Outdoor Meditation

As part of our efforts to focus on Care and Wellness through traditional Japanese Arts in 2020-21, we began a wonderful new collaboration with Zenshin Florence Caplow, who is a Soto Zen priest in the Suzuki Roshi lineage of San Francisco Zen Center. She has been a student of Vipassana meditation and Zen Buddhism for nearly 40 years. She is a meditation teacher, field botanist, essayist, and the co-editor, with Reigetsu Susan Moon, of The Hidden Lamp: Stories from Twenty-Five Centuries of Awakened Women. She is also an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister. She currently lives and works in Urbana, as the lead minister for the Unitarian Universalist Church of Urbana-Champaign.

On the first Friday of every month, Reverend Caplow provided 10-15 minutes of live meditation at various places in and around Japan House. Meditation can positively impact mental and physical health by helping to gain a new perspective on a stressful situation, increasing self-awareness, helping to focus on the present, as well as increasing patience and tolerance, imagination and creativity, while reducing negative emotions.

As First Friday Meditations are coming to an end, Weekly Outdoor Meditation is casually held in the University of Illinois Arboretum on Saturdays.