Skip to main content

Exercise Extreme Mindfulness with These Calming Zen Rock Garden Videos

The Internet is a place where the ancient past and the modern and trend-driven can collide and produce wondrous things. The concept of ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) took off in 2007, describing the pleasurable tingling response from various stimuli, such as whispering, or quietly being read a story, or listening to the closely mic’d sounds of paper. There are currently some 13 million ASMR video channels on YouTube.

Meanwhile, the idea of the Zen garden is about 800 years old, and at the center of its care and upkeep is a quiet, mindful practice that mirrors meditation. Unlike classic Western gardens that brought symmetry and mathematics into their design, Japanese gardens recreated a sort of curated chaos. A Zen garden takes this idea further, making its centerpiece a rock garden that is raked into patterns to mimic water. They are also small and meant for individual contemplation.

Artist-Designer Yuki Kawae combines the two with his series of videos on his YouTube channel. In close frames, he takes his rakes and creates patterns and fractals in sand around a series of stones. The sound of sand and rake and ringing bowl make for a very meditative experience. The confidence and beauty of his steady hand are mesmerizing, but you could also just listen to the audio.

Kawae is based in the Bay Area and told Colossal that the practice came out of the anxiety of life in 2019:

I was quite overwhelmed with day-to-day tasks and what are the ‘expected’ next steps in life…One day, I realized all of those thoughts were completely gone when I was gardening, pruning, watering, and re-potting the soil. That process let me be clear-minded somehow, and it was very calming and refreshing.

You don’t have to be a Zen monk to realize the calming effects of gardening—-ask anybody who tends to their garden weekly. But there is something special in the minimalism of the sand and the rake and the rock. Kawae’s “garden” is only coffee table sized.

Sand is also a good material in which to practice mutability, says Kawae: “All the zen garden patterns are not permanent, and they get erased to start a new one. It is temporary like many things in life. It taught me about what not to overthink as what I am stressing about may also be temporary.”

Meanwhile on YouTube there are others working on Zen gardens. The Kikiyaya Forest Dwelling and Zen Garden is actually located in the Netherlands and the owner posts her raking adventures on YouTube.

And for those who would like to hear from an actual Zen master and gardener, this hour-long presentation from Shunmyo Masuno—one of Japan’s leading landscape architects and an 18th-generation Zen Buddhist priest—will fill in the philosophical details.

I’ll leave the last word to 13th century Japanese Zen master, writer, poet, and philosopher, Dogen Zenji: “Working with plants, trees, fences, and walls, if they practice sincerely they will attain enlightenment.”

See you in the garden!

via Colossal

Related Content:

What Is a Zen Koan? An Animated Introduction to Eastern Philosophical Thought Experiments

Take a Break from Your Frantic Day & Let Alan Watts Introduce You to the Calming Ways of Zen

The Zen of Bill Murray: I Want to Be “Really Here, Really in It, Really Alive in the Moment”

Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

Exercise Extreme Mindfulness with These Calming Zen Rock Garden Videos is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/3C2KBoS
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What Voltaire Meant When He Said That “We Must Cultivate Our Garden”: An Animated Introduction

“Voltaire’s goal in writing [his 1759 satire Candide ] was to destroy the optimism of his times,” says Alain de Botton in the School of Life video above, “an optimism that centered around science, love, technical progress, and a faith in reason.” These beliefs were folly, Voltaire thought: the transfer of faith from a providential God to a perfect, clockwork universe. Candide satirizes this happy rationalism in Doctor Pangloss, whose belief that ours is the best of possible worlds comes directly from the philosophical optimism of Gottfried Leibniz . The preponderance of the evidence, Voltaire made abundantly clear in the novel’s series of increasingly horrific episodes, points toward a blind, indifferent universe full of needless cruelty and chaos. “Hope was, he felt, a disease,” de Botton says, and “it was Voltaire’s generous goal to try and cure us of it.” But as everyone who has read Candide (or read a summary or brief notes on Candide ) knows, the novel does not end with ...
Post a Comment
Read more

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

An Interactive Map of Odysseus’ 10-Year Journey in Homer’s Odyssey

The Odyssey , one of Homer's two great epics, narrates Odysseus' long, strange trip home after the Trojan war . During their ten-year journey, Odysseus and his men had to overcome divine and natural forces, from battering storms and winds to difficult encounters with the Cyclops Polyphemus, the cannibalistic Laestrygones, the witch-goddess Circe and the rest. And they took a most circuitous route, bouncing all over the Mediterranean, moving first down to Crete and Tunisia. Next over to Sicily, then off toward Spain, and back to Greece again. If you're looking for an easy way to visualize all of the twists and turns in  The Odyssey , then we'd recommend spending some time with the  interactive map created by Gisèle Mounzer .  "Odysseus' Journey"  breaks down Odysseus' voyage into 14 key scenes and locates them on a modern map designed by Esri, a company that creates GIS mapping software. Meanwhile, if you're interested in the whole concept of ...
Post a Comment
Read more