Juice Feasting™ | The Preparation Course

Big Mind, Big Heart Practice

INTRODUCTION: ZEN MASTER DENNIS GENPO MERZEL, PREFACES BIG MIND, BIG HEART

In short, Big Mind is a special new way to discover, experience and appreciate your life. It’s also a good way of working out the kinks, the stuck places, and the unhealthy patterns that keep us down. Life is complex, and the inner self is an exquisite network of the psychological and the spiritual. Understanding it well leads to a better life.

Big Mind is a method of self investigation that is straightforward and effective, and it will open your heart and mind to the fullness and richness of life. It’s a new combination of tools, a blend of western psychology, and the non-dual wisdom traditions passed on to us, and it’s been developed for the express purpose of helping us to better understand the mind and the nature of human life.

You won’t need previous experience. Genpo Roshi leads the process, like only a Zen Master can, with humor, wisdom, compassion and deep sincerity. Big Mind is completely non threatening, safe and fun for young and old. You don’t have to know anything about psychology or Zen. You only need a burning desire to understand life.

Big Mind—your Original Face—Nondual Awareness—Spirit itself, is not other than who you are at this very moment. To get us to realize this, many spiritual paths and techniques call us to go beyond the ego, into its source or ground. And rightly so. However, what an integral approach would suggest—and what we find wonderfully exemplified in Genpo Roshi’s Big Mind Process—is that in order to transcend the ego, we must include it as well. In order to go beyond—in order to taste the spaceless, timeless Reality—we must integrate what is with us here and now, in space and time.

The Big Mind Process befriends the many voices within us—the dualistic voices with which we narrowly identify at one time or another—in order to gently lead us into a recognition of our nondual self. Because the enlightened state is ever-present, we can access it any time. And while a permanent realization of Big Mind requires growth through stages of development, this process is one of the quickest and most reliable ways to give us a taste of this “stateless state” right now.

This practice is extraordinarily valuable to experience before beginning a Juice Feast (we consider it a Primary Life Practice), and to return to throughout your transformation. Many voices and habit energies of old will arise as you detoxify and heal from a cellular level up through the Chain of Being from Matter to Body to Mind to Soul to Spirit. Understanding these aspects of yourself, and being able to organize them from a place of Big Mind and Big Heart, will benefit you now and for the rest of your life, no matter what your root tradition may be.

JuiceFeasting.com is so pleased to offer a complete hour and a half of the Big Mind process (see the video below), as led by Genpo Roshi during an Integral Art Weekend in Boulder, Colorado in February 2004. Please sit back, relax, and enjoy this guided tour into the freedom and fullness of your very own Big Mind, the mind and ground of being you are ultimately seeking, after all, even if your path is now wrapped in physical transformation.

BIG MIND: SIMPLE EXERCISES FOR RECOGNIZING OUR OWN TRUE NATURE

All of us are facing very challenging times. We are concerned for our children, parents, partners, friends, and loved ones. We would like to be able to communicate and empathize more fully in all our relationships. We want our children and family – and ourselves – to reach our fullest potential, to be happier and more joyful in this life.

Each day brings new stress at work, worries about financial security, not to mention the threat of terrorism, dirty bombs, global warming, and natural disasters. We are all searching for how to be more at peace with ourselves, to live with less fear, anger, and anxiety, simply to get through the day.

This book [Big Mind, Big Heart: Finding Your Way] [read: this practice] can help each of us work with these issues and problems. It offers what may be one f the best tools that has come from the merging of East and West. It will help you to work with your thoughts, feelings, and emotions, to gain a new perspective on your difficulties, to see how our basic attachment to the self and its notions keeps us suffering and feeling insecure. This book [practice] will help you to see yourself with clarity, to be less attached to a limited self-perspective, and therefore to function freely as an integrated human being.

Big Mind Big Heart Practice is the result of more than thirty-five years of study, difficulty, and searching for a way to bring anyone the experience of living a free, fulfilling, and awakened life. I have written in a style that you don’t have to be a Buddhist practitioner or scholar to comprehend. The point of the book is to make these highly valuable, accessible, and urgently needed teachings available to the world.

My own path has led me to the way of Zen, but there are many paths I could have taken which could have led me in the same direction. In fact, since I first developed the Big Mind process, I have shared it with thousands of people of all ages, from children and teenagers to the elderly and terminally ill. It has worked for people in many walks of life – educators, doctors, therapists, CEOs, and leaders in business and government, lawyers, judges, and meditators, athletes and artists, among others – and of many different faiths – Catholic Priests and Nuns, Protestant Ministers, Mormon Bishops, Jewish Rabbis, Hindu Swamis, Buddhist Lamas and Zen Masters, skeptics, and those of no particular religion. It has proven to be compatible with all faiths and beliefs, so I am confident all people can find it useful and valuable on the Way we all share.

PRACTICING BIG MIND / BIG HEART WITH GENPO ROSHI

Please set yourself up in a quiet room with about two hours to do this practice the first time.

You will find it most helpful if you are relaxed, in a comfortable chair with the computer at eye level, know that you will have uninterrupted time, and can enjoy immersing yourself completely in this guided session.

Anyone can do this, and you can smile knowing that what we are making available is a most significant opportunity for the transformation, healing, and growth you are cultivating.

PROFESSIONAL ACCLAIM FOR BIG MIND BIG HEART PRACTICE

Genpo Roshi’s groundbreaking book offers us one of the best cutting edge tools sprung up from the merging of Eastern and Western enlightenment work. It helps us to see and know ourselves with clarity, to be less attached to limited egocentric perspectives, and to function freely as integrated human beings – effectively bringing anyone who applies these methods the experience of a free, fulfilling, and joyous awakened life. I myself have found it both useful and illuminating.
Lama Surya Das, author of Awakening the Buddha Within: Tibetan Wisdom for the Western World

To shift perspectives easily, to see the world from another’s point of view, is an essential skill that is taught by this book. It has the potential to enhance every aspect of our lives.
Michael Zimmerman, Attorney, Meditator, Zen Teacher, Former Chief Justice of the Utah Supreme Court

In these times of such great global need, Genpo Merzel brings a method that will not tell leaders what to do, but rather, will help them know themselves from the widest possible perspective. May it benefit them, and us all.
Glenna M. Crooks, PhD, President and CEO, Strategic Health Policy International

Genpo Roshi’s book brings us into the immediacy of his face to face teaching, inviting us to listen to, rather than argue with, the voices in our heads whose incessant chatter creates the illusion of self. Freed from the need to silence or censor, Big Mind teaches us how to slip the knots of small mind and take refuge in the One Mind that is all minds and none.
Rabbi Rami Shapiro, author of Sacred Art of Loving Kindness

“In the Big Mind Process, Genpo Roshi has devised an astonishingly elegant and compassionate method for recognizing our own Being, the transcendent ground of what we most deeply are. We begin by dialoguing with the controlling, skeptical and protective voices of the ego, and disarm the ego’s tight hold by simply asking it to get out of the way. At that point, with thrilling precision, we naturally begin to invoke our own vastness, the ever present, limitless awareness that all the great traditions point out to us. Once you’ve walked through the Big Mind process, the door to the transcendent is open, and practice will let you deepen that recognition. Big Mind, Big Heart, like all truly innovative knowledge, seems totally easy and natural once you’ve been introduced to it–and so effective that you wonder how we all ever managed without it.”
Sally Kempton, author of The Heart of Meditation, teacher, and columnist for Yoga Journal

“I have the highest admiration for Genpo Merzel’s work and believe that his Big Mind process is the most significant contribution to Zen and the awakening of consciousness in both the East and the West in the last thousand years.”
Paul McKenna, British author and TV personality

“Is talking to your own Mind a ‘conversation with God’? I have often said that this is true, and now comes a book that backs up the thought. I highly recommend you not miss Big Mind, Big Heart: Finding Your Way.
Neale Donald Walsch, author of Conversations with God

“A book of great creativity and originality that will make a significant contribution to the East-West dialogue and to the needs of those who are attracted to move beyond seeking.”
Father Thomas Keating, author of Open Mind, Open Heart

“The masters of Jewish mysticism guided advanced seekers to the levels of Great Mind and Extended Heart. Genpo Roshi, aka Reb Merzel, offers the trans-denominational seeker a contemporary gate to the highest awareness.
Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, co-author of Jewish with Feeling

“A remarkable new method for catalyzing deep insights that may otherwise require long and arduous effort.”
Roger Walsh, MD, PhD, author of Essential Spirituality

“A gift to the many Westerners who would like to awaken and live in the world with effectiveness and compassion. “
Zen Master Bernie Glassman, PhD, author of Bearing Witness