This meditation was recorded by MBSR teacher Adele Stewart,
Live on Zoom in Woonoona,
July 2020.
So finding yourself a comfortable seated posture or lying if that feels right for you today.
Whatever posture you've chosen,
Have a sense of being both connected to the earth,
But also having a reasonably erect and alert manner,
But not too tight and rigid.
Making any final movements.
Find yourself really comfortable and ready to meditate.
Noticing if there's any areas that are a bit tight.
You might like to breathe in and out of them,
Seeing if they'll relax a little.
And if not,
That's okay too.
Perhaps experimenting with bringing a little smile to the edge of the lips.
Seeing if that has any influence on how you're feeling at the beginning of the meditation or not.
Perhaps even imagining that smile in the heart.
Beginning,
If you will,
By focusing attention on the body in general.
Perhaps you can have a real lightness about this,
Not a striving.
Perhaps if you practice the body scan a lot,
You might just want to do a little mini body scan yourself.
Or perhaps you might want to have a sense of the whole body.
Whatever sensation is most prominent,
Noticing that.
Maybe a coldness of the toes.
The tension in the shoulders.
The angle of the joints.
Perhaps pendulating between unpleasant body sensations and pleasant sensations.
Or at least neutral ones.
But again,
Rather than this seeming like a chore,
If possible,
Having that sense of settling back and receiving body sensations.
Having body sensations in the foreground of our awareness.
And any other experience like thoughts or sounds in the back of the background of our awareness.
There's not a real clarity around body sensations.
There's always just noticing the contact that the skin of the body is making.
Body parts without other body parts,
Perhaps hands on the legs.
Eyelids on the eyes.
Lips touching.
The feeling of hair,
Glasses,
Jewellery and clothing.
The contact with whatever you're sitting or lying on.
Now moving,
If you will,
To a more narrow focus.
So we've had a broad focus of the whole body.
Narrowing the spotlight to the breathing.
Again,
In a very gentle way.
Noticing with curiosity where the breath was immediately apparent.
No need to manipulate or control the breath in any way.
Allowing the breath to breathe itself.
Perhaps noticing your emotional response to focusing on the breath.
Does it feel like coming home to an old friend?
Or is there a sense of boredom or irritation?
Is there a curiosity about getting more intimate with the breath?
Or perhaps a state of mind that is obscuring that today.
Restlessness or drowsiness.
Doubts about the benefit of the practice.
No need to block out any of these mental states.
These mind states.
Just noticing the breath.
Sitting down next to the breath.
Now an invitation to shift the focus of our attention to hearing.
Notice the effect of that invitation.
Again,
No need to go out looking for sounds.
No need to analyse sounds.
Label them.
It can be useful to notice if they are pleasant or unpleasant.
Perhaps you might even receive the sounds as loads of textures.
Different volumes and pitches and durations of sounds.
Might be sounds within your own body.
My voice.
The sounds in my environment.
And the sounds in your external environment.
Maybe you might notice the spaces or the silences between sounds.
There is always sound or silence.
Just as we can sit back and receive sounds.
Perhaps you can try sitting back and receiving internal sounds in the mind.
Particularly those of us who have thoughts that come in the form of an audio.
Internal voice.
No need to block that out.
Just noticing.
And opening to notice the nature of thoughts in general.
Perhaps there's images.
Memories.
Thoughts can even be not audio or visual.
Kind of aesthetic.
Something can be difficult to articulate.
As best you can.
Settling back.
Observing thoughts as they come and go.
Air been flow.
Letting the mind do what it does naturally.
Perhaps we might only notice that we've been thinking when we suddenly realize we've been lost in a train of thought.
And at that moment,
We're aware again.
This process of observing thoughts feels a little too confusing or overwhelming.
There's always the option of returning to the breath as our focus.
Perhaps noticing thoughts about our meditation.
Thoughts about sounds we hear or body sensations we feel or about the breath.
Perhaps noticing whether thoughts are pleasant or unpleasant.
Can be interesting if you catch yourself in a thought to immediately drop into the body and notice any sort of subtle contraction or otherwise in the body.
Training.
Not even notice when thoughts contribute to a general mind state or mood state.
That mixture of thoughts and body sensations that make up an emotion.
Letting go of any one specific focus now.
Seeing how it feels for you today.
To expand the field of awareness to notice all and every experience that's arising.
Help some people to think of the mind like the spacious sky.
And all our experiences as the potential weather.
We might have fleeting little cloud like thoughts.
Or storms of emotions.
Sunny joy.
Body sensations or the breath or this experience coming and going,
Air being and flowing.
Experiencing how it is to not have any one specific focus.
Having that wide open awareness.
Noticing all experience coming and going.
Sometimes it might feel possible to feel our awareness is so expanded.
We can really feel,
See,
Sense all experience at once.
Other times it might be more that you notice one experience at a time.
Attention in the left knee.
A distant sound.
Lost in a train of thought.
What's that contraction in my belly just under that train of thought?
You need to analyse just noticing the experience.
Air being and flowing.
A bit like life.
All experience.
Imperfect in many ways.
Impermanent.
Perhaps there's a little bit of a sense of it being a bit impersonal as well.
All of us in this spacious sky with this constant flow of sounds,
Thoughts,
Emotions,
Body sensations.
Tastes,
Smells.
Pleasant and unpleasant experiences.
All of us in this spacious sky with this constant flow of sounds,
Thoughts,
Emotions,
Body sensations.
No need to block out any experience.
Noticing it all.
As best you can with that kindly,
Patient curiosity.
All of us in this spacious sky with this constant flow of sounds,
Thoughts,
Emotions,
Body sensations.
All of us in this spacious sky with this constant flow of sounds,
Body sensations.
No experience needs to be a barrier.
Needs to be a barrier to our meditation.
The ping of the computer.
The thoughts about what you're cooking for dinner.
The whole mind,
The agitated mind.
All simply more to observe.
All right.
All right.
All right.
All right.
All right.
