Find The Quiet Inside

37:57

37:57

Find The Quiet Inside

Rated

4.7

Type

guided

Activity

Meditation

Suitable for

Everyone

Plays

918

Welcome to a 35 minute guided yogasomatics mindfulness practice that you can practice in busy or speedy places. This is an ideal seated guidance for finding the quiet inside while traveling, on public transport, waiting in busy places. Please do not use this guidance while driving a car.

Mindfulness Body Awareness Relaxation Movement Alignment Shoulder Relaxation Jaw Relaxation Breathing Breathing Awareness Commute Meditations Fluids Mindful Gazing Workplace Workplace Meditations

Meet your Teacher

Sardinia, Italy

Meet your Teacher

Sardinia, Italy

Transcript

Welcome to a guided mindfulness practice called to find the quiet inside. This particular practice has an intention to touch inward, Especially when you're in a busy place or a hectic place or a very populated place. You might find this guidance helpful or useful when you're in public transportation, When you're traveling, When you're in a hectic office or when you've been by yourself but working a lot on your computer or in very mental activities that can tend to speed us up and bring us away from our center. So I'll ring the bell and when I ring the bell I give a little bit of suggestion on how to find a comfortable seat. Take the time you need to do that and then there will be some guidance to find the quiet inside. So on whatever seat you found yourself, Maybe it's an airplane seat, Maybe it's a train seat, Maybe it's a chair in your office or a chair in front of your computer, Maybe you're waiting in a public place and your energy and your attention has been pulled outward by the speed and the hecticness of life happening. So find this chair, Find this seat to be your meditation or your mindfulness seat for some minutes here. Let yourself shift a little bit left, A little bit right with your seat so you can find actually that you're in contact with your sitting bones, Your seat and your backs of your legs on the chair. If you need to lift up your seat, Lean a little bit forward and then sit back on the center of your seat. Let the soles of your feet be on the earth, Legs uncrossed and they may be in shoes. If you're in high-heeled shoes, If the possibility to take the shoes off and let the soles of your feet be on the earth could be useful. Otherwise simply let yourself sense the soles of your feet in the soles of your shoes on the earth. So you have your seat sitting on the chair, You have your soles of your feet in contact with the soles of your shoes on the earth or whatever represents earth. Let your navel, Your belly button come just a little bit forward as a way to give a soft opening to the front body that in a chair and in public places often we slump back or hang back with the belly button. So maybe it's a slight tipping of the pelvis so the belly button comes a little bit forward. And then let yourself sit back into the inside curve of your sacrum, The large triangular shaped bone in the base of the spine. There's a fine balance between letting belly button or navel be emerging from the front body and still letting there be a support in the sacrum and the lower back of the back body. You can play between this front and between this back and you can also softly drift or shift your weight in a very, Very gentle and slow way from left sitting bone to right sitting bone. Soft belly button, Supportive sacrum. Softly and slowly in these little movements forward and back, Left and right and they're really, Really micro movements just shifting of the weight and shifting of your attention. Slowly this begins to define a sort of a bowl shape of your pelvis, A space in which you may be able to let your energy settle down into a little bit. It may or may not come with ease, That settling down into the pelvis, But at first we simply define that there is a place to settle. Notice your shoulders and imagine that a trusted friend put just a simple neutral hands on your shoulders and said, You can relax now. And whether or not it's true that you feel relaxed in this moment, It's a metaphor for feeling the shoulders soften away from the ears, Feeling the weight of the arms just give a little tug on the shoulders. Notice what happens if you were to let the palms of your hands rest face down on the surfaces of your thighs. So if your hands are in a different way right now, Go ahead and try to put left palm on left thigh, Right palm on right thigh. And imagine that the weight of the arms really gently just gives a little tug to the shoulders. And that little tug sends your attention from shoulders down the upper arms to the elbows, Lower arms, Wrists and the weight could land softly in the hands and the palms that are on your thighs. Sometimes, Depending on the setting that you're in, You'll need for your eyes to be closed, Enabled to start to move within. If that's necessary, Absolutely fine. If it's possible to have your eyes softly open a gaze that's not looking at anything in particular, But resting on a spot slightly below you, Below horizon maybe two to five feet, Or about a meter to a meter and a half in front of you. It doesn't need to be a hard focus. You don't have to concentrate on anything that you see. Just letting the gaze rest. Almost as if you're looking or gazing from the back of your brain, The back of your skull, Letting your eyes have a resting point. If you're in a place that's quite populated and busy and you feel like you need to have your eyes closed, That's okay too. Still let yourself have a sensation of the eyes, The sense of vision, The sense of going outward with vision, Resting back to the backs of the eyes, The backs of the brain, The back of the skull. And you might even feel that you could very softly move the back of your head, A millimeter or two or three back into the space behind you. Notice what it would feel like to let yourself tip your head very, Very subtly, A little left, A little right, Slow and subtle, Almost as if you were tipping the hemispheres of your brain a little inside of the skull, Left and right, Side to side, Really slow, Really subtle. So slow and subtle that even in this populated place it may be not very apparent that you're moving because you're just moving slowly and perhaps a centimeter left or two, Centimeter right or two. It may feel a little bit strange to move like this in a public or a populated place because the movements that we usually do are related to function and in a certain speed that is the cultural norm. Often when we work with these type of slow micro movements in a very populated place, The very fact that they are so slow and that they're not about a functional, Active direction, Most people around you won't even notice what you're doing. So your inner movement and your very slow and private micro movements usually go undetected and become your secret on your way to find the quiet inside in a busy place. So you've established soles of the feet in the soles of your shoes on the floor of where you are that represents earth. You've established your sitting bones and shifting the weight slightly towards the left and towards the right and towards the front, Navel, Support in the inside surface of sacrum, Back, Shoulders, Arms, Palms on the thighs. Eyes, Vision, Gaze, Resting from the back of the brain. Nothing the eyes need to keep up with. And a soft movement through the base of the skull and the top of the neck that tips and moves your head slightly, Slowly, Gently side to side. Notice the state of your jaw and if your lips or your jaw feels tight, Let yourself have a little space between your lips and let the jaw slip down just a little bit and sense your tongue in your mouth, Even resting on the floor of your mouth, Your tongue. Head, Shoulders, Arms, Hands, Pelvis, Legs, Feet and the breath that's been here all the time, Coming and going as you slowly made contact with the body that has been here all the time. So nothing special you need to do with your breath or make it any different. It may even feel a little shortened if you've been in a hectic or speedy place, So that's okay. Let it be as it is, Simply a pattern in the nervous system. Observing the sensation in your body as breath comes in and breath goes out. Without needing to be exact, Let yourself explore something that feels like a seven second breath, Meaning as you breathe in, You could imagine that it is about the count of seven coming in and about the count of seven going out. You don't have to count every time but use it as a metaphor for a soft slow inward and a soft slow outward. You might even imagine your breath something like a soft ocean tide coming in and going out. And just like the ocean tide, The breath will be variable. We're not trying to make it like a clockwork. We're softly becoming aware and then letting it bring some spaciousness to our body, To our attention and awareness and also give us a resting place for the active thinking mind. About seven seconds in, About seven seconds out. Notice how you notice that you're breathing. Can you feel the breath at the edges of your nostrils as it comes in or goes out? Do you feel the sense of expansion as you breathe in around your waistband or in your skin? Let yourself notice where your inner upper arms are in a light contact with the sides of your ribs. They may not even be that close but there is some idea of contact, Some feeling sense that the arms are at your sides. And as you explore this slightly slower breath that is slower than the busy world that you may be sitting in, Invite yourself to notice that you're breathing by the sense of your side ribs being sensed by your inner upper arms. Soft sensing of the sensation of inner upper arms from the armpit to the elbows and the side body that includes your ribs, The muscles of the ribs and the connective tissue of the ribs really gently, Really subtly moving into the inner upper arm contact, Both left and right. Jaw is still soft, Eyes still seeing from the back. Head can move if you need. Seat is at home on the chair, Feet on the earth. Let your breath find its own rhythm. It may be seven, It may not be seven. So whatever rhythm it's in now, Let it be that. And one of the next times that you sense the exhale coming, Let the exhale move really softly and almost inaudibly, Almost without sound out of the mouth. Let the in breath be through your nose and your out breath be out the mouth. You may even sense the warm humidity of the out breath, Almost like if you were to breathe into a mirror and fog it up a little bit. As you find a soft swing of this breathing in through the nose, Breathing out through the mouth, Notice if there may be some moments that after you breathe out, There's not a necessary urgency to breathe back in right away. There's no effort in trying to keep the breath out. But if there's a sense where the breath just lands into an open space before the next in breath comes back in, Imagine that your entire physical body could rest in that space after the exhale and before the inhale. It might just be a short second, It might be a few seconds. If you have to force to make that happen, There won't be a place for your system to rest. So when it happens, Naturally when you notice the gap after the exhale and before the inhale, Sense the body sitting down into that space for a few minutes, Experimenting with this and knowing that it probably won't be an open space after the exhale every single time you breathe every round of breath. So it's fluctuating. It's variable. It's open. The in breath through the nose as you can without needing to pull it or grasp at it, Just a light lofty breath that comes in through the nose. You may feel it through the ribs or through the belly. And the breath out the mouth, Really soft without force, Like you're breathing warm humid air into a mirror or into the winter sky and seeing your breath. And when there are those spaces after the exhale, When nothing needs to happen, Let the body sit down in that space. Feel the weight of your steady sit in the space. It will never be the same from one breath to the next. It's a fluid practice. It's a fluid practice. And if your eyes have remained open, Stay in the back of the gaze. And without moving the eyes around or trying to focus, Just notice the movement that is going on around you. You could use a panoramic awareness or notice through your peripheral vision, Movement, People, Advertising, Activity, Whatever's happening is just happening. Yet you can rest in body and breath in a fluid way. And notice where you can be in that fluidity, That changeability and also where your nervous system will try to stabilize or get a little bit rigid when it goes into its patterns of how we react in a busy world. So it will come and go. And if you do find yourself getting a little rigid or distracted, It's absolutely what happens. And when you come back without any sense of victory or defeat, You simply come back to this moment feeling the seat, The feet, Shoulders, Head, Brain, Jaw, Arms and hands, Breath coming and going. Finding the quiet inside isn't finding a pocket, A corner, A hiding place, An escape. It's really about letting our system become more fluid. In the here and now as life is, It's almost like becoming a seaweed moved by the breath, By the inner movement yet unaffected or less affected by the hectic, Busy or speedy outside rhythms. It's a practice. When distraction come either from the outside or from the inside, Thoughts, Opinions about what you're seeing, Hearing, Feeling. The suggestion is to go back to the body contact to recognize again that you're breathing. For a while, Seven second breath in, Seven second breath out. Until it can shift into noticing the space after a soft exhale out of the mouth and letting yourself sit down in the space. It may be that this practice continues on for you for some time depending on where you are and the situations of your day. It may be that this is the moment that you conclude the practice officially. Yet the invitation is to touch into this at many times through the day when you feel things speeding up, When you feel yourself get pulled outward out of your center. Attaching back in to finding the quiet, The fluid quiet inside. What is this?