Welcome.
Thank you for joining me today for this mindful practice.
So,
Making yourself comfortable lying down on your bed,
Or on the floor,
Or wherever you can be comfortable.
Maybe putting a pillow of some sort under your knees.
Allowing your eyes to close and your body to just melt into the floor or the bed.
And allowing your attention to gently come into the body and to the flow of the breath.
Experiencing the sense of the body as a whole,
Simply lying here,
Extended and breathing.
And when you feel ready,
Picturing in your mind's eye the image of a lake.
Perhaps a lake that you know well and frequent,
Or one that you've seen in a photograph,
Or an imaginary lake for that matter.
Just seeing if you can bring that image into vivid focus in your mind's eye.
And noticing how it's an extended body of water held in a depression in the earth's surface,
And perhaps fed by a spring or a stream.
If you watch and observe the lake carefully,
You'll notice that it's always changing.
And yet,
It's also always itself.
It changes as the sun moves across the sky.
The light is reflected off the water in different ways.
It changes depending on the weather.
Sometimes,
On very calm days,
The surface might be like glass,
And reflect virtually everything with great precision that comes by.
Clouds,
Birds,
The trees that might surround the lake,
The sun as it makes its journey across the sky,
And for that matter,
The moon and the stars at night.
So there are times when the lake is extremely reflective,
And contains in a certain way everything that comes by or over it.
In different periods of time,
The surface might be choppy or roiled,
And sometimes quite pronounced in the waves,
In which times the light might sparkle off the waves in different ways,
Like a myriad of jewels.
Of course,
The lake changes through the seasons.
In the winter,
Depending on its location,
It might actually be frozen over,
At least on the surface.
Through day and night,
And through the seasons,
And through the years,
The lake is constantly changing,
But is always its own essential nature.
Let's see if we can invite the lake to become co-extensive with our own body lying here,
So that our body becomes the lake itself.
We also feel held and embraced as we lie here aware of the many ways in which our own mind is like the surface of the lake,
Sometimes highly reflective.
Getting in touch with the sense of the entirety of the lake,
The full body of water,
Not only on the surface,
But down below.
As we lie here,
Just experiencing the fullness of our own being,
So that even at times when our mind is choppy and upset,
Or reactive,
Or dealing with difficult things,
We can drop down beneath the surface of our own mind's waves and find a stillness and a calmness that's always here and always available to us,
With each moment,
With each breath,
And certainly when we come to lie down in this way.
Lying here under the canopy of our vast awareness,
Experiencing the moment-to-moment changes in the body and sensations,
Thoughts,
Feelings,
Impulses,
Sounds,
And all the while lake-like,
Just simply lying here watching the play of the weather,
Of the mind and body.
Allowing the awareness to hold it all,
Moment by moment,
Breath by breath,
In our own fullness,
In our own completeness,
Moment by moment.
