Welcome to this guided visualization.
So take a position that feels very comfortable for you.
If you are feeling tired or overwhelmed,
I can really recommend laying down and just enjoy that.
It's perfectly fine to do laying down meditation.
I did that today and it was wonderful.
On the other hand,
If you feel energized enough,
I can also recommend sitting.
And then if you sit,
I recommend you sit with a spine that has some kind of alertness in it,
But with a body that is soft and supple and gentle and releasing into gravity.
And take a moment here to already sort of activate mindfulness,
To not just mindlessly habitually sit down,
But take note of what feels good for your body right now.
Maybe you need to change your leg a bit or shift your hips or how do your arms and hands want to be held right now for the next 10 to 20 minutes.
So take some time to do that.
This is also a way to slow down,
To already check in with the body.
Allowing your face to become more relaxed and without making your body relax,
But just seeing if there's any relaxation that is available.
So we want to go into a kind of intention of receptivity rather than activity.
So we're not making anything happen.
We're becoming aware and open for reality to unveil itself.
And as we're going to do some visualization,
I want to invite you to imagine any kind of weather that you would love the most right now.
And maybe it's something that is on the face of it,
Not what you would think.
You can really check what would I really like right now.
Would I like a gentle rain or like a very thick mist or a thunderstorm in the distance or a beautiful warm sun or any kind of maybe snow.
So just take a moment to imagine what weather would be just perfect right now and then just allow the imagination to kind of manifest that.
What is the mood that would be cultivated by that weather system.
And then allow for that mood to emerge along with the visualization.
All right.
And then for the rest of the of the practice here,
I want to just bring a few pointers to your attention for you to kind of contemplate.
And the first one is that the air that you're breathing right now has been inhaled and exhaled by countless organisms over the millennia.
Countless animals,
Mammals,
Reptiles,
Birds,
Fish,
Algae,
Microorganisms,
Trees,
Flowers.
There's something so interesting about this because we seem to think or at least subconsciously,
I do,
That somehow this is my breath.
But that's not true at all.
If we inspect a little bit closer,
We realize that there's one breath which is the the gas layer that surrounds the planet and everybody breathes the same air.
Even our ancestors and other people's ancestors.
There's no segregation of breath.
There's one breath that the entire planet shares.
So here we already enter a kind of natural non-duality of there's no separation between my breathing and the breathing of the plant here on my desk and the breathing of a mongolian warrior a thousand years ago or a tyrannosaurus rex.
I don't know how many million years ago.
Those are the same molecules and atoms circulating eternally on the planet through all the beings,
All the generations.
So just kind of let that perspective inform your participation in all of creation right now in this moment.
It's so cool that in this way our breath is both fresh and present as well as ancient and shared.
And something very similar can be said of our bodies.
This temporary and ever-changing vessel that we inhabit that we call my body.
Of course it is my body in the sense that i'm caring for it and i'm responsible for it.
But is it really my body in the sense that i own it?
Or is it even a body in the sense that there's this idea of a fixed thing?
I think most of us know this biological fact that all the cells in the body they refresh themselves so to make it the case that every seven years or something there's literally an entirely new body because all the molecules and all the cells have been replaced literally by the food that we eat.
The food body,
I think the word is anamaya kosha or something like that in the yogic literature,
But it's literally the ever-changing constituents of the body.
But more than that,
Not just in this lifetime,
Not just in this cycle of every seven years,
But also notice that all those molecules and atoms they are actually shared by again all organisms.
You know the carbon that is now part of your skull might very well have been part of a tree 400 years ago in china or the iron that is now part of the muscle on the left side of your heart it's entirely possible that that has one time been part of a mountain in canada present-day canada maybe a mountain that no longer exists and so kind of zoom out and see that all of the literal parts of your body have at one point been part of another organism or a plant or a river or a cloud or the very lava and magma that make up i guess i should say magma i don't know the molten rock that makes up the kind of red hot life liquid of the planet itself beneath the earth's crust and if you take that perspective then this whole body in the sense that it's somehow my body becomes very relative if you were to speed up the imagined camera pointed at the earth then you would see that all these bodies keep on being created and dissolving you know they come into being and they dissolve and it's just one big musical chairs but with molecules and atoms of the body and to me when i contemplate this i see this perspective of how am i separate and how can i do violence to other beings it's just one big shared experience so just let that sink in that all the components of your body at depth and in reality are ever-changing borrowed components that we share with all other beings across continents in the sea on the land and across vast eternal time on this planet now that we've already loosened up the habitual calcification of our normal body image with that increased relativity now look at your life story and your name and all the ways that you normally introduce yourself at parties and look at that as mostly kind of a language game that we play and you know the labels the categorizations the stories that we impose on on ourself and just see through that right now as just a kind of language game that we play and instead when you think about who i am who i am in this body right now what is what is really here being as you right now and on this on the level of the body the individual body let's say notice that there's this being that doesn't really have a name the name is the first label we ever got and it's not even true it's helpful but it's not who you are so just looking beyond that see or rather feel feel into this organism that is now here laying or sitting breathing and notice how silent that is and enjoy for a moment this silent breathing in this anonymous organism your vessel that you inhabit and then for the last few minutes of the meditation here i want to invite you to reflect on the perspectives that we have shared so far and there was probably one perspective or kind of realization that really clicked for you and i want to invite you to just bring that one forth into your experience right now and contemplate the perspective that kind of hit you hardest like that blew your mind the most and just sit with that for a few more minutes in silence and then at the end you'll hear a bell thank you and enjoy the rest of the meditation
