Let's do a brief meditation on openness,
The expansiveness of the mind.
So settling yourself in a comfortable position.
You could be sitting or reclined.
You can even do this walking,
Relaxing the body,
Soften the muscles of the face and the belly.
Let the shoulders drop.
Let's take three deep breaths together.
Exhaling now and breathing in and a long full exhalation.
Extending the length of the exhalation and again breathing in and exhaling.
One more deep breath.
Exhale.
If you are in a position to close your eyes,
Closing your eyes and feeling into the body.
Become aware of thoughts.
Become aware of the continuous stream of thinking.
Noticing what it's like for you right now.
The energy of the thoughts.
Whether they're continuous or there's gaps.
What sort of emotional charge the thoughts have or create.
See if you can relax around the experience of thinking.
Thoughts come and they go.
Looking again at the space between the thoughts.
Seeing if you can find a sense of spaciousness.
A sense of the kind of background within which thoughts arise or appear.
You could think of the space between musical notes.
Or a classic and wonderful analogy is the space of an open clear sky.
Getting in touch with the feeling of that.
Imagining laying on your back and looking up at a clear blue sky.
See if you can feel the resonance of that visualization in your body.
And in this analogy,
Our thoughts are like clouds that appear and disappear floating through the sky of the mind.
In the same way that the sky does not reject clouds,
Our awareness does not need to reject thoughts.
Our awareness doesn't reject thoughts.
It simply appears them.
We become entangled and the mind might become reactive to certain thoughts.
We see a big storm cloud coming and we focus on that and fret.
For the purpose of this meditation,
Training yourself to identify with the spaciousness of the sky.
Moving back to it again and again.
The openness and clarity of the mind itself.
And whenever you become captivated by a cloud,
By a thought or a feeling,
Imagine creating space,
The space of the sky around it.
Looking for that resonance in the felt sensation of the body,
The heart and the mind.
I'm safe,
I am open,
I am clear.
In the same way that the sky is never harmed by clouds,
Never touched by clouds.
Your natural state of awareness is never harmed by thoughts or feelings.
So even when things become turbulent,
We can recall this and rest in a trust,
A sureness that we are essentially okay.
If it resonates for you,
You could take on board a little mantra for the rest of your day.
I am peaceful,
I live with ease.
I am peaceful,
I live with ease.
