Welcome,
Friends.
Today,
Let's center ourselves in conscious awareness and experience stillness as a quality of presence.
First find your comfortable position,
Upright but not tense,
Erect and tall.
Take a couple of comfortable breaths and allow your body to relax.
Now,
Intentionally,
Take a deep slow breath in and hold,
And as you release,
Allow your sense of awareness to pool beneath the crown of the head and rest.
Take another deep slow breath in and hold,
And as you release,
Allow that sense of awareness to pool down the center of the brain and brainstem to the top of the back of the neck and rest.
Take another deep slow breath in and hold,
And as you release,
Allow your awareness to pool down the spine to the area behind the heart and rest.
Take another deep slow breath in and hold,
And as you release,
Allow your awareness to move down the spine to pool in the tailbone and rest.
Take another four breaths on your own,
Holding at the top,
And as you release,
Allow your awareness to center beneath the crown of the head and then down the spine incrementally to pool in the tailbone.
Take about a minute.
Welcome back.
Now,
From this center position,
Let's explore one quality of presence,
Stillness.
One quality of the thinking mind,
And one that becomes troublesome,
Is the constant motion of thought.
We think in symbols,
Linguistic and imagistic,
And symbols take their meaning relative to other symbols.
A word,
For instance,
Is related diachronically to the concept or object it signifies.
For example,
The word pizza refers to the Italian dish.
And a word is related synchronically to the other words in the sentence.
For example,
Let's order a pizza,
Where pizza now is the intention of the act.
Having stepped back from the thinking mind,
We have also stepped out of the forward motion of thought,
The momentum of thought that carries us along seemingly without our intention.
Resting in presence,
We notice that being is stillness.
Stillness is everywhere.
And into this profound stillness arises motion,
The movement of a leaf on a tree's limb,
The passing of a car.
Eventually,
The motion ceases and the stillness returns.
Take a deep,
Slow breath in and hold.
And on the release,
Allow your awareness to acknowledge the profound stillness that is everywhere in our experience of being.
Simply acknowledge stillness as a presence and continue your slow,
Deep breathing.
In Immanuel Kant's epistemology,
Time and space are posited as fundamental to all thought.
These exist prior to all thinking and form the ground in which we may think at all.
We cannot know quantity,
For example,
Until there is a space to hold objects.
And we cannot know quality without the enduringness of the objects.
Similarly,
In conscious awareness,
When we step back from thought,
We step back from the forward motion of thinking.
And what we step into is stillness.
Being is experienced as profound and abiding stillness.
Being awake means awakening from the identification with thinking and forward motion and sensing beneath all an abiding stillness.
Even as we move through our days,
Propelling our bodies through the world,
We can practice conscious awareness of the stillness that grounds all movement and to which all movement returns.
Let's take a few moments of intentional breathing,
Deeply and slowly,
And luxuriate in the stillness of being.
Thanks for joining me.
I hope you have a beautiful day.
