Hey there,
It's Jon.
Thank you for turning up in your life and in your practice today.
This meditation aims to lean into your small joys and your authentic feelings of gratitude to help us open up our neuroplasticity and generally increase our daily sense of well-being and belonging on the planet.
Let me invite you to gently take your meditation seat.
And as you are setting up for practice,
Allowing yourself a gentle uprightness through the body,
A relaxed but open posture.
I want to invite you to connect to your body and let yourself know that this is a safe and open space for you.
This is so so important that we begin to see our practice as a positive and safe space.
And as you're allowing yourself to settle,
Can I invite you to notice if you are coming from an idea of what this meditation is supposed to be or something that you want to achieve.
And instead,
Just inviting you to allow yourself to simply be here as your sweet self.
As authentically as possible,
Just be here.
No effort being made to meditate,
To lean into a feeling,
To put another layer over our faces.
Just you.
It's safe enough,
But it's you.
That's what we need in this world.
We need you.
And just tuning into your breath without changing it in any way.
I want to also invite you to allow feeling,
Perhaps,
That your breath is moving in and out through your heart as you breathe.
Just tuning in to the feeling that your breath is moving as you breathe.
Just tuning in to the feeling space around your heart.
And as your breath moves in and out at its own pace,
That you are breathing through the heart.
Now,
If you have a lot of armoring in your body or tightness,
Perhaps allow yourself to breathe through your back and through your heart.
And allow this,
Not with force,
But with absolute love and presence.
Just to allow your back to open.
We're not trying to force our back to open.
We're allowing the breath to move through the armoring between the shoulder blades and through the heart,
Now at the front of the chest,
And then as you breathe in back through it.
And you may have a sense of light or warmth,
Or it may bring a little vulnerability,
Because we're opening up that emotional space.
So just being open and loving with that.
Just being kind and present.
And the process for this meditation is extremely simple.
I'm going to invite you to bring into awareness a small joy or something that you're grateful for from the last,
Say,
24 or 48 hours.
And rather than trying to force that to be more than it is,
We're going to allow ourselves to drop that into the heart space.
So we're using the gigantic field of the heart as a way to allow these gratitudes to impact on our neuroplasticity.
And it's been shown in recent studies that focusing a little bit on the heart that focusing a little bit each day for 30 seconds or so on gratitudes improves our sense of well-being immensely and takes us out of just survival mode.
And when we add in the warmth of the heart,
This process is both boosted and accelerated.
So inviting you now just to allow your awareness to feel into a recent kindness that you have experienced.
Either you being kind with someone or someone being kind with you.
Just allowing that to bloom as a thought in the mind.
And just meeting that with gentle awareness.
And then without any egoic force,
As authentically as possible,
Just allowing that to rest in the center of your heart.
In the center of your heart.
Now we'll just take a moment to allow it to simply sit in the heart.
We're not even going to try to do anything with it.
And you'll feel perhaps a stillness,
An openness,
A liquid tenderness.
And when that feeling comes,
I just want to invite you to simply expand outwards by feeling the feeling of life in your body.
The space of the room around you.
So that we are totally present in this moment,
In the field of life and the field of the heart and the awareness that lies behind the mind.
Inviting you to allow to arise into awareness a moment of love or intimacy with self or other that you have given or received.
That you have given or received.
And allowing that to come into the space of the heart.
And then just coming to the basic feeling of the field of life in your body and awareness of the space around you.
Very good.
We are here.
We are real.
This is your life.
And these are your small daily joys.
Inviting you to consider within your awareness an honesty that you have encountered in the recent time.
The honesty of yourself.
The honesty of another towards you.
Or seeing an honesty out in the world.
That impressed you and that moved you.
Allowing yourself to feel this in your heart,
For it to bloom in your heart.
Checking that you're feeling the life in your body.
Allowing yourself to be aware of a moment or a happening of basic goodness that you have encountered recently.
Allowing the heart and the mind to work together.
The mind in the heart.
The heart in the mind.
And both of those within the field of life in your body.
Within the space that you're in.
Present and of the world.
And finally,
With this practice.
Awareness of a moment of companionship or connection.
The heart and the mind.
The mind and the heart.
The drop of life.
The life of companionship.
Moving through the heart.
Being felt in the life of the body.
So I'm just meditating along with you while holding the space through this recording.
But I want you to know that I am grateful for you.
I'm grateful for your life.
I'm grateful for you being authentically you.
I'm grateful for your practice.
And you don't need to be anybody other than you are.
Bless you for turning up today.
Now it's time to gently draw this practice to a close.
So I want to invite you just to feel into the energy field of the body.
I want to invite you to be aware of the light in your eyes.
The sounds that you can hear.
The feeling of the air in the room.
The feeling of the light in your eyes.
The feeling of the air in the room.
The scent in your nostrils.
The taste in your mouth.
Just tuning into your five senses.
The floor beneath you.
The room around you.
And when you're ready,
Gently drawing your practice to a close.
