Hello and welcome to Levitate.
I'm Ryan Nell and today we're going to explore the senses.
Now when you think of mindfulness you might think of something that you have to do with your mind,
But really thoughts and thinking are only a very small part of the picture.
And in fact in this exercise we are most interested with the world at hand.
That's the world you can see and hear and touch and taste and smell.
So we're going to use a mindfulness exercise which is all about waking up the senses.
I want you to find a really comfortable seat and close your eyes.
Let's start by taking a couple of nice deep breaths.
Breathing in through your nose and out through your mouth.
Breathing in calm and breathing out stress.
Continuing to breathe in a nice relaxed manner.
Let's start to bring our senses online.
Let's begin to notice the sounds in our environment.
So just seeing if you can stay wide open and curious to the whole soundscape.
As if you were listening to some avant-garde music and every note was in its right place.
However bizarre.
So that we don't need to worry about what's making the sound,
Whether we like the sounds or we think about the sounds.
Rather we simply want to sit back and enjoy the music.
So it's not easy to do is it to drop the judgments and drop the thoughts.
But the idea is that every time you realize you're in a judgment or a thought you simply gently drift your attention back to the sounds themselves.
So as if you were zooming in with a telescope on a particular star and then removing the telescope from your eye and taking in the whole universe above you.
Keeping your eyes closed you might notice that there are lights and color.
Perhaps even patterns or movement.
And even though that all suddenly seemed to swing into view.
In fact all that's happened is you have expanded your awareness to connect more deeply with what was already happening in the moment.
And you might notice even as you gently rest your awareness on your vision.
But you can still hear the sounds around you.
We're going to expand our awareness even further.
And bring in our sense of touch.
Perhaps noticing the weight of your body in the seat.
And the pressure of your feet on the ground.
Gently bringing your attention and awareness to the warmth or coolness of the air against your skin.
And the texture of your clothes against your body.
And the feeling of contact between your hands and whatever they're resting on.
And you might notice that all these tactile sensations are appearing in the same space as the lights and the colors and the sounds.
It's all connected by your awareness.
It's all appearing in your consciousness.
And you might think of your consciousness a little like a starry sky we mentioned earlier.
Each sound is a star.
Each visual experience is a constellation.
And your sense of touch and smell and taste are all stars populating the same inky dark sky.
We may be used to thinking of space as empty but I'd like to encourage you to experience it as full.
We're not very used to paying any attention to the backdrop of our consciousness.
We give all our attention to the contents the sights and sounds and thoughts and emotions.
And yet when we're able to sit back and look up far out into that starry sky we're able for a moment at a time to experience it all as connected.
With me let's take a deep breath to wake up the body and breathe it out into the world.
And once more deep breath in and sigh any tension out as you open your eyes.
Thank you so much for your practice and I'll see you back here for the next class soon.
