Welcome to your Live Mindfully meditation.
You bet.
This practice will explore mindfulness of the body,
Which is the B,
Mindfulness of emotions,
The E,
And mindfulness of thoughts,
The T.
This formal practice will support us to build our skills in really inhabiting our body and in perhaps more effectively relating to our thoughts and our emotions in our everyday lives,
Supporting us to make the shift from reacting to responding.
I'll invite you now to get into a comfortable position,
Either sitting in a chair or on a cushion on the floor.
We can allow the back to become straight but not rigid and perhaps moving slightly away from any back support you may have.
You might like to tuck the chin slightly to lengthen the back of the neck and you could allow the shoulders to soften down.
Place your hands wherever they feel most comfortable,
Either on your lap or on your knees.
If you feel comfortable with it,
You might like to now softly close down the eyes or simply allow your gaze to rest unfocused on a spot in front of you.
Let's start by allowing our attention to rest within our body,
To get to know this part of ourselves with whom we so rarely take time to connect.
We can gently move our awareness up to our face and we might start by attending to the eyes,
Bringing our attention to all of the tiny muscles in and around the eyes,
Really sensing into what's there.
Is there tension,
Softness,
Tiredness,
Twitchiness?
Just allowing our eyes to be exactly as we find them.
If you feel comfortable with it,
You might like to experiment with sensing the eyes from the inside out,
Exploring the muscles behind the eyes,
Noticing the sensations there.
As you may have already noticed,
Our mind may become impatient if we rest our attention in one place for too long.
It can feel like we're pulled to attend to something else,
A sound,
A feeling elsewhere in the body.
We might like to gently and kindly remind ourselves that there's plenty of time for all of that.
For now,
Let's just rest with the eyes,
Feeling them from the inside out.
Allowing the attention to move down now to explore the whole face from the inside out,
Noticing the neck and shoulders and consciously letting go of any tendency we may have to judge our experience.
And in much the same way as a nature photographer might simply take a photo of what they see,
Rather than questioning or assessing it as right or wrong,
We too are simply exploring our inner landscape with openness,
With curiosity.
Let's allow the attention now to rest in the chest and in the belly,
Where we can sense into the rise and the fall of the effortless flow of the breath,
Exploring the chest and the belly from the inside out.
Letting go of the body now,
Let's experiment with bringing our skill of mindfulness to our emotions.
We'll start by cultivating an emotion and then exploring how our body feels in response to it.
So if you feel comfortable with it,
Bring to mind an experience that made you feel really happy.
Use this experience in as much detail as you can.
Who was there with you?
What could you smell?
What were you wearing?
As you recall this joyful time,
Start to tune in now to the kind of sensations you can feel in the body.
What do you notice?
How is the body responding to these feelings?
Okay,
Letting that memory and the associated feeling go now,
Let's experiment with a different emotion.
If you feel comfortable with it,
Bring to mind a situation or an experience in which you felt angry or upset.
Not too angry or upset,
Just a little bit.
Let's keep it small for now.
So again,
Recall the situation in as much detail as you can.
And again,
Start to tune in to your body.
What can you feel there?
How is your body responding to this emotion?
And how does it feel in comparison to the experiment with happiness and joy that we just completed?
Our emotions can,
At times,
If left to their own devices,
Overwhelm us.
And through practicing with them mindfully in this way,
We can learn to attend to them with awareness,
Kindness and curiosity before we choose how to respond to them.
We can step out of the passenger seat and into the driver's seat,
Navigating our own course.
Okay,
Letting go of the memories and the emotions now and taking a slightly longer,
Slightly deeper breath.
Supporting ourselves to come back to the present moment,
Feeling the breath move through the body,
Nourishing,
Cleansing and cooling.
Before we move to working with thoughts,
You might like to allow your attention to rest with the breath.
Choose one spot in the body where the breath feels most vivid.
It might be in the gentle rise and fall of the belly,
The expansion of the chest or the flow of air as it passes your nostrils.
Choose this spot and allow your attention to rest there for a time.
It is likely that at some stage your attention will be seduced away from your breath by a thought or a series of thoughts.
This time we're going to experiment with being mindful of our thinking,
Starting to see our thoughts for what they really are,
Just stories,
Opinions,
Memories or worries,
Not often truthful and not always useful.
So if you'd like to,
Still rest the attention with the breath in the body at the spot you've chosen and start to watch the thoughts come and go.
There may not be many thoughts,
There may be lots,
Dancing across your field of awareness,
A bit like a video playing or like clouds passing across the blue sky.
Just keep watching,
Be really curious.
Are the thoughts single or are they in groups?
Let's just rest for a time watching the thoughts,
Knowing that we're separate from them.
Observing the thoughts,
Can you notice the space between the thoughts?
What about the space or the awareness from where the thoughts come and where they go?
This practice can take some time for us to develop.
As for many of us,
This is a very new skill.
However,
It's such a wonderful skill to develop as we can then use this in our daily life and bring choice to the way we respond to the events as they unfold.
So as this formal practice comes to an end,
I'll invite you to sense once again back into the body,
Allowing the attention to rest at the top of the head and then trickle down over the whole body like warm water until your attention is resting once again with the feet on the floor.
In a moment you'll hear the sound of the bell to complete the practice.
I'll invite you to keep your eyes closed until you can no longer hear the ringing and then you can slowly open your eyes and transition consciously back into your day where you can choose to live mindfully.
