Hello,
My name is Haley.
Thank you for joining me for your practice today.
Today we're going to practice a 10 minute meditation where we will work on cultivating awareness by becoming aware of our emotions and how our emotions arise in the body.
So I'll invite you now to find a comfortable seated position.
This can be sitting on a cushion or in a chair or even sitting on a couch or in your bed with your back supported either against the back of the couch or a wall.
But just find a position that is comfortable and feels sustainable for your body to rest in for these 10 minutes.
And then once you've found that comfortable position,
I'll invite you to either close the eyes here or just gaze softly down the line of your nose towards the ground.
And we'll open our practice together today by taking three deep cleansing breaths.
So when you're ready,
Inhaling deeply through the nose and exhaling out of the mouth.
We'll take two more deep breaths like this,
Inhaling through the nose,
Exhaling out of the mouth and maybe letting out a sigh.
And then we'll bring our awareness to the breath and just watching the breath flow in and out.
No need to change the breath in any way here.
Just watching the breath as it naturally flows.
And then slowly we can begin to turn our awareness towards any sensation of emotion in the body.
So just taking a moment here to see if you can feel any emotion bubbling up.
Maybe it's been a long day.
Maybe something happened in your day that stirred up some kind of a negative emotion.
Be it fear,
Anger,
Jealousy.
Or maybe you've had a really good day and there's feelings of joy,
Happiness.
And there's no right or wrong here.
No emotion is better or worse than another in this practice.
Right now,
Just tuning in,
Just witnessing any sense of emotion that's present in the body.
And we're going to practice turning towards this emotion without judging it and without feeling as though we need to dissect it and figure out what caused the emotion.
For this practice,
We're just tuning in to how the emotion feels in the body.
So becoming aware of the sensations in the body that coincide with this emotion.
So maybe you feel a tightness in the chest or the belly.
Do you feel a sense of lightness or spaciousness in the body?
Are you holding or clenching any muscles here related to becoming aware of this emotion?
And again,
We're not trying to change the emotion.
We're not trying to figure out what has caused it to arise.
We are only interested in becoming curious about how this emotion feels in the body.
What sensations are present in the body?
And these sensations might be very,
Very subtle.
It might be just a subtle vibration of emotion that exists in the body.
When we say that we feel anger or we feel joy,
Both of these emotions exist as slightly different sensations in the body.
So right now,
We are just curious about feeling into these subtle sensations of emotion existing in the body.
And if your mind is throwing lots of thoughts into your awareness and distracting you from this practice,
That's no problem.
Becoming aware of those thoughts and then just gently guiding your awareness and your attention back into the body,
Back to the breath or back to the subtle sensation of emotion existing in the body.
Letting go of all effort now,
Of all concentration on feeling into the emotion that's present in the body.
Just taking some nice and slow deep breaths here.
Take a moment to notice how it feels to approach our emotions without needing to identify where they come from or what's caused them.
How did it feel just to give your emotions some space to exist,
To become curious about the subtle physical sensation of the emotion and to feel the emotion in the body without needing to change it or push it away.
And then when you're ready,
You can slowly bat the eyes open here and bring some small movements back into the body.
Slowly coming out of this formal practice,
But I encourage you to move throughout your day to day life with this idea of becoming aware of the emotions in terms of becoming aware of the sensation that you feel in the body when the emotion arrives.
And the more that we practice taking that step back to feel the emotion as opposed to trying to analyze it and dissect it with the mind,
The more space we create and the better able we are to allow the emotion to come,
To feel it,
Connect with it,
And then watch it as it slowly dissipates and disappears all on its own.
Thank you so much for practicing with me today and for allowing me the privilege of guiding your practice.
I hope you have a beautiful rest of your day.
Om Shanti Shanti Shanti.
