In this meditation,
I'm going to lead you through a tour of the senses.
The sense of your body,
And the sense of the sights,
Sounds and more around you.
So prepare for ten minutes of curious,
Open exploration of what is here.
The beginning by just settling into your seat.
Finding a comfortable position,
Seated or lying down.
Just gently closing the eyes to begin this practice.
And seeing if you can give your weight to the surface beneath you.
Just feeling that sense of your body's presence on this seat.
Feeling the contact that your body makes.
That pressure that exists between you and the surface that supports you.
Gently relaxing your body into this seat.
You can loosen up the shoulders,
The face.
See if you can feel gravity pulling you down into the earth.
And noticing if you can feel your feet at the very bottom of your body.
Just any sense of the presence of the feet.
Just be a gentle hum.
A sense of pressure or contact that the feet make with the floor.
Wiggling your toes if you need to get a sense more strongly of your feet.
Just feeling whatever is there.
Perhaps you can feel your legs as a whole.
The heaviness of your legs.
You can feel your arms and your hands resting where they're resting.
The point where the hands make contact with the surface beneath them.
You might feel the air on the skin on your hands and arms.
You might feel the temperature.
Just relaxing the arms.
Wiggling the shoulders.
And noticing if you can feel your breath in your body.
Just feeling that rhythm of your own breathing as the breath comes in.
And then the breath falls away.
Not changing our breathing.
Just noticing the movement that's already happening.
Not seeing if you can feel that movement all the way in and all the way out.
So we're not trying to breathe here.
We're just dropping in to what's already happening in the chest or the stomach.
Or if the breath is strongest for you in the throat and nose.
Feeling that movement.
You might also hear the breath moving through.
Breathing out all the tension that you find.
To draw yourself into that sense of being a breathing body.
And as we hear our breath moving through,
We'll notice that there are also other sounds around us in this space.
As the sound of my voice talking to you.
As the sound of this room or this environment.
What can you hear in this moment?
Just picking out two or three sounds you weren't aware of a few moments ago.
Perhaps the sound of the weather,
The creaking of the building if you're in one.
Just allowing the sounds to come to you,
Picking out each one with your attention.
There are no good sounds or bad sounds here.
There are just more things to pay attention to.
To help draw us in to this moment.
To anchor us to what's real.
Bring us out of our stories,
Our worries.
Some of the sounds might be far away.
Others very close.
Like different instruments in a piece of music.
We listen carefully.
And when our thoughts arise during this,
We don't mind.
They don't need to hook us in.
We don't need to get rid of them.
We just listen to what's next.
As we're sitting,
Breathing,
Listening,
We can just gently open our eyes,
Keeping our eyes still.
So keeping the gaze resting wherever it is.
Becoming aware of the visual sensations that come in.
Understanding what it's like to see these shapes and colours.
The light and shadow.
The slight movements in our visual field as the body tries to keep still.
Being aware of seeing.
Understanding that even as we keep our eyes still,
We can see the whole of this space that we're in.
Noticing that background of our visual awareness.
Filling that space with our awareness.
Sitting relaxed.
No effort.
Just awareness of what is here.
And noticing any smells in this environment.
Imagine any tastes that remain on the tongue from earlier meals.
What if we can't find anything there?
Just a sense of our mouth,
Our tongue and our mouth.
Feeling the mouth and the tongue.
Feeling the nose,
The sense of the air coming in through the nose.
A sense of breathing as we're fully open to the sounds and the sights of this space.
We can end this practice by gently looking around the room that we're in.
Noticing the actual contents of this room.
Perhaps it's full of our belongings or full of other people.
Picking out the things that we don't usually notice.
The patterns,
The shapes,
All the memories it might hold.
We just allow our experience of this room to unfold.
And now we can rest for a final few moments just with our sense of our breathing body.
Our anchor and our foundation.
From this sense of being embodied and this sense of the richness of our sensory experience,
We can go forwards more open,
More composed and more kind to what we meet in the rest of our day.
Thank you for practicing.
