Welcome to this practice exploring our sense of self across time and our place amongst things.
My name is David.
Take a little time to settle gently onto your cushion or however you choose to be present here.
Easing into this moment without the need for tension but with respect for your body.
Letting your body relax.
Feeling weighted and held within a field of gravity.
Gradually feeling your attention transition from thoughts and feelings to the sensation of your breath.
Be here with your breath.
This breath.
Each and every breath to follow.
The simplicity of breathing flowing and expressing itself through you as it always has done since you were born.
Noticing you are already aware of this moment without intention or effort.
No manipulation needed here.
Acknowledging awareness is always and already here.
Allowing awareness to fall into the body without needing to land anywhere.
Not trying to do it right.
Not trying to achieve a goal.
Breathing.
Falling.
Listening.
Falling more and more.
Until falling blossoms into opening.
Like a spring bud transitioning to unfurl to flowering in the warmth of the season.
We rest here.
Aware of sounds,
Feelings,
Emotions,
Images,
Sensations.
Opening to what is only here.
Without manipulation.
Imagining now our awareness escape a little from the boundary of this body.
Seeing ourselves here,
Wherever you are,
Meditating.
Imagining all those who have meditated before you,
Stretching like a golden thread back in an arc of time that falls far beyond the horizon.
Imagine the gravity of all those before you and even now who have chosen to sit and marvel in being aware.
Your limbs and body feeling weighted even more.
And more.
Held and supported by the earth beneath.
Opening your sense of time a little.
Imagining deeper time.
Expansive time that speaks of earth's history.
Time that pivots,
Stretches and flows out from this simple moment you have taken.
Opening to the chronology of rocks and deserts and forests and spinning planets and spiralling galaxies.
Such deeper time is marked in scales that humble the human instant.
Epochs and aeons overshadow minutes and years like giants.
Such deep time is kept and signalled by stone,
By ice,
By stalactites,
By sea beds and sediments.
A migration of tectonic plates and by past life.
Its stories whispered to us through fossilised ghosts caught in stone.
From this moment of practice you are taking,
Deep time also opens out into the future too.
The earth falling silent and tumbling back into darkness as the sun exhausts its light in 5 billion years.
Inevitably it will.
Within the embrace of deeper time ice breathes.
Great mountains ebb and flow.
Stone pulses.
Rock flows.
Glaciers are just weather.
Forests and deserts blink in and out in an exchange of existence.
Oceans change.
A metronome.
The earth shimmers.
Can we gently reflect on our fears,
Pains and perils?
What are our stories we carry with us daily?
How do our challenges and difficulties seem to us when held in the palm of deeper time?
Can we pour our worries,
Our fears and challenges into this sense of deep time like pebbles dropped and lost into an even deeper pool?
There is peril too.
A warning in opening our mind to this grander sense of time.
We can question,
What do our hopes,
Our wishes,
Our desires,
Pains and perils matter set within this blink of existence?
When viewed from the life of a desert soon to be an ocean.
The season of high mountains rising and falling like a lotus flower blossoming in and out of existence.
Human mortality,
Human needs,
Human behaviour and indeed even morality may seem absurd held by such scales of time.
Crushed and worn away to irrelevance.
Our challenges and worries and wants,
All life too,
May seem insignificant when seen through the eye of deep time.
We are a blink,
A scintilla within much grander cycles of erosion and renewal.
When we pour our concerns into such a radical perspective of time we should not feel apathy though.
Can we sense a deeper call to action?
Sensing into the scale of time we need not seek to escape or devalue our troubles and needs as irrelevant,
But hear and listen to a greater call to reimagine our stories,
To reimage our stories,
To see them anew.
In this way we can reimagine our desires and unfilled hopes and furies with the world within more ancient and grander stories of making and unmaking,
Of arising,
Falling and transition.
Can we see our stories not as relevant and devalued by deep time,
But as part of a majestic web of time,
Of gift,
Of inheritance and legacy that stretches back and forward from this moment,
This simple moment that spins with you sitting here,
At its centre?
Re-imaged,
Our stories may transform when we imagine the ancient footprints we can place our feet within.
Our stories are also about what footprints of our own we will leave behind for sentient beings that are yet to walk and step through their own lives to.
A sense of deep time may not disconnect us,
Should not disconnect us from having value,
But rather we discover and connect to what is of value in our lives.
How different could the world be if we see ourselves no longer the centre of our world,
But our world as the centre of us?
The Sami people,
A living history of nomadic people,
Reindeer and proud survival within the northern hemisphere hold a haunting understanding of life and time.
For them the earth beneath us is seen as an inversion of our human realm,
The ground a gossamer mirror line,
Such that the feet of all those before us walk forever inverted,
Upside down so as to press against and touch those of the living who stand upright in their lives and stories,
In an intimate and personal posture of the past standing resolutely with the present.
Soul pressed to soul.
Every being that has been and is yet to be,
For eternity has stood or will stand square on the ground held by gravity against the feet of all those that have walked before them.
With this perspective,
How do our stories that are important to us,
That are important and do matter,
How do they appear to us now?
Whilst confidently pressing our feet to the ground,
How might we reimagine our stories and find new meaning in them?
Imagining too,
Many thousands of years ago,
Unknown artists using their mouths to blow an explosion of dark rich pigments of okra dust over their hands.
Hands that were pressed to a cave wall,
To leave a ghostly reminder of a conscious mind.
Signs of art,
Maybe.
Signs of understanding of the place amongst things,
Possibly.
Of joy,
Of hope,
Of wish.
A mark of life that stayed undisturbed in the darkness of time for many more thousands of years.
Silently waiting.
Can we imagine ourselves having the good fortune now to stand in those caves?
We stand cloaked in an ancient silence,
Stillness hanging in the air,
The coolness of the cave falling upon us.
Imagine pressing our worries and fears and hopes and joys and challenges with our hand,
Precisely against the silhouette of a ghostly hand made by an unknown artist.
A print,
An imprint of life and early humanity.
Desires and hopes held and grooved into their own palm.
Can we also imagine too,
The warmth of a hand pressing back through and from within the cold rock of the cave.
Eating fingertip to fingertip.
Finger to finger.
Grooved palm to grooved palm.
Warmth to warmth.
Life to life in an open-handed encounter across deep time.
Hand pressed to hand.
We may reflect.
What stories do we grasp tightly onto that hold us from leaving our own mark?
Can we open our hands just a little even,
Spreading our fingers wider,
So fragments of the stories and truths we tell ourselves may loosen,
Even a little.
To fall an ebb away between our fingers,
And to the ground at our feet.
Falling further still,
Lost and embraced within time.
Within a sense of grander time and wider perspective.
A sense of time that can always be found just under our feet.
Rest back now and let go of the idea of meditating.
Give yourself to being here now.
Breathing.
Time flowing.
Breathing.
Breathing.
This meditation will not end.
No bell will sound.
No signal of time to say you have finished will be heard.
It will never finish.
It never really does.
Instead,
Hold a wish,
A hope even,
To continue to allow everything to be as it is just now.
When feels comfortable and natural,
Open your eyes if they have been closed.
But with no idea that this meditation is ending.
We simply just open our eyes,
And nothing else needs to change.
When ready,
You will soon transition into your day.
But I am curious to ask you,
What will this day become for you?
How will you carry your challenges?
How different will your day be if you walk carefully into and through this day,
Mindfully even,
Imagining each step taken is with your ancestors greeting you at your feet?
And finally,
I am curious to ask you to imagine,
How can your difficulties be re-imagined,
Re-valued,
Feeling the warmth of past humanity pressed in recognition,
In common gesture,
Into the grooved palm of your own hand,
In a knowing handshake across time?
Namaste.
Thank you.
