So please get yourself comfortable for this meditation and just check in with how you normally sit and whether you might be able to make some small adjustments to improve your sitting posture,
Ensuring your spine is upright and straight.
Your shoulders relaxed,
Along with your head and your neck.
It's good to spend some time at the beginning just checking on the posture.
As it is the foundation that supports you in meditation and can make all the difference to how you relax and the level of concentration that you can develop.
And we'll start out by taking three or four deep slow breaths,
Filling the lungs to capacity as you breathe in and fill the lower abdomen and then let it come out in a relaxed way.
And you may notice that when you take conscious deep breaths it helps stop the conceptual thinking mind.
It's difficult to breathe deeply and at the same time to be thinking and proliferating.
So it's a helpful skillful means and as you're filling your body with fresh oxygen that will help you clear your mind and help the body feel relaxed and at ease.
So posture and breathing are really key foundations and they're worth spending a bit of time on at the beginning of the meditation in order to support the practice.
Now just let your breath come back to normal,
To a natural breathing rhythm.
Start to notice if you brought some sort of attitude into your meditation.
Have you brought in an expectation that I'm going to get something,
I'm going to change something,
Fix something or get rid of something?
Just sweep away all those attitudes so that your mind can be open and clear and empty like the sky.
Just relax and don't make any of this a task or another thing to add to your to-do list.
Just enjoy.
The key thing in meditation is to not force the mind,
Not control the mind.
Really it's about to gently attune the mind to its natural state and the best way to do this is not by trying,
It's simply by relaxing.
When your mind is relaxed,
Concentration or samadhi comes quite naturally and you're able to sustain that samadhi.
And all we're really doing here is simply remembering.
Mindfulness means to remember,
To remember how to just be in a natural state.
The natural state doesn't preclude the fact that thoughts will be coming into your mind,
Memories,
Desires,
Plans and so on.
And being in the natural state doesn't preclude the fact that there are natural sounds,
Sense impressions coming in from the outside.
Welcome everything,
Allow everything to come as it will.
We're simply practicing letting all of these things go.
The whole point of meditation is to start to understand the workings of your own mind,
How it is,
How it suffers by clinging to these appearances.
So you're not going into combat,
Into conflict with anything that comes into consciousness.
Nothing's a problem.
Everything's welcome.
You're not grasping at anything,
Not picking them up.
Everything's just flowing like a river.
Feel how relaxing that is when you don't get into contention with anything that arises and passes away.
You can imagine that your mind is like a wide open field.
There's enough space for everything to come,
Maybe stay for a while and pass through.
In particular,
Start to notice the passing away of sensations,
Of a sound,
Of a smell,
A thought,
An emotion.
And see directly how everything naturally comes to cessation.
So why fight anything?
If you're fighting things,
It's simply prolongs them.
So let them go naturally.
And as you start to develop an experiential understanding about the art of just letting be and letting things go and dissolving,
Can you start to notice more the inner space in the mind,
The knowingness?
Can you rest into that so that all these other sense impressions become more and more on the periphery?
And you learn to deepen this connection with your own natural awareness.
But not as an attainment or an achievement.
If you start seeing it like that,
You're going down the wrong path.
It's just the ego claiming something for itself,
When in fact it's just our natural state.
When the mind is relaxed,
Natural concentration arises,
And then wisdom starts to come on its own.
Insights,
Understandings.
And these insights will be unique to each individual,
Depending on where we're at in the practice,
Where we're at in the understanding of Dharma or truth.
There's no need to force wisdom to arise either.
Once we clear or lift the veil and clear all the white noise from the senses,
The white noise may in fact still be there a little bit,
But it's not intruding in the same way.
And most importantly,
We're not identified with it in the same way.
Our tight hold on it as me and mine is starting to loosen.
