Relax Your Brain, Open Your Mind (With Waves)

The main part of this mindfulness meditation will be mindfulness of our own thoughts but before we get there I'd like to invite you first of all to become aware of your breath and we're just going to practice the approach we're going to apply to our thoughts but first on the breath.

The reason for this is our thoughts are so intimately connected with our sense of self and identity.

It can be a bit tricky sometimes to take a step back from them so we're going to practice that approach first with the breath so become aware of your breath and see if you can maintain an open awareness so rather than closing down your awareness onto just a breath see if you can keep your awareness nice and open and just choosing to pay a little bit more interest in the breath than the other things that are happening.

So I'm not excluding ignoring thoughts,

Sounds,

Sensations,

Emotions,

All the variety of things that are happening in this moment they're all completely welcome to be within my awareness.

I'm just going to choose to hold the breath,

Place the breath in the center or the foreground of my awareness,

Allow everything else to happen around the breath so feel the breath in your body now and really explore the physical sensations of the breath as you breathe in and out so so we're practicing holding one thing in the center of our awareness in this case the breath but keeping the awareness nice and light and open still aware of everything else happening around the breath so you then the second thing to practice with the breath is to realize that with each and every breath you could be choosing to change the breath in some way you could choose to hold the breath so you try and slow the breath or deepen the breath but we're going to choose instead to allow the breath to be just as it is spend a few moments experiencing that sensation of actively choosing not to change the breath knowing that we could change it at any moment so this is making this step an engaged and active choice otherwise to just say don't change the breath feels like I don't need to do anything and your mind may wander so it's engaging with the breath by being really aware of the sensations of breath and choosing not to change it whilst experiencing the fact that we could and the final practice with breath is to see if you can get a sense of the body being breathed by the breath so rather than experience being a few breathing you having to breathe just noticing that you don't have to remember to breathe to choose to breathe you don't have to make the breath happen at all the breath happens to the body I spend a few moments experiencing the body being breathed by the breath so just to briefly recap these three practices with breath gently holding the breath within the center of your awareness allowing everything else to just happen just slightly in the background so not concentrating but maintaining an open awareness choosing not to change the breath in any way and feeling the body being breathed by the breath so now we're going to apply those three approaches to our own thoughts see if we can treat our thoughts in the same way as the breath just another experience happening within our awareness so the first step is to gently hold our thoughts our experience of thinking in the center in the foreground of our awareness but not concentrating on our thoughts keeping the awareness nice and light and open we're still aware of breath of sounds and other sensations and feelings which is taking more of an interest a few moments in that experience of thinking you and keeping that open awareness still being aware of the body breath and the present moment that can really help with not getting attached to any particular stream of thoughts we can build on that with the second step and that is to not make any effort whatsoever to change your thoughts so it doesn't matter how fast or slow your thoughts are it doesn't matter what the content of your thoughts are whatsoever doesn't matter if they feel like positive or negative thoughts just allowing your thoughts to be exactly as they are so we're interested in experiencing thinking but we're completely disinterested in the contents of whatever whatever those thoughts are so as we did with the breath knowing we could try to change our thoughts by actively choosing not to change them in any way at all and the third step the thoughts and as we did with the breath noticing that you don't have to remember to think you don't have to choose to think you don't have to make any effort at all to create any thought see if you can get a sense of the thoughts just arriving occurring within your mind completely naturally spontaneously automatically without any effort whatsoever you you so just bringing those three steps together for the thoughts gently holding the thoughts within the center of my awareness keeping the awareness open still aware of everything else at the present moment not trying to change those thoughts in any way at all and noticing the thoughts just arriving all on their own without any effort from me whatsoever So one more step before we introduce a few minutes of silence to conclude the meditation and that's a step of relaxation.

What we're going to do here is relax the brain and the invitation is to treat the back brain exactly as you would any other part of the body.

To begin with let's become aware of the face,

Be aware of all the muscles around the eyes,

The mouth,

The jaw,

Forehead and allow all those muscles to relax.

Now become aware of the top,

Back and sides of the head,

The scalp and the skull and allow all these parts of your head to simply relax.

Next bring your attention to the brain and allow your brain to completely relax.

So what does it feel like to simply allow your brain to totally relax?

Allow your whole head,

Face,

The skull,

The brain to all relax.

Allow the rest of your body to join in and also completely relax.

So we can feel the breath flowing through our relaxed body and we can feel our thoughts flowing freely through our relaxed brain.

And the final step now is to turn your attention,

Your alertness,

Your awareness,

Your open welcoming awareness to what your next thoughts might be.

So completely disinterested in whatever our current thoughts are and turning our attention and our open awareness to wondering and welcoming whatever the next thought might be.

And whenever a thought arises we simply wonder again what the next thought might be.

So in this way we're opening the mind to receiving new thoughts beyond our habitual patterns as we keep gently drawing our attention to what the next thought might be.

Keeping your awareness light and open,

Inviting any new thoughts of insight,

Inspiration or intuition to arise or arrive in your mind if they wish to,

Without any effort or expectation.

We'll spend a few minutes in silence and the only effort to make is to just keep that awareness nice and open,

Keeping the body,

The brain relaxed,

Allowing the breath and the thoughts to flow and just turning your attention to what the next thought may be,

Seeing if you can be alert and welcoming enough to catch each new thought as and when it arises within your open awareness.

We'll spend a few minutes in silence.

We'll spend a few minutes in silence.

We'll spend a few minutes in silence.

We'll spend a few minutes in silence.

We'll spend a few moments in silence.

These are just a few moments more,

Just remembering to be disinterested in your current thoughts and being open to catching whatever the next thought may be.

We'll spend a few minutes in silence.

OK,

So we'll bring the meditation to a close there.

We'll spend a few minutes in silence.

We'll spend a few minutes in silence.

We'll spend a few minutes in silence.