Welcome.
This is a focused awareness meditation using the charm of your breath as an anchor into nowness,
Enhancing your body's capacity for calm and natural ability for self-healing.
Begin by finding a position where you can hold stillness in your body,
Create a steady container to hold the breath inside.
You might be comfortable sitting up or if your body needs to lay down for a wider ground of support,
That's okay too.
Now simply allow yourself to settle in here.
Let your musculature sigh and drop the weight of being for a while.
As your external landscape comes to stillness,
Your internal landscape will come into clearer focus.
Feel your outer body,
Skin,
Face grow increasingly soft as the inner body gently glows brighter.
Start to observe the breath rhythm that is present and in a more detailed manner than usual,
Examine its ethereal passage through your being.
When it first touches your nostrils on entry,
Is it fast or slow?
And how about when it exits?
Are you able to map its journey like a cartographer from nostrils,
Down throat,
Collarbones gently rise,
Side ribs spread like gills and belly expands?
Then trace its steps back in reverse all the way till it kisses your upper lip as it leaves.
Feel your breath's inner touch.
You'll find that when we observe a thing,
By nature it changes its behavior.
So it can be tempting to try and enhance the breath in some way to make it what you think is better.
But a part of this style you're practicing today is releasing the need to improve or manipulate what you observe in yourself.
Aspire to get to know it exactly as it is,
Relaxing into the space of patiently allowing rather than following the impulse towards improving.
You might imagine the same gaze with which you'd observe a baby sleeping.
There's a preciousness,
An inherent perfection,
Nothing to change or fix because nothing is broken.
Every breath full of infinite potential within its brief ephemeral existence.
With this loving gaze towards your breath,
Begin training your attention to stay with it.
You'll inevitably notice the tentacles of the mind reaching out to other things,
Some planning,
Some analysis,
Memories or even fading into sleepiness.
This is normal and a key part of the process.
When you realize that's occurring,
There's this beautiful moment where you can gently disentangle your attention from those things and allow it to be charmed back to the breath.
Once again enamored with the soft tide of your inner body rolling in and receding out.
It's completely natural for the human mind to time travel,
Tumbling forward into what's next or tugging backward into what was.
If you find your mind deeply tangled in some past or future experience and it resists coming back to the breath,
That's okay.
We'll use a counting technique to give the mind a louder,
More tactile anchor.
So on your next inhale,
Silently count one to yourself and on that same exhale,
One.
On your next breath,
Silently count two and on that exhale,
Two.
Continue like this until the moment you realize you are no longer counting and without reprimand,
Lovingly attend back to the present breath.
Part of this practice is a willingness to begin again with loving kindness without scolding yourself.
Beginning again is not a failure,
Rather the realization that your mind is entangled elsewhere than the present breath is the moment of mindfulness itself.
So it's perfect.
Imagine how you would train a puppy to sit and stay.
At first,
The puppy's anxious to explore and constantly running off to play with its toys.
But you don't tell the puppy it's a failure.
You just patiently bring it back,
Sit it down and lovingly tell it again,
Stay.
If you count your breaths all the way to 21 and find the puppy mind has settled,
You might release the counting and just sit with your breath.
The numbers are merely a tool and not the goal.
Hold this space for yourself with loving kindness.
Underneath all else you can feel the precious organism that is you simply breathing with the fullness of each moment.
Here as you can see I focus on the type of dog's population and 안� disproportionate the dog.
It's seeks to beath the думs or consider relating relatives and fawns to family but often is nicely brought back the winter so you can be one of the Justices So now it's time to release our attention from this practice.
The moment here is a bridge into the rest of your day where you can maintain some threads of attention inward as your mind starts to reach out and get swept up in the color and movement of the external world.
Let any sounds and smells enter your awareness first,
Taking your time to recalibrate as you open your eyes into the rich stimulus around you.
Whatever happens next,
Remember that no matter where you are,
The breath is also here with you,
Always present and lovingly calling you inward with its subtle touch to the sweet softness of this exact moment.
