Meditations

Basic Mindfulness Meditation (suggested time: 25 minutes)

Setting an intention: When you take your seat for a period of meditation, you are making your intention known. In a sense you are taking a stand about what you value. See if you can connect with your intention to be with the breath, to become more aware, to nurture yourself right here and now.

Setting up Posture: Sit in a way that is upright and dignified, yet relaxed and not rigid. If we are too relaxed, we’ll slump and lose energy. If we are too tight, we’ll be tense. The key is to balance our posture between alertness and relaxation. In our posture, we want to embody a quality of openness, honesty, and presence.

Allow the spine to rise out of the pelvis with energy and uplift, all the way to the top, so that the neck is fully extended. Let the chin be slightly tucked in toward the chest. Allow the hands to be soft and supported on the body. The shoulders are relaxed, slightly back and down, the chest is open. Allow the belly to become round and soft. Let the muscles of the legs become heavy, sinking into the ground. Release any tension in the face muscles — allowing the brow, the cheeks, the mouth, the eyes, even the scalp, to become soft.

The following meditation has 6 distinct phases. A good rule of thumb for practice time is four or five minutes a phase.

The Meditation:
The Breath: To begin with, bring your awareness to the tip of the nose, and as you breathe in be aware that you’re breathing in, and as you breathe out be aware that you’re breathing out. If you find that it’s easier for you to focus on the breath in the abdomen, as it expands and contracts with each breath, please do so.

Breathing in with awareness, breathing out with awareness, at the tip of the nose or the belly, one moment at a time, one in breath and one out breath at a time.

If you find that your mind wanders from the breath, you can make a mental note of it by saying to yourself, wandering, and acknowledging wherever it is your attention went, and coming back again to the breath, breathing in and breathing out. See if you can take your life one inhalation and one exhalation at a time.

If other experiences, like strong emotions, sensations, or mental states, become distinct, acknowledge their presence but stay with the breath. Let the breath continue coming into the foreground of your awareness as the other experiences recede into the background.

Sensations: Now, very gently, shift your awareness from the breath, and feel sensations as they arise in your body, especially ones that are the most distinct and predominant. Sensations can be hot or cold, or dry, or itchy, or aching, or pulsing, or tingling, or stabbing, they can be painful, pleasant, and even neutral. Just watch whatever sensations are arising in the body and acknowledging them as they arise, moment to moment.

If you find your mind is drifting, just make a note of wandering and come back to the sensations of the body, being mindful of them as they arise. Again we are not trying to push away other experiences — allow them to be there, but keep letting the object of meditation, in this case, bodily sensations, emerge into the foreground.

The Mind: Now release the awareness of sensations and shift the primary object to watching the mind. The mind secretes thoughts like a body secretes sweat. Like sensations, thoughts are events that arise and can be known in awareness for a time. Thoughts pass through the mind, like debris in a rushing river. You don’t have to jump on the debris and go for a ride — you can just stand on the shore and watch the thoughts rush by without identifying with them. They’re just thoughts. If you do identify with the thoughts and get caught up in them, simply acknowledge, thinking, and come back to being an observer of them.

Plans, memories, worries, fears and hopes…all of them just mental events appearing for a time and then disappearing in the space of awareness.

Feel free to include whatever emotions might be present: sadness, happiness, anxiety, boredom, etc, without any judgment. Feel them in the body, acknowledge their presence, and let be.

Whenever you get lost in the thoughts, just note thinking, and come back to the process of thought, standing on the shore of the river and watching the thoughts flow by.

Sounds: Now release the awareness of watching the mind and shift the object of focus to sounds, bringing awareness to the faculty of hearing. Be aware of sound as a bare, direct experience, and without conceptualizing it. There’s no need to like or dislike what you hear. Be aware of sounds that arise externally in the room or outside the room, or internally as sounds in the body, such as ringing in the ears, pulses, heartbeats, etc.

You can notice that there’s nothing you need to do to hear. Hearing is just happening, it’s a completely impersonal process, and it's impermanent. Sounds enter awareness, sustain for a time, and disappear.

Choiceless Awareness: Now broaden the awareness to focus on whatever arises in each moment and makes itself known: it could be a sound, a sensation, a train of thought, an emotion. Just watch whatever is the most distinct and predominant object of awareness in that moment. This practice of choiceless awareness allows us to be present for the entire play of life itself as it reveals itself to us moment by moment.

You might notice the impermanent nature of phenomena as it enters awareness and disappears….sounds, sensations, thoughts, emotions, judgments, identifications, watching things rise and pass away in the mind, body and heart moment to moment, breath by breath.

Just being in the moment, watching things as they are.

Conclusion: Now very gently shift the focus of your awareness and return to the breath as the primary object — breathing in and breathing out, focusing your attention either at the tip of the nose or at the belly. Breathing in and breathing out, moment to moment, staying with the breath.

Now expand the field of awareness to include your whole body as it breathes. Sense the breath wherever it reveals itself to you in the body. Sense the body as a whole, as a connected and whole organism.

Observe how you’re feeling physically, mentally, emotionally, acknowledging how you are right now, in this moment, and letting it be.

Gently open your eyes to conclude the practice.

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