Awareness of body sensations leading into spacious awareness

So just finding your way into the shape that your body’s going to take for this meditation practice, and let’s see if we can make the transition into meditation something really drama-free. So often when we come into meditation, we can really sort of just feel a weight arriving into our consciousness, a kind of pressure. Let’s not do that. Let’s just have the attitude that we’re just exploring our experience in a very natural and easy way. There’s no hard graft to be done, nothing to achieve. So as we begin really bedding that attitude in, and another attitude I want you to really absorb is the sense that I really don’t know what life is, what I am, what it is to experience myself. I just don’t know. We want to be open to experiencing what we experience in meditation, free from projection, from prejudice, from a kind of boxing in that can happen when we have certain views. So just make the effort to establish this sense of freshness. I don’t know, I don’t know, but I’m here to explore. And the final attitude that I want to invite you to bring is kindness, compassion, warmth. Maybe you can see that this is not separate from this freshness and this kind of divine ignorance. Kindness and compassion can allow us to meet ourselves as we actually arise in each moment, rather than needing it to be this way or that way. So just in your own way, connecting with these qualities of ease, freshness, mystery, and kindness. We could just practice sitting here and just absorbing these qualities into our awareness and seeing how it affects our experience and seeing what it allows to unfold. That would be a beautiful practice, but we’re going to take these qualities into our experience of the body. We’re going to meet our experience of the body in a way that we may not be habituated to meeting it. So we’ll begin just connecting with the sense of your body in this moment, in whatever way that’s available to you. And again, this isn’t really something that needs work or effort. Your body’s already here. Just let it be seen, let it be known, let it be felt. Just kind of brighten that layer of consciousness, the body layer. Rather than needing to really look for your body or focus on your body, just turn up the brightness, turn up the resolution on the awareness that’s already there. And as you do this, you’ll notice that there are identifiable sensations arising in your body as your body, through your body. There’s tension here and there, no doubt, different temperatures. There’s the movement of the breath, the clothes against the skin. And more subtle than these, you can feel, for example, in the fingers, many shifting micro sensations, subtle tingles. So as we just open more and more to our experience of the body, we can allow our awareness to get a bit more sensitive, to pick up more. More subtlety, more nuance. It might even be helpful to gently sort of scan the body from the toes up through the feet, bringing this really subtle awareness that can pick up the tiny tingles and the subtle tension that you wouldn’t normally notice. Even the subtle movement that’s always present even when our body’s in relative stillness. Being interested, scanning through the feet, the lower legs, maybe there’s not so much sensation there, but a kind of sense of space, calves or the shins. Moving your awareness through the upper legs, listening deeply through the pelvis, the belly and the lower back, the heart, the chest, the upper back. This quiet awareness that can take in what we might normally miss, we might normally not be interested for this subtlety. Looking for the tiny vibrations as well as what’s more obvious, carrying on through the neck and the head, feeling how the face is a constant play of tension and relaxation, subtly shifting moment to moment. Completing this mini body scan by bringing awareness to the arms, the hands, the fingers, opening to the body as a whole. And it will now probably feel like your body takes up more sort of psychic space, as it were. More of your consciousness is inhabited by your body sense. Notice this, notice the kind of expansion of this field of experience and tune into the sense of these many hundreds or thousands of sensations, big and small, dancing, shimmering, fizzing, popping, playing. Even a sensation that seems to endure in time, like the feeling of the cushion or the chair underneath you. Actually, if you tune in, never constant, never static, different in each moment. And the constellation of sensations that we call the breath, it’s not really one thing. A whole galaxy of smaller sensations clustered together in it. And while all of this is going on, all of the time, this constant play, this constant shifting landscape of sensation, there’s also a way we can tune in to the kind of background of all of this, the kind of space in which this is all happening. One way that we can help ourselves to tune into this background is by finding some part of the body space, some part of this universe of sensation that feels relatively spacious and maybe a little bit pleasant, or at least neutral. So sometimes, if the belly is relaxed, this can be a place that feels like it has a spacious and maybe slightly pleasant quality. For some people, the palms of the hands provide a pleasant place to rest, maybe the cheeks, the thighs, the ears; it can be anything. So have a little look around and find the region of your body that feels most spacious, most pleasant, and spend a while becoming really intimate with this region and just encouraging that sense of spacious well-being. If it helps, you can kind of use the breath to sort of open up this part of the body, sending the energy of the breath there, letting the breath feed any sense of well-being that’s present. So we’re just enjoying whatever sense of space we can find, opening to it, allowing it to really nourish us. And if or when you can be really clear that yeah, there’s just some sense of space here, some sense of pleasantness or neutrality that feels okay, it feels nice, maybe when that’s clear, really tune into that sense of space itself. So rather than this body part, this region of the body, this area of sensation, tune in more to the sense of spaciousness, sense of kind of freedom, steadiness. However, it’s showing up for you, there might be other words that work better than we might. We might be able to notice that this sense of space that was flavored in a particular way for this part of the body and that was maybe associated with certain sensations, this sense of space is not confined to this part of the body, to this region. Maybe you can notice that this quality of spaciousness actually is the kind of background, it’s the medium in which all body sensations arise. One way of sensing this is like if the body sensations are light projected on a screen, we want to be interested in the screen itself, this whole space. And we can have a sense of the space as one thing, as a kind of field, a kind of unified field in which sensations come and go. Or you can tune into the quality of the space, a sense of spaciousness, kind of freedom, lightness. And it might be carrying a particular vibration; it might be a particular kind of background color on the screen before the rest gets projected on. Often we can find our emotional states showing up here in this quality of the background space of the body. If there’s agitation or anxiety, there can be a kind of fizzy, high-pitched vibration. If there’s joy or love or peace, it can feel warm and fuzzy, like a cloud of pink candy fluff. If we’re feeling a bit numb or dissociated, it can feel quite vague. And that’s still good, that’s still something we want to be interested in. Vagueness, dullness, cloudiness. And so however this space is showing up, whatever it’s carrying, we can try and open to appreciating the kind of freedom that can feel like kind of openness, kind of unboundedness or less boundedness. In our experience of the body, this may be happening to a really noticeable degree, or it may be really subtle. And as always in our practice, we’re interested in tuning in more and more to the subtlety. Can I tune into a sense of space, let it grow, and appreciate any apparently tiny sense of freedom along with anything more obvious and delicious? And what will probably happen repeatedly is that our more prominent sensations will create a kind of magnet for a more focused kind of attention. Attention will be pulled here or there. That’s kind of just a normal thing that happens with attention. The way we’re practicing today, we just kind of shift out of focus, almost relax attention entirely. Rather than bringing attention somewhere else, just let attention have a day off and rest instead. In this kind of background awareness, this more all-pervading awareness, it isn’t so much associated with this or that separate experience. It’s more something that pervades everything. And to the extent that you’re able to tune into this space, this space of awareness, you may be able to sense how it generously holds everything. In meditation, we can often struggle with trying to establish a kind of attention that’s non-judgmental, that’s welcoming, that allows everything. But with this sort of approach that we’re exploring this morning, we just notice that awareness itself, this kind of fabric of consciousness or fabric of perception that we can, to some extent, whether it’s clearly or just subtly tune into this background sense of awareness, it already just holds everything with complete allowance. Nothing is excluded, nothing is too difficult to be witnessed from this spacious free awareness. So just rest for the last couple of minutes, enjoying the natural equanimity the free equanimity awareness offers. Noticing when attention creates a more sort of pointy way of noticing experience and just resting back, relaxing that effort. So having cultivated this spacious awareness, we can begin to transition from this particular form of sitting still. We don’t need to sort of snap back to a default way of attention pinging around here and there. Maybe that will come back at some point. But to whatever extent is possible, as we move the body and begin to come out of the formal meditation, see to what extent you can keep some of this sense of space. It might be something that we can tap back into occasionally in the day. That way, we can build up more of a muscle memory for sliding back into that space. It’s a very restful place to be.