Basic breath & body meditation

Arrange your body in a suitable shape, a shape that feels relaxed and awake. So there’s some brightness to the mind and the body, as well as a sense of ease and comfort. When you found yourself in that shape, you can make the easy transition into meditation without needing to bring in any sense of effort or some kind of goal to be attained. Just incline your awareness towards your body. And you might start by noticing the parts of your body that are in contact with what’s underneath you. The chair or the cushion, the floor. Then you might notice your breath entering and leaving your body all on its own. Then you can also notice the clothes against your skin. Maybe you can sense areas of tension in the body, parts that feel tighter and areas that feel more relaxed. And just spend a minute or two just becoming really curious about your present moment, experience of body. Not thinking about your body, not looking down at your body from your head, but inhabiting your body, and by doing so, just receiving your experience of being a body. And there may be a kind of general sense of the body, like the space of the body may feel a certain way. It may feel tired, may feel restless, it may feel peaceful and relaxed. Just notice this general sense of how the body is, and then become curious about that. What does it feel like to be tired, to be relaxed, to be restless? How do you actually know in your immediate experience that that’s the case? And let’s see if we can adopt an attitude of just welcoming and allowing the body just as it is. There’s no particular way it needs to be right now in order to meditate. We don’t need to be experiencing anything in particular. Our meditation is just an opportunity to embrace the reality of what’s actually happening. So just stay with this intimate contact with your body, sitting here, breathing it, and it can help to find a place in the body to gather your awareness, to call home for the next little while. And a good place to do this is the breath moving in the belly. So situate yourself in your belly. Be in your belly. And just by being in your belly, you can receive the sensations of breathing without any need for ideas of focus, concentration, effort. What effort does it take to just notice something that’s happening? So rest in your belly and just witness the movement of the breath. The way the belly rises on the inhale, falls back on the exhale. And just resting here in the belly, we can see how much detail we can experience in the breath. Noticing the texture of each breath, whether it feels rough or smooth, jagged, stilted, silky. We can notice the length of the breath. We can follow the breath all the way from the moment the inhale begins to the point where the inhale fades to the exhale and then linger for a moment in that short gap, the pause between exhale and inhale, giving our whole hearted presence to this very simple experience of breathing. This is something that our nervous systems appreciate, allows them to settle. And this simplification of experience, encouraging the awareness to just rest with breathing, with body, with our immediate experience, this can be profoundly settling. And as we allow the mind and the body to settle here with the breath, this doesn’t mean we need to block any other experience out. Sounds, thoughts, emotions, other sensations will come and go entirely of their own accord and there’s nothing we need to do with them, we don’t need to chase them away, we don’t need to wrap ourselves around them. We can just include everything that’s happening and just remain centred. With the breath in the belly, with our home base. And no doubt your mind is continuing to produce thoughts, which is what minds are for, it’s what they do. This isn’t wrong, this isn’t a problem. We need to avoid making war with the mind in our meditation practice and in our lives. So each time that we discover that we’ve become disconnected from the body, from the breath, we can just notice this, take a moment to pause, to relax the body and to come back to the simplicity of breathing. And this doesn’t mean the mind needs to stop. It can carry on in the background with whatever is occupying it. Our job is just to choose what we emphasise and to make this shift away from getting lost in thought into this embodied awareness that has no story, no drama. So we’ll just spend a couple more minutes like this, continuing to just rest in the belly. Notice the breathing in your direct experience, not the idea of the breath, but the moment-to-moment movement of your body and all the ways the breath is animating your body, moving your belly. And we’ll spend the last couple of minutes in silence practicing in this way.