Basic Mindfulness Meditation

Okay. And so as we prepare to transition into meditation, just let this transition be gentle, let it be low drama. So often when we do something like meditate, we can bring in just through the act of assuming a certain posture and having a certain intention, we can bring in all sorts of pressure, sense of effort, needing things to be a certain way. And all we’re doing is bringing a little bit more awareness, intimacy, curiosity, honesty to our experience. That doesn’t really need the forehead to furrow and the shoulders to tense up. We can just be soft in the body it. And just to find the right intention for practice as well, can we orientate ourselves towards compassion, presence, curiosity? We can let go a little bit of ideas about focus and concentration. We want to be wholeheartedly here, to experience ourselves as we appear moment to moment, and so we can tune into our bodies. Just noticing where you’re meeting the chair, the cushion, whatever’s underneath you. Finding your way more deeply into inhabiting your body this morning, how can you get a sense, not like you’re looking down at your body from somewhere up in your head? That’s not really how consciousness works. It’s not located in your head, and from there it sort of regards everything else from afar. Can you inhabit your body, be there, fill your body out with awareness? And as you do this, you’ll meet the very many sensations that make up your experience of your body. Subtle tingles in the feet and hands that we don’t really notice until we look. The sense of the clothes against the skin, the many areas that feel some tension or even some discomfort. The many areas that feel a sense of ease, a sense of space, and the movement of the breath animating the body, inflating the belly. Our simple intention is just to receive and meet these sensations, this dynamic, ever-changing experience of your body. To meet this with open arms, you might notice the habit of the mind to categorize, to label, to judge. This experience is a problem, needs to go away. This other experience, maybe I like it, I want it to stay. You might notice that when there’s tension or discomfort, there’s a kind of unwillingness to feel. It might be quite subtle, might be quite obvious. There may be other sensations that feel pleasant, that we enjoy, and very many sensations that don’t even capture our attention because they’re neutral, subtle, uninteresting. So we can welcome and allow and hold with awareness all sensations. So-called pleasant, so-called unpleasant, so-called neutral. We can adopt the kind of poise or the stance that there’s nothing here that needs to be any different right now. We can bring awareness to the emotional flavor of things right now. And we might sense some discernible emotion showing up, perhaps in the form of sensations in the body. We may just be able to tune into the kind of atmosphere, notice how our emotional state, even if it’s relatively neutral, sort of colors and flavors, experience it. And even if the emotional atmosphere is one of not much happening, that’s still something that we can recognize and bring awareness to. That way, developing sensitivity to less obvious emotional states. And again, adopting this attitude, nothing here that needs to change. Welcoming your emotional state right now, just how it is. Meditation is not about replacing our experience with something else. It’s about the way that we meet and hold and care for what’s already here. So with this awareness and this honesty and this kindness toward our experience, we can notice what’s happening, allow it to be there, welcome it, and be interested in it with this foundational attitude. And we can begin to allow awareness to gather again with the breath, perhaps in the body, or if there’s somewhere else that you prefer to rest your awareness, then feel free to rest it there. As we begin to bring that experience, the breath in the belly or whatever else into the foreground, it’s not that we block anything else out. So we can breathe with everything that’s happening, not as a way to remove it, to kind of blank everything else out. That won’t work. We’re simply resting and receiving experience, receiving the breath, receiving the sensations in our bodies. It’s not really a practice of effort. It doesn’t really take effort to just be here and experience what we are actually experiencing. The only kind of effort is just the reapplication of this intention whenever it drops away. Ah, yeah, I want to be here. So you find your way back to the breath, the body, each time your intention frays and you become distracted. So this practice of mindfulness is to bring awareness in an intentional way to our present moment experience and to take care of how that awareness meets experience, the quality of it, infusing our very awareness with compassion and curiosity. So we can really allow our experience to be exactly as it is. And we can be interested, interested enough to look twice or three times or four times and not just settle for the sense of what we already know. This curiosity, this interest, is the antidote to boredom in meditation. If we’re bored, the answer is to become more interested. What is this experience? This moment is completely unique. Can I know it as fully as is possible?