Breathing into the space of the body

So let’s just make contact with our bodies as they are in this moment. Finding your seat, finding where your body meets the ground, and just using this connection to make it clear to yourself that you’re sitting here in this body this morning, in this place, and just checking in with your body this morning. Noticing what’s prominent in your experience, noticing how tense the body is and which areas are tense, just meeting them with your awareness, noticing the different temperatures of different parts of the body, noticing the overall sense of the body, the kind of felt sense of the whole body space. And there might be a word for that, like tired or restless or relaxed. Or you might just stay with the immediate sense of whatever kind of vibration or texture you can detect in your immediate experience of your body. And just opening as well to notice whatever your emotional experiences right now. And that might be present in this very felt sense of the body. You might see how the mood is reflected in the body, or how emotions are manifesting as heat, tightness, expansiveness, warmth in different parts of the body. Noticing this and just extending a warm welcome to your physical and emotional body. Just how it is this morning. And then we’re going to begin to tune into the breath. You may already be very aware of the movement of your breath in your body, but we can just centre ourselves here to begin with. We’ll just meet the breath as it is, without changing it, letting it just reveal itself to us, and staying sensitive to the breath throughout the whole movement. You might really situate yourself in your belly to do this. So you’re resting back in your belly, not kind of looking down for some idea of the breath from the head. So just receiving the breath in the belly as you stay with the whole cycle, from the beginning of the inhale all the way to the top and all the way back down to the little empty space between the end of the exhale and the beginning of the new inhale. You may notice some parts of this cycle, some sort of phases of this cycle that don’t feel as smooth, that feel a little bit more shaky or jerky. We can just bring awareness to this and invite a real gentleness into the breath and a real subtlety, smoothness. Sometimes if the breath gets a little bit more gentle, a little bit quieter, we can iron out some of this shakiness and jerkiness and it’s easier to be present with the breath and to allow the breath to become more nourishing, more harmonising it, and also beginning to lean towards an appreciation of the breath and the way that we’re encouraging it to be subtle and smooth. It’s like coming out of a sense of wanting to appreciate and enjoy and really get the most out of this simple act of breathing. Like someone carving a sculpture from wood would appreciate and enjoy the wood and find the shape that the wood wants to make, find the way that your breath wants to be received and the way that it wants to move it. And then just opening your awareness a little to include a sense of the whole body again, the whole space of the body. It might help to just visit some sensations in different parts of the body, bringing awareness to the temperature of your feet and your hands, subtle tingles there, regions of tension in the face, jaw, the forehead, clothes against the skin, the shape of the body, the posture. Having kind of collected these sensations and these experiences, we can just let them be one experience. Notice that they’re not really a collection of different experiences, but just a kind of particular movement, configuration of the space of the body. Again, tuning to that kind of texture or that kind of vibration in the background of this space. It might feel like an intense kind of vibration if there’s agitation or restlessness, might feel quieter and subtle if there’s more relaxation, peace. And either way is totally fine. What we want to do now is we want to really remain sensitive to this sense of the space of the body as we inhale, as we meet the inhalation, and just notice how it’s responding to this influx of energy into the body, influx of breath. There’s usually some sense of brightening, of energising, of lifting, of buoyancy, it. And so our awareness may be centred on the movement of the breath, but the whole space of the body is in our peripheral awareness, so we don’t lose it. In fact, we’re more interested in these qualities of buoyancy, lift, energy. However that’s felt in your experience, you’re more interested in that in the space of the body than becoming narrowly focused on the breath. To whatever extent you’re able to tune to this sense of brightening in the body, you can just appreciate it and enjoy it, feed it with appreciation. Appreciation is perfect food for the good things that come from meditation. Just enjoying, really opening to any sense of lightness, lift, pleasant energization. And so as we tune to the breath, in particular the inhale, for this sense of energization, we can also tune to the exhale and look out for a sense of kind of smoothing out of the wrinkles in the space of the body, a kind of harmonising of the space of the body. So the inhale brings energy, brightness, vibrancy. The exhale kind of smooths this all out, bringing more stillness or harmony. Spend a couple more minutes practising like this. For the last couple of minutes, you might just want to release any sense of effort, just resting awareness in the space of the body in as easy and effortless a way as is possible. And as we prepare to transition out of formal meditation and into whatever awaits us today, you don’t have to completely lose the sense of the space of the body. You can see if a sense of the anatomical shape that you’re used to your body taking up legs, hands, head, etc. See if that can kind of coexist with this sense of a space. A field can feel like the space of the body is a kind of smudgy charcoal cloud. And the anatomical shape of the body is a kind of sharper pencil drawing within that. We might want to have a mini practice a couple of times today, just to come back to this sense of the space of the body. Such a useful meditative aid.