Holding everything in compassion

We can start by just sensing, in whatever way is accessible, sensing the body, just allowing yourself to really sink into your body. And you can sink all the way to the lower body, the parts that are in contact with something solid. And just noticing and being very clear that your body is fully supported by the ground. You might even acknowledge that right now the whole planet is underneath you. And just really checking in with your body. You’ll notice certain sensations or regions of the body that are more obvious than others. There may be some experience in your body that’s just more prominent, calling out for attention, welcoming these sensations, and also tuning into the kind of background quality of the body, the space of the body, noticing the kind of texture of that space, the felt sense of it, noticing how it’s coloured and flavoured by our emotional state. There’s tiredness or restlessness or peace or joy, sadness or anxiety. Notice how this shows up in the very sense of the kind of fabric of the body. You might sense it as a kind of background vibration of this space of the body over which there will be very many foreground vibrations, sensations. So with this felt sense of the body, we’re going to spend a couple of minutes just really affirming our intention, compassion, and listening and honesty and care. You might do that by recognising that inherent in your desire to meditate is kindness and care and compassion. We come to practice because we want something beautiful for ourselves. If we’re really honest, even if sometimes practice comes from a sense of should. Underneath that, there’s some kind intention. There’s some reason that we bring ourselves to practice. It’s a beautiful reason. We want to be more at home in our bodies, want to feel more free, want to understand our inner life more. We want to connect more with compassion, with love, joy, whatever resonates. Spend a moment just feeling this, the goodness in this intention. And we can feel in this intention, there’s desire. I want this. I want to understand myself. I want to connect more deeply with compassion. I want to explore the mystery of life, whatever it is, feeling that desire and feeling the goodness and the kindness in that desire. See if you can encourage that feeling, that goodwill quality of Metta, loving kindness that’s inherent in that desire, in that wish. See if you can sort of filter that out, breathe with it, let it fill out your being. Whatever other voices there are in your psyche this morning and whatever tension or resistance or numbness, can we be really clear, more true than all of that? At a deeper level than all of that, there’s this fundamental goodwill, this ground of matter we can just breathe with that. Like, each breath just sort of rubs it into our bones. Spend a couple of minutes breathing with this sense of matter; you can sense that the breath kind of carries compassion, carries love and care. And we can see how this colors and affects how the body feels. As we really rest into this atmosphere of matter, of kindness, of compassion, slowly that becomes the lens through which we see the body, the heart, mind, so grounded in this matter and this compassion. We can tune in again to the body and the heart, and we can sit with ourselves with this quality of deep listening and respect and honesty, with this compassion as a bizarre foundation. It’s like it’s easier to genuinely want to know how we’re doing, to genuinely want to know those parts that are calling out for care and attention. So you can just tune into your experience, this sense of deep friendliness, and you can tune in particularly to your heart, doing so with a lot of gentleness and a lot of patience. Whatever your experience is as you attempt to tune into your heart, it’s like we want to listen to that with this honesty and this depth, like you’re listening to your best friend. Your initial experience as you tune into your heart may include some amount of numbness or tension, constriction. We can just hold this in this atmosphere of compassion and kindness. Not going in there with the chisel to try and crack things open, but just, hello, numbness. Hello, constriction. Welcome. What do you need now? We want to start to really breathe with our hearts, to breathe with whatever we find here. So you might imagine that the breath is sort of this feather that with the inhale brushes the heart in one direction and exhale caresses it in the other direction, using the breath to just become more intimate with your own heart, to soothe and to care for whatever’s present there this morning. And so there’s your heart, which you’re practicing this deep sensitivity and attunement towards. There’s the breath, which is sort of soothing and opening and kind of massaging your experience. There’s this background of compassion. If we can allow ourselves to rest back into it, we can really hold everything with this kind of warmth and this acceptance, really emphasizing this background of compassion. Before we prepare to transition out of this meditation practice, to whatever extent you feel in touch with this background atmosphere of compassion, see if you can notice the sense that it’s kind of just there. It’s not something that we make, that we create. It’s not really something that we imagine or that we build. It’s like a certain frequency that’s always in the air. And all we do is we kind of tune to that frequency until we can feel it in a more clear and direct way. So we might just have this as an intention for a day or for some other period of time to see if it’s possible to tune into this frequency of compassion at different times throughout the day, and notice how it colours things, how it flavours things in a beautiful way.