Meditation basics - honesty, curiosity & ease

Take a moment to really turn towards your experience this morning of being in your body or being your body. You can connect with the feeling of the buttocks, the legs on the ground, the breath moving your belly, the temperatures in your body in different parts of the body, temperature of your hands, your feet, your nose just opening to whatever sensations in your body are calling for attention this morning. There might be areas of tightness or discomfort and just welcoming these along with everything else, tuning into the general felt sense of your body. So we can name this or that sensation arising in the body here or there, but underneath this or the kind of background to this is a kind of tone of the space of your body, the felt sense of the whole. We might be able to tune into a kind of background of peace or agitation or tiredness, just welcoming this, allowing this to be exactly as it is, and then tuning as well to whatever the emotional state is at the moment, whatever the mood is, and maybe this is showing up in the body and how the body feels. There might be an obvious emotional state. We might be feeling some very clear emotion, some anxiety, some sadness, some excitement, some joy. Well, there may be nothing so obvious and we may need to spend a while with sensitivity, just listening to our hearts and opening to whatever’s subtly there. Even a neutral emotional state is an emotional state that we can recognise and welcome into our practice. It’s in this way we’re deeply listening to our experience, checking in with our physical, emotional, mental life. This acknowledgment of how things actually are is foundational to our practice. We’ll spend another minute or two just welcoming ourselves, welcoming the body as it arises as a field of sensation, moment to moment, welcoming our emotional life as it shifts like weather patterns, welcoming even the background hum of the mind. Without this honesty, without being real about how we are right now, our practice can be disconnected. It can be a process of trying to get somewhere else. Let’s just really deeply allow this intention of honesty, of welcoming ourselves, of meeting our experience as it is. Let that soak into your bones. In a moment, we’re going to turn towards the breath and really welcome and become curious about the experience of breathing. We want to situate that within this context, the context of this deep listening, this deep honesty, so you can begin to tune into your breath and you may have your preferred way to do this. If you would like a suggestion from me, I would encourage you to really rest your awareness in your belly, rest in your centre here and don’t get too hung up on the breath as a physiological phenomenon, as air moving through pipes. We can really tune into the breath as something that the whole body partakes in more. A kind of energetic phenomenon, so we can keep our peripheral awareness opened out to the whole body. Feeling this kind of space within which physical sensations arise, the space of the body. And within that space, the movement of the breath is just received, it’s just witnessed. There’s a kind of movement or pulsating. You can let go of any ideas about focusing on the breath, about concentrating. It doesn’t require focus or concentration or any kind of effort to just be present, just rest awareness in your belly, in your centre, and allow the breath to come to you. If we want to breathe with our whole experience, breathe with everything that’s going on. There’s no need to block out any category of experience. The mind will carry on doing its thing. Our emotional life will be constantly there in the background, sometimes the foreground. Our senses can be open to sounds and in each moment our body is shimmering with sensation. To sit and practice with the breath is not to exclude any of this from awareness. Instead, it’s to choose a centre, to choose where we base ourselves as we allow everything to just carry on exactly as it is. You can really notice when excess effort is being applied. You can notice this as physical tension showing up, maybe in the forehead, the jaw, the chest. There’s a sense of needing to kind of hold the breath, to grasp it. If so, you can just soften your intention and kind of lean back, so to speak, enter a more receptive mode. If our practice is effortful, it’ll be more uncomfortable, feel more difficult. To simply be present with our breath, with our bodies, with our hearts, doesn’t require grasping this experience or that experience, locking down onto one thing or another. It’s much more a kind of opening out. And at times we might find that we start to kind of drift a little bit and maybe we lose that sense of connection to our experience, lose the sense of immediacy. The remedy for this? Not so much effort as curiosity. What is it actually like to be in this body today, breathing? Do we even want to know? Can we find a genuine interest, curiosity, whatever? I may think I know about my experience, I may feel like I know what it is to breathe. I can never really know what it is to take this next breath until I actually show up for it wholeheartedly. So as we continue to just rest, receive our experience, this quality of deeply listening to ourselves, we can notice that at times, it may be helpful to become closer to the breath, to kind of take a step towards the experience of breathing, to savour the shifting textures of the breath, to be really clear about when the inhale begins, when it becomes the exhale, and when the exhale dissolves into the pause before the next round of breath. We can bring our curiosity in this more fine-grained way, exploring the breath. And this can bring us into a brighter sense of presence if we’re feeling vague, drifting away. And at other times, it’ll be more helpful to zoom out a bit with this kind of holistic awareness, just receiving the breath as a movement in the whole body. And this is helpful when we feel tight or small or uncomfortable. We relax back, rest back into this wide inclusive awareness where the breath is just happening. And so we’ll continue practicing for the last few minutes like this, getting close and intimate with the breath when that feels helpful, and resting back in this more receptive mode when we need more space, always with this sense of really welcoming and allowing everything just to be as it is. And in a moment we’ll begin to make the transition from sitting meditation to whatever comes next. In your day, you might just re-establish a sense of location in your body, your location in space and time, feeling the ground beneath you, allowing the body to move in any way it needs to, to stretch or wiggle and see if you can keep this presence, this quality of listening to some extent as we open our eyes and come out of the practice.