Presence, awareness, attitude, breath

Entry into the practice is really just a kind of emphasizing of certain aspects of experience over others. So we kind of lean away from the more abstract realms of experience that involve higher order concepts, stories, plans, future, past. We lean towards the embodied reality that's here right now. And to help us find that embodied reality, we can visit a few places in our body to sort of flesh out this terrain. Landing into the seat, feeling where your body meets the ground. Noticing how this meeting with the ground kind of underpins the rest of the body in some way, supports it, allows it to rest. Just tuning in for areas of tension in the body without the explicit agenda to make them go away. Just like surveying the scene. Maybe the forehead carrying tension, the jaw, the shoulders, the belly. What does it actually feel like, these regions of tightness? Noticing the parts of the space of the body that feel a bit smoother, a bit more relaxed, there's a bit more ease. And then just tuning into the breath for a moment initially just with this intention to notice what's already here, what the breath is doing, without any sense of control. Is it shallow? Is it deep, is it smooth, is it jagged? Where is it felt most clearly in your body? We can also just open to whatever experiences in your body are most prominent right now. What's asking for attention? Is there some place that attention keeps getting sucked back to? We can care for these experiences too and give them space without letting them dictate where attention goes—to be free to bring awareness in an intentional way. So having tuned into your body in this way, it might feel like your body takes up a bit more space in your awareness. If that's the case, just notice that. That's interesting, isn't it? The sense of the body, the sense of this aspect of experience is a little bit kind of fuller, higher resolution. We can use this higher resolution display of the body to notice as well how our emotional atmosphere, how our mood is showing up in an embodied way. We can sense how we are feeling this morning emotionally. This question may elicit an answer from the mind, but if we ask a little bit deeper—how do we know? How can we be sure? Then we need to look here in the space of the body. Normally we miss that part out and just respond with some easy answer. We can sense if there's some obvious emotion, it'll be showing up in some physical sensations, maybe in the chest or the belly or the head or the throat. A tightness, a movement, a burning, a glow, a buoyancy. And whether or not there is anything obvious going on emotionally, we can always tune in to the kind of background, felt sense of our embodied experience that reflects our emotional state. And if we feel neutral, then we can tune in to this sense of neutral. It's not nothing, a kind of subtle spaciousness, maybe slightly slippery or hard to grasp. We can't really grasp it, but we can become subtle in our awareness, listen a bit more deeply, and pick up this background vibration or texture. This deep and thorough checking in allows us to be in more intimate contact with our embodied experience, and it forms the basis for our practice. If we skip this part out, we're liable to be sort of trampling over certain aspects of ourselves, certain aspects of experience. Having checked in like this, we can take a moment to establish the attitudes that are going to serve us well in our practice. Most fundamentally, this allowing and welcoming of experience, letting go of the very natural attempt to replace some experience with some other, more desired experience, acknowledging that to allow and welcome experience is actually the most helpful and kindest thing that we can do to make peace with ourselves, to make peace with conflict, even if conflict is our experience. So this attitude of allowing and welcoming can be there in the very way that we are aware, the very awareness that holds the body right now, that holds the movement of the breath, the other very many sensations that are always happening in the body. This sense of allowing is here in the very relation to those sensations and implied in this sense of allowing is kindness, compassion, goodwill. We can just tune into this a bit more explicitly as well, tuning into our very natural wish to be well, allowing this wish to be kind of spacious. So it's not like, "I wish this or that for myself specifically." It's just, "Yeah, I'm on my team, I've got my own back." And this practice is part of that, part of a demeanor of kindness. We can also establish the attitude of curiosity and kind of not knowing into our meditation. We bring our preconceptions about experience—what we know about the objective world gets inappropriately smuggled into our relationship with the subjective world. But the rules are a little bit different here. The subjective world is mysterious, sort of wafer-thin, but at the same time vast and spacious, groundless, yet kind of free and much more malleable, much more open to different perspectives, different ways of experiencing. And it's important to be clear about this in our practice. We're not here to reinforce some already known truth. We're here to discard stories and narratives and experience the mystery. We don't really know what it is to breathe, what it is to be alive. We can bring curiosity from this place of freshness, divine ignorance. So, having checked in and having established how we want to practice these attitudes that we can come back to whenever we lose them, whenever we find that we're practicing in a very limited way or a dry way—so having established all of this, we can tune into the breath. This would be a very different experience than if we just immediately tuned into the breath as we sat down to meditate. We can be open to receiving the breath in a fuller way. The breath has different levels that we can experience it from. It's possible to kind of just encapsulate the breath in a slightly abstract idea, constructed from some vague physical sensations, but kind of bundled into a solid thing that we're not really then paying attention to in a curious way. Or more fruitfully, we allow awareness to become subtle, we allow awareness to become wide and take in the whole body. We tune into this spacious sense of the body that feels a little less anatomical than our kind of everyday conception of the body, and is more just a realm of experience, a field of sensation, and we just kind of soak awareness into this space. And then we watch and we feel as this space pulsates, undulates, moves, flows with the movement of the breath. So we're recognizing how the breath kind of meets every part of the body. We let go of the anatomical map—toes, fingers, legs, etc.—and just sense this whole space, can feel how the breath animates this whole space. We can get very interested in not so much sort of asking questions and learning facts about this space, but more interested in how this can be experienced on deeper and subtler levels and freer levels. If we can find this curiosity that has this desire to explore—how can the breath be felt in these ways, these more liberating ways, these more subtle ways? Then staying with the breath and staying close to the breath can be something that we want to do and that we can even enjoy, rather than something that we're doing because we feel like we should for some reason. And then a centeredness and a relaxed focus can emerge from this genuine engagement. So we soak awareness into every square millimetre of the space of the body. We establish our desire to really allow experience to reveal itself, knowing that this attitude is a kind of kindness. And we allow ourselves to experience the body, the breath, our life, as if we don't already have it all boxed in and understood. And we'll just spend the last couple of minutes practicing like this.