Spacious awareness 30 minutes

We’ll begin by just meeting our bodies with awareness. And a good place to start with this is where your body meets something solid. Feet on the ground, buttocks, legs on whatever they’re on, just turning towards your immediate physical experience of your body. You can just spend a moment making space for whatever’s prominent in your experience of your body, whatever is most calling for your attention, just meeting it, welcoming it. And just noticing as well the general sense of the body—whether the body feels tired, tense, relaxed, restless—and just setting a strong intention to welcome your body, welcome yourself, welcome your experience exactly as it shows up. Nothing needs to be fixed or changed. Just checking in as well with the emotional atmosphere that’s present in your experience. There might be some obvious dominant emotion, or it might be just a more subtle kind of flavoring or coloring of the space of your experience and the space of your body. And just welcoming this as well, welcoming whatever the mood is. To complete this check-in, just noticing what the mind’s up to—how many thoughts are being produced, what kinds of thoughts are coming up—and just letting the mind do its thing. You don’t need to be disturbed by it. The mind can just carry on doing whatever it thinks it needs to do. As we bring awareness to the body in this moment, having surveyed the conditions that we’re practicing with, we can resolve to include all of these layers of our experience in our practice—not pushing anything to one side, not blocking anything. With that as our foundation, we can begin to open the awareness out to sounds. So just tuning into whatever you can hear. There’s really no need to apply any effort to hear sounds—maybe you can notice that sounds just arrive in your awareness. All you need to do is be here and receive them. With this wide awareness, just allowing sounds to become known to you, allowing them to appear in your awareness, have their moment, and then disappear once again. As you rest and receive the sounds that are happening around you, be very clear that these sounds are just happening all by themselves. There’s nothing that you’re doing to make these experiences happen. Simply by being here, sounds are heard. You can begin to pay some attention to the silence around sounds—the silence between sounds, the silence before sounds, the silence after sounds. You might be able to get the sense of the silence not so much as just an absence of sound, but a kind of presence of its own, a kind of quiet spaciousness. And it’s from this quiet spaciousness that sounds emerge, and it’s back into this quiet spaciousness that they dissolve. You might even sense that the sounds and the silence are not really two different things. The sounds are somehow made of the same stuff as the silence. Just like ripples are made of the pond—the sounds, the ripples, are nothing but a kind of vibration in the pond, the quiet spaciousness of silence. As we tune into the silence, we might notice a sense of more space, a sense that our awareness is growing a little bit more open, a little bit wider. If this is happening, this is just something to notice and appreciate. What we appreciate can grow further. We’re going to continue to rest into this sense of space—this wide-open, receptive awareness. But we’re going to tune in now to the body. Do this from this spacious awareness, just bringing a sensitivity to your moment-to-moment direct experience of physical sensations arising and passing. Noticing the breath moving in the body, noticing the subtle tingles in the fingers and the toes that are always there when we look with the right kind of sensitivity. Noticing the shifting patterns of tension and relaxation in your body, the temperatures, the feeling of clothes against your skin. And noticing that just like sounds, these sensations are just coming and going, just popping into your awareness. There’s nothing that you’re doing to make this experience of the body happen. You can notice the quality of change in these sensations—one moment to the next, always different. Even something seemingly solid, like the pressure of your body against the floor or the cushion or the chair—when you bring this kind of awareness, you notice the constant quality of change, shifting patterns of sensation. You can feel your body sensations like the flicker of light on a screen, ever-changing. You can tune into the screen itself—this spacious awareness that can hold this constant flow of experience. It can be a really frictionless container for the arising and passing of sensations and sounds. You might be able to sense, just like the silence between sounds, the space between and around your body sensations—noticing the kind of medium of the body space, the field of experience itself. And just like the sounds and the silence, the space of the body and the flickering sensations that play within it are not really two different things. You can just feel this changing play of sensation as ripples, vibrations, movements within this wide-open space. So we’re just allowing ourselves to rest back into this open awareness, and just welcoming within that space the body, the heart, the mind—showing up as it does in this ever-changing play of sensation. It’s like in each moment, our bodies are created afresh from this play of movement. There’s nothing really solid and enduring in our direct experience—just this ever-changing flow of life moving through our awareness. We’ll just spend another couple of minutes in silence, allowing this flow, welcoming this flow, and resting as this spaciousness that holds it all.