insight – Kynan Tan Meditation

Transforming Emotions (Guided Meditation)

NOTE: In this practice you will intentionally invite an emotion to come forward. It’s best to bring up something that isn’t the most intense or strongest. Choose something that feels of medium intensity and manageable for your current state. The practice begins with 10 minutes of grounding and settling. If at any point you feel either overwhelmed, or disconnected and spaced out, return back to a grounding practice, or stop the meditation.

Emotions are a dimension of experience that occupies a space between physical and mental. These are felt experiences that are tangibly real, yet ephemeral and elusive. It is emotional experiences that make being a human both worth rich and wondrous, as well as difficult and oppressive. Yet we often don’t fully open to the emotional dimension. When we feel into emotions fully and allow them to be there, they will shift on their own. Emotions cease being static or stuck and instead become liquid, flowing, changing experiences that unfold the richness of being alive. Through exploring the emptiness of the emotional experience, it will often transform into an essential quality: sadness becomes love and compassion; anger reveals strength; frustration turns into clarity.

Let be (Guided Meditation)

The one spiritual truth is to “let be”. However, most people need some technique, practice, and system to figure out how to do this. In this practice, you will bring an intention of affectionate curiosity to the whole body space. Working with the body is particularly helpful here, as the body is so tied up in our sense of self and our habitual patterns, plus it also helps us get out of our heads. Occasionally asking “can I be with this?”, you’ll notice when there is resistance or trying to change the experience, allowing you to soften and relax into the unfolding present moment experience. Finally you will notice that who you are at a deeper level is not these sensations, but the awareness that is knowing, clear, lucid, and still.

Pointing Out Awareness (Guided Meditation)

You experience many sensations and contents of awareness: sounds, images, body sensations, feelings, emotions, thoughts. You can observe these and be with them. But these sensations are not you. You can have an emotion, but you aren’t an emotion. An emotion can’t fully define you. Your sense of experiencing goes way beyond this. Thoughts might reference a sense of self, but there is awareness that knows the thoughts and knows the spaces between thoughts. When the mind settles, you can notice the awareness that knows these contents. You are this awareness that is like a wide open sky. Just as the sky is more than the clouds, awareness is more than its contents. This awareness is continuous and spacious. It is a bright, clear, lucid knowing. Rest as this awareness that is completely whole and unbroken.

Practice: 15 minutes samadhi, 15 minutes pointing out instructions on awareness that is aware of itself.

Interconnectedness and Non-Separation (Guided Meditation)

So much of being a human is dominated by a sense of separation. There’s an underlying sense of being an individual entity that is somehow outside of the environment. Yet when looked at closely, your being is intimately interwoven with all of existence. You are made of the same minerals as the Earth, a home to bacteria and micro-organisms, your body is sustained by the air and sunlight. Each person you know has affected your existence, and you have affected them, in ways that can be pointed to directly. By resting into a sense of non-separation, you can find a prior sense of relatedness; a sense of the field of relation that comes before separation.

Can I be with this? (Guided Meditation)

Duration: 30:07

Letting be is a core principle of Buddhist meditation (and perhaps a key tenet of all spiritual practices). To let be means to be with what is experienced, exactly as it is, with no need to change it. In this meditation, you will be guided to bring a curious, welcoming awareness to whatever is arising, gradually including sounds, sights, body sensations, thoughts, and emotions. The key here is welcoming any resistance. To aid this you can visualise resistance by seeing it as a Part of your mind and letting it take a form, or imagining placing it beside you. You can also use the trick of taking whatever is causing difficulty as unchanging — the one permanent thing in the universe — as a way to release the urge to change. Finally you will explore the felt sense of your whole body in this moment as the unfolding experience that is more than words and somehow in excess of what is present. Ask yourself: can I be with this, exactly as it is, with no need to change it?

Download link.

The Body is Space

YouTube | alternate | audio only (31:33)

The body itself is made of atoms, which are mostly empty space. You can find a sense of freedom and refuge in the body through tuning in to spaciousness that arises within the body. This practice explores ways of opening to a wide-open, vast, spacious awareness. First you will allow the body to settle by connecting with the breath and then expanding to include the whole body in awareness. From here you can tune into the shifting, changing, flowing, impermanent sense of the body sensations, noticing how the body is open, empty, transparent, and light. Tuning in to the sense of space in the body, you can open to this sense of lightness and openness, and then opening to the sense of a vast, spacious awareness that holds the whole body, and all of experience, bringing tremendous relief.