Meditation practice can be finding methods to get out of your own way. The sense of self and operating as an individual self, while really useful in daily life, is a limiting factor on your sense of existence. By dropping out of your habitual patterns, more opens up. This practice focuses on relaxing and settling through tuning in to the present moment and then following the sensations of the breath. While doing this, you allow all other sensations to come and go in the background of spacious awareness. Then finally you will drop the breath or let it fade into the background and simply be — allowing all the body sensations, sounds, thoughts, and feelings to come and go, without getting caught up. The universe continues on, vividly appearing, without you having to do anything at all.
Tag: relaxation
Inviting Relaxation By Doing Less
In this practice you will be gently guided to relax through connecting with the body, feeling into each body part and inviting relaxation. This relaxation is a kind of doing less — there was already some tension or tightness and you are simply intending to release this. You can also relax *around* any tension you find. This relaxing is a mode of allowing the sensations and feelings to be exactly as they are, reducing any clinging or aversion. Finally you will check in with how you are relating to the experience and if there is any resistance, embracing and allowing this. When resistance is fully allowed, it too will shift, soften, or change in some helpful way.
Thoughts and the Thinking Process
This 26 minute guided meditation that explores one way of seeing thoughts and the thinking process. This is an insight practice that is intended to increase clarity of this specific part of experience. Here we look at how thoughts often appear as either mental images or mental talk, finding where they are located in space and the felt sense of experiencing these different kinds of thoughts. We are unconcerned with their content, seeing them as a process of the mind that doesn’t need to be stopped or controlled but instead can just be allowed to happen without pushing away or holding on.
Version 1 – 26 minutes. this meditation doesn’t include any śamatha/samadhi/concentration practice, so you may want to add this yourself at the beginning.
Version 2 – 40 minutes. This is a longer version of the Thinking Process meditation that includes śamatha practice at the beginning.
Scanning the Body for Subtle Sensations
This recording provides some ways into the Stage 5 practice of The Mind Illuminated. In this stage, you can use the subtle sensations of the body as a way to increase sensory clarity. By looking for sensations that are hard to find and at the edge of your sensory range, it heightens the degree of sensory clarity, which then increases the overall power of mindfulness. This practice is best done once there is some stability of attention so that it is relatively easy to stay with the sensations in the body. You may find that at first this is tiring and leads to dullness or vagueness, but over time and with repeated practice it is likely to help increase the degree of sensory clarity.