Tag: sensations

The Insubstantial Self (Guided Meditation)

The ordinary, lower case “s”, relative self is vividly appearing, yet empty. This emptiness is a lack of inherent, substantial, permanent existence. Seeing through the self means to notice that it isn’t fixed, solid, or permanent and doesn’t have to be where you are coming from. This practice investigates the ways in which you feel the self — body sensation, sense of location, thoughts, inner coach/critic, dialogue, or self image. Then you will look closely and see that there isn’t any substantiality to this, that the mind is gluing together sensations and treating them as solid. You’ll find that the self is ultimately unfindable. Once you reach a sense of conviction here there will be a lightness and relief.

You will also explore how the sensations, thoughts, and emotions don’t encapsulate your being and instead notice how when you put all these aside you are left with either a Presence or Absence, which points to a knowing awareness — an awareness that knows itself by itself, without having to be coming from the small self.

Note: these practices can be somewhat destabilising or lead to a sense of disconnection. If you are feeling under-resourced or unbalanced, please be cautious. If you find the practice leads to disconnection then re-ground yourself by noticing present moment sensations and doing normal activities. Reach out or speak with a qualified teacher if you experience continued difficulty.

There is a short talk at the beginning. Guided meditation begins at 3:15.

Sounds as Waves in an Ocean of Awareness

Take the view that all sounds are like waves emerging out of an ocean of awareness. Each sound is known the moment it arises, by this awareness — the sensation and the knowing are inseparable. By tuning in to this quality of sound, you can take the view that all sounds are washing over you, known as expressions of this spacious awareness. Then you will turn towards internal experience and see that thoughts, emotions, and the sense of self also all arise within spacious awareness. Seeing this allows all internal experiences to be there, held within this bright ocean of awareness. This leads to a sense of being deeply connected with everything that arises, fully allowing all of these expressions to be there, while not having to be the self that it is happening to. Instead, you can simply be the spacious ocean of awareness.

Balancing the Energy of the Mind

Meditation presents the opportunity to cultivate both calm and clarity at the same time. This leads to a quality of mind that is, compared to ordinary states of mind, more alert while also being more relaxed. This is a state of deep resource. It allows for nervous system regulation and being connected and engaged. From this collectedness of mind, craving and aversion arises much less intensely. In this practice you will use the sensations of the breath at the belly as a way to ground and settle, allowing experience to simplify. Then you can bring in the practice of focusing on the inhale to bring more energy, drawing upwards; while using the exhale to relax and settle, drawing energy downwards.

Attuning to Emotions (Guided Meditation)

Emotions are essential to being human, yet we often aren’t taught emotional literacy or provided models for feeling into and skilfully respond to our emotions. This practice works through different levels of experience — sensations, mind states, and emotions — in order to understand internal experience. Beginning with sensations, you will notice where there is body sensation in terms of warmth, coolness, pressure, texture, tingling, or vibration. Then you will look at mind states: boredom, curiosity, focus, clarity, dullness, sleepiness, etc. You’ll then tune into emotions and see where hearing the words of certain emotions resonates with you — feeling into anger, sadness, happiness, calm, strength, or fear, and the many variations and flavours of these feeling states.

Liberating Positive Emotions

Note: This practice invites you to bring up positive emotions, which can at times also have the effect of bringing up anything that is not that emotion. Be gentle and cautious.

Positive emotions, when freed, become boundless and unconditional. In meditation practice, we can intentionally bring to mind love, compassion, joy, peacefulness, trust, gratitude, kindness, friendliness, humour etc. by intentionally recalling a situation when we felt that way. Through feeling into the felt experience of that emotion, we can notice that the sensations felt in the body, such as warmth, openness, uplifting, groundedness, or connection, don’t have a solid, inherent existence but rather are insubstantial and changing. We can also sense that the self that feels the emotion is insubstantial. The emotion is vividly expressing, without needing to have a solid core, or a separately existing self that is feeling it. This frees up the emotion to be fully expressed and fully felt. The emotions then transform and become boundless and unconditional — compassion for the suffering of all beings, including yourself equally; boundless love for all others; or a deep gratitude for being able to be part of this complex dance of life.

Liberating Emotions (Guided Meditation)

Note: this practice involves intentionally working with challenging emotions. If you are currently not feeling grounded and resourced, you may want to choose a different meditation. If at any point during this practice you feel overwhelmed or disconnected from experience, open your eyes, come out of the meditation, and do something that you find grounding such as gentle movement, walking, eating, or resting.

When related to in skilful ways, all emotions become part of the practice. Here you are asked to bring to mind a challenging emotion of medium intensity (around 5 out of 10), such as frustration, tiredness, sadness, anger, or shame. You can recall a situation or memory when this emotion was activated, using the visualisation in order to bring the experience forward more clearly. You are then invited to look closely at the sensations and thoughts associated with the emotion, seeing them as insubstantial. After searching, you’ll find that there is no substantial, permanent core of the emotion that is inherently existing. You can also search for the self that feels the emotion, also coming to the conclusion that this is ultimately unfindable. In this forge of emptiness, the emotion may then shift and transform, allowing anger to shift into strength, sadness into tenderness, frustration into clarity, tiredness into deep rest, and shame into integrity.

Releasing Clinging

When we experience painful sensation, we generally resist it, want it to change, or otherwise have some form of craving and aversion. This is wanting things to be different from how they are, either by trying to get something better, or by trying to get rid of what is present. The way of non-clinging releases this resistance. You can notice the sense of clinging through detecting contraction, stuckness, or resistance in the body, then you can release this by opening, softening, and allowing. Be present with this experience exactly as it is. This will open up a different way of being, with more lightness, openness, and freedom. Note that this is equanimity in regards to the primary experience in the moment, which still allows for taking action as appropriate to the situation.

Beholding Awareness (Guided Meditation)

In becoming aware of the sense of self, it greatly helps to have a practice that enables shifting out of habitual modes into a more open and spacious awareness. One key to this is noticing the awareness, rather than objects of awareness, which creates a shift towards allowing. The self is known by this awareness (as well as body sensations, thoughts, and emotions). This beholding awareness can know the self as it arises and passes, as the sense of solidity increases and decreases. This also helps us tap into the sense of completeness of being awareness — where there is nothing missing and no self-deficiency.

This practice begins with belly breathing while counting the length of inhales and exhales, moving from equal duration, to longer exhales. This is a powerful practice for quickly calming and grounding.

The Body Knows Itself

This practice weaves together two threads: relaxing and calming the body by gently bringing attention to the whole body space; and knowing the body from the body. Awareness is effortlessly already aware, without you doing anything or needing to make awareness happen. So too does the body know itself — the body space is filled with bright, clear awareness. In order to get a sense of this, you allow the body and mind to settle through calming and collecting, then tune in to how it feels to inhabit the body, from the body. Allow awareness to drop down into the body space and behold itself.

Sit With Dignity (Guided Meditation)

Sit upright, with care and respect. Sit with dignity. When you sit in meditation practice, you dignify yourself, the community, and the practice. Recognising that each passing moment is constantly changing, you open yourself to the uniqueness of each experience. This body, this breath. The body calms and eases into comfort and stability. As you sit, poised and balanced, you begin to notice this palpable sense of presence, a quality of knowing awareness that is immovable, imperturbable, and fully awake to each passing moment.