One of the very powerful and helpful questions we might ask ourselves in the midst of being stressed,
Overwhelmed,
Not coping very well in a moment,
One of the most helpful questions I find is this,
Is to ask yourself Is the world busy or is it my mind?
And simply notice,
Sit back and notice the world around you.
And your mind.
And you can interestingly look at the world From many different angles you can pretend you're on the moon and look at the world.
You can be even on another galaxy and you'll probably find that you cannot even see the world from there.
And be an observer of this world.
And then examine what's happening in your mind.
When you are in midst of this situation.
Is your mind completely still?
Or not?
And this is a leading question of course because when we are dealing with crisis,
When we are in a very stressed overwhelmed.
Whatever it might be situation.
The mind is nothing but still.
So the purpose of this short exercise is to regain Seeing our mind as still.
And again we've got to our disposal our wonderful imagination and we can Firstly,
Notice all the things available to us in that moment,
Starting with sensations in our body,
Hence the body scan meditation.
But,
In a moment we can just simply notice one thing,
Which is,
Quite often.
.
.
Noticing the feet.
What the sensations are there so what are they resting against if we're wearing shoes noticing if we can sense that If we have socks on,
Noticing the elastic around the ankle for example.
Any sensations?
Just that.
And then.
.
.
Move from noticing our feet,
For example,
To just noticing our breathing.
And without trying to changing in any way,
Noticing simply the air that we receive and the air that we breathe out.
Quality of it like for example temperature Maybe the one that we breathe in is dry and we breathe out moisture or vice versa.
Just noticing and saving grace.
Is in noticing what is present.
We can then move on to visual noticing.
Noticing one thing that's close to us.
I often like very much doing this exercise.
Pretend that you are an alien out of space just landed in your body and you're looking at your hand as if you've never seen that hand before.
It's very strange.
Sensations.
Meditation in and of itself,
Nearly.
When you're just trying to look at something,
Imagining you've never seen it,
That you're seeing it for the first time.
Everything changes.
Coming back to that question.
Is my mind busy?
And slowly directing our senses to just that one thing,
We get ourselves out of that busyness of the mind.
And we can be as creative as we want,
For example.
We can imagine we are on the moon looking down at ourselves doing whatever we're doing at the moment.
That is a very strange,
In a weird way,
In a good way exercise.
You can pretend right now you are sitting on the moon with a beak.
Telescope and you through that telescope zoom in on the town you're in finding your street and your house and the room you're in right now watching yourself There is something beautiful and almost peculiar about this exercise and very soon we start being that person we're watching we leave the moon but the purpose is stay on the moon go back and do it again and again and stay Stay a little bit longer next time on the moon.
And watch yourself doing what you're doing.
Maybe even if you're sleeping,
Trying to sleep.
Noticing watching yourself from the moon in your bed trying to sleep coming back to them over and over and over.
Playing with your wonderful imagination.
