Check in with your body.
Are you in as comfortable of a position as possible?
Allow yourself to be just a bit more comfortable.
Either sitting in a chair or lying down on the bed or the floor.
Inside or outside.
Allow the weight of your body to settle downwards,
Down towards the earth.
Take a few conscious breaths.
Inhale and exhale.
And now take a few deeper breaths.
And let go.
Let go a little bit more with each breath.
Each out breath,
Let go.
Inhale,
Curiosity.
Exhale,
Judgment.
Allow your breath to settle and find its own natural rhythm.
Your breath is breathing itself.
Try not to interfere with this process and notice how your body moves in response to your breath.
Your chest expanding and relaxing.
Your belly rising and falling.
If your breath is affected in any way by your illness or your pain,
Then simply noting this with a kind,
Gentle awareness is perfect.
Try and let go of any ideas about how you think this ought to be.
And just rest with an awareness of how things actually are for you in each moment.
Moments unfolding into other moments.
Sometimes it can be helpful to include an image with a sense of your breath.
You can imagine a wave cresting and spilling over the beach's shore,
Turning and flowing back out to sea again.
Notice how the movement of your breath has a similar rhythm.
Or you might have another image that you find evocative and calming.
Please use your imagination in your own way to help your mind and your body to settle around your breath.
Go ahead,
Cozy up to your breath.
Notice how each breath is unique.
How no two breaths are the same.
Notice the texture and quality and the duration of each breath.
If you notice your body or your mind tensing up around your experience,
In this noticing you can gently let go again without judgment.
You get to do this over and over again as many times as you find necessary with a kind,
Gentle awareness.
Perhaps you want to include in your noticing and recognition any pain or discomfort in your body.
Any unease that is within your broad field of awareness.
You may find yourself resisting feelings of pain or discomfort.
This can lead to more unwanted tensions,
More pain,
More discomfort.
You can use your breath to help soften the edges around your pain and allow a tender,
Gentle awareness to permeate the in and the out breaths.
As you use your breath to soften resistance to your pain or discomfort,
You may notice how the experience of pain is in fact a constantly changing mass of different sensations.
Experience how it comes into being and passes away moment by moment.
Now you can broaden out your experience even more to invite in the pleasurable dimensions within your field of awareness.
They might be very subtle,
Such as a tingling in your fingers or some sort of pleasure around your breath.
Or maybe the sun is shining through the window and onto your skin.
In your own way,
Scan through the whole of your experience,
The entirety of this moment.
And notice little moments of pleasure,
No matter how fleeting,
Rising and falling with each moment.
Sparkling,
Dazzling bits of pleasure.
You may notice that each moment of life contains elements that are painful and elements that are pleasurable.
It can be comforting to know that this is the way things are in this world for everyone,
Painful and pleasurable and everywhere in between.
Simply notice a tendency to harden against pain and to grasp after pleasure.
And in your noticing,
Relax back into your broad field of awareness.
Now broaden out your awareness still more to include an awareness of others.
Become aware that all of humanity experiences a mixture of pain and pleasure moment by moment in much the same way that you do.
Yes,
The stories of our lives are unique.
And the range of basic human experiences and emotions are all very similar.
You might connect.
You may notice similarities in hopes and dreams,
Fears and regrets.
No matter where we live,
Our age,
Our skin color or degree of wealth,
We all have hopes and dreams,
Fears and regrets.
And in our lives,
We all have a voice.
In this way,
We can allow our own experience of pain and illness to become a moment of empathy for others who are in pain or who are ill rather than this being a moment of isolation.
All life suffers in one way or another.
And all of life experiences pleasure in one way or another.
In the same way that you imbued your breath with a kind awareness towards your own experiences.
You can also allow kind awareness to permeate your in and your out breaths as you conjure up other experiences.
Maybe you can even get a sense of the whole world breathing.
All of life breathing like waves on the ocean.
Rising and falling.
Allow a sense of the hard edges of separation to soften.
Let go into a sense of all that we share.
Feelings of connection with all life.
As you sit or lie here,
Allow images and words to come to you and allow them to float by.
Just as quickly as these words or images come to you,
Allow them to go.
Rest quietly with your breath.
Moment by moment.
You get to rest with your new found quality of awareness for as long as it feels appropriate for you at this time.
You can also know that these feelings,
Your awareness,
You can return to these feelings at any moment throughout your day.
When you notice jagged edges,
Locate your breath and soften.
Aang.
