The Mountain Meditation Sit with a straight back,
Your head held erect on your neck and shoulders.
Allow the shoulders to fully relax and place your hands on your knees.
Close your eyes.
Bring your attention to the flow of your breathing.
Feeling each in-breath and each out-breath.
Just observing your breathing without trying to change it or regulate it in any way.
Allowing the body to be still.
And sitting with a sense of dignity,
A sense of resolve,
A sense of being complete.
And as you sit here,
Picturing in your mind's eye the most beautiful mountain that you know or have seen or can imagine.
Just howling the image and feeling of this mountain in your mind's eye.
Letting it gradually come into greater focus.
Serving its overall shape,
Its lofty peak high in the sky,
Large space rooted in the rock of the earth's crust.
Noticing how massive it is,
How solid,
How unmoving,
How beautiful both from afar and up close.
Perhaps your mountain has snow at the top and trees on the lower slopes.
Perhaps it has one prominent peak,
Perhaps a series of peaks or a high plateau.
Whatever its shape or appearance,
Just sitting and breathing with the image of this mountain.
Observing it and noticing its qualities.
When you feel ready,
Seeing if you can bring the mountain into your own body so that the body sitting here and the mountain in your mind's eye become one.
You become the mountain rooted in the sitting posture.
Your head becomes the lofty peak supported by the rest of the body.
Your shoulders and arms,
The sides of the mountain,
Your buttocks and legs,
The solid base rooted to the chair or the floor.
Experiencing in your body a sense of uplift from deep within your pelvis and spine with each press as you continue sitting,
Becoming a little more a breathing mountain.
Unwavering in your stillness,
Completely what you are,
Beyond words and thoughts,
A centered rooted presence.
Now as you sit here becoming aware of the fact that as the sun travels across the sky,
The light and shadows and colors are changing moment by moment.
Night follows day and day follows night.
A canopy of stars,
The moon,
Then the sun.
Through it all the mountain just sits.
Experiencing change in each moment,
Constantly changing yet always just being itself.
It remains still as the seasons flow into one and another and as the weather changes moment by moment and day by day.
Calmers abiding all change.
In summer there is no snow on the mountain except perhaps for the very peaks.
In fall the mountain may wear a coat of brilliant fire colors.
In winter a blanket of snow and ice.
In any season it may find itself at times enshrouded in clouds or fog or pelted by freezing rain.
People may come to see the mountain and comment on how beautiful it is or on how it's not a good day to see the mountain.
None of this matters to the mountain which remains at all times its essential self.
Clouds may come and clouds may go.
The mountains' magnificence and beauty are not changed one bit by the way people see it.
Or not by the weather,
Seen or unseen.
In sun or clouds,
Broiling or frigid,
Day or night it just sits,
Being itself.
At times visited by violent storms,
Buffeted by snow and rain and winds of unthinkable magnitude.
Through it all the mountain continues to sit unmoved by the weather,
By what happens on the surface.
And in the same way as we sit in meditation we can learn to experience the mountain.
We can embody the same unwavering stillness and rootedness in the face of everything that changes in our own lives or seconds over hours or years.
In our lives and in our meditation practice we constantly experience the changing nature of mind,
Body and of the outer world.
We have our own periods of light and darkness,
Our moments of color and our moments of drabness.
Certainly we experience storms of varying intensity and violence in the outer world and in our own minds and bodies.
We endure periods of darkness and pain as well as the moments of joy.
Even our appearance changes constantly,
Experiences a weather of its own.
By becoming the mountain in our meditation practice we can link up with its strengths and stability and adopt it for our own.
We can use its energies to support our energy to encounter each moment with mindfulness and equanimity and clarity.
It may help us to see that our own thoughts and feelings,
Our preoccupations,
Our emotional storms and crises,
Even the things that happen to us are very much like the weather on the mountain.
We tend to take it all personally but its strongest characteristic is impersonal.
The weather of our lives is not being ignored or denied.
It is to be encountered,
Honored,
Felt,
Known for what it is and held in awareness.
And in holding it in this way we can come to know a deeper silence and stillness and wisdom.
Mountains have this to teach us and much more if we can come to listen.
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