Short Guided Meditation | Ajahn Brahm

Ajahn Brahm guides us through a short meditation. In his unique manner, he emphasizes kindness, gentleness, and present moment awareness as the most important attitude during meditation. Ajahn Brahm is the popular Buddhist teacher to a growing international audience of people keen to learn meditation and develop a deeper spiritual understanding. He is also the founding father of an emergent Australian forest tradition of Buddhist monasticism focused on the roots of the Buddha's Teaching.

Transcript

You start by closing your eyes,

Reminding yourself this is your meditation time.

It's not a time for writing your autobiography or for working out problems.

Problems are worked out at the end of the meditation,

Never at the beginning.

And one of the most difficult things which stops you seeing clearly is stress.

So we're going to deal with that first of all.

The stress,

The tiredness,

Not so much in our body but in our mind.

We start with our body,

How do you feel in your body,

Physically?

How nice you are.

You start with your feet,

Wearing your feet right now.

With your eyes closed,

You can be far more sensitive to the position of your feet.

My feet were just really uncomfortable so I moved them.

It's okay to move at the beginning of the meditation.

Now my feet feel way more comfortable.

How's your ankles?

What do they feel like?

How's your calves?

Now at this point it starts getting really interesting for me because I've been a monk for such a long time,

Meditating before I became a monk.

It's over 50 years of meditation I've been doing now so my awareness is very strong.

I can feel my legs.

I can feel the calves,

They were uncomfortable.

They've been doing a lot of work today.

I can feel them.

Now I just imagine just feeling them and giving them kindness,

Care.

If you don't know what kindness is,

Try many different things until you find what makes those legs feel more relaxed,

More at peace,

More strong.

So my calves are now much,

Much more stronger than a couple of minutes ago.

Still feel some sensations in my left calf.

I just focus on them,

Get some loving kindness.

Carves,

I cannot complain because I have overused you sitting in cars traveling for such a long time today,

Five or six hours just in a car.

Until the legs,

The feeling disappears,

Things relax.

Look at your knees.

Some people do have to have operations on their body because they played aggressive sports or be in accidents.

I've seen it happen so often in meditation,

Especially meditation retreats,

The people start to feel heat in that part of the body.

When other parts of the body,

Say to show knees,

Get uncommonly warm.

You feel it.

All that is,

Is the body putting its limited energy into one place to heal you.

And people do experience strange sensations in the body.

If they feel comfortable,

They feel non-threatening,

Just let them be.

Don't try and get rid of them because you don't understand them.

Part of meditation is learning.

You're supposed to understand it in the beginning,

But learning and trust it feels good,

Keep going until my knees now feel so incredibly relaxed,

Like they've been soaking in hot water.

And your thighs,

I don't know why but my thighs feel at ease,

At peace.

Go up to your bottom.

How does that feel?

Especially if I ever do long meditations,

I really make sure the bottom is really comfortable to begin with because at times when my bottom was,

I was neglected it,

Sometimes I would cuddle some blood supply to the nerve endings and my leg would go to sleep.

You'd get numb.

And all the problem was I wasn't really aware of how I positioned my buttocks at the beginning of the meditation,

That was all.

So now make sure the buttocks are comfortable.

To ensure that I sometimes ask them,

I'm not a dumb monk,

I'm not crazy,

I ask buttocks,

How are you?

You need to be adjusted.

Now every time I ask a question like that of my body and listen,

There's always an answer.

I follow that answer.

It's as if the buttocks were an individual conscious entity who can answer these questions honestly and accurately.

Once I hear from my buttocks are comfortable,

I leave them alone and I go and look at my back.

Just adjusted the headphone in my ear because it was falling out.

I'm always happy to adjust,

Interfere in the sense at the beginning,

Making sure my back feels good.

Again many times I keep a straight back.

This evening because of maybe traveling in a car is the only way to get these long distances in Australia.

So I look at my back,

Feel it,

And realize this is a comfortable position for it right now.

It's not supposed to be,

Just being against the chair.

And I look at my torso and all the organs inside,

And the intestines and the colon and the bladder and I'm not going to give a medical anatomy lesson.

I just scan my attention up my own body.

If I find somewhere it's not comfortable,

I pause.

My stomach,

My lungs,

My heart,

They're pretty much at ease,

At peace.

I go past them,

Relaxing my shoulders,

Looking at my arms and hands,

How are they situated?

Often when I sit on the floor so my hands can go on my lap.

As I'm sitting at a desk now to let you see me on the internet,

I got my hands on the table.

But they're comfortable.

I make sure they're comfortable.

Any adjustment sounds,

There we go,

Just a small one.

Now they're at ease.

And I go to my neck.

My neck is irritated at the moment because of tiredness and because this is the time the farmers here are making hay.

It's a season for reaping the crops.

I'm physically tired and that makes me more susceptible to hay fever.

I can feel the blockage in my nose and the itch in my throat.

I can feel it.

What I do is try and care for it.

Relax those areas.

Send them warmth and loving kindness.

It always works.

The itch in the throat gets less.

The blockage in the nose gets relieved.

Because it works every time,

It really encourages me to share this with you.

When I teach guided meditation,

It's not theory,

It's what I actually do.

I guide myself.

And I go to the front of my face because many of your muscles in your face are screwed up because of emotional problems,

Negativity or even because of fear.

You can read a person's state of mind simply by looking at their facial features.

So I'm aware of the muscles around my mouth and my nose especially and my eyes.

I relax them to the max.

If you have strong enough mindfulness,

You can feel the muscles relaxing.

The sensory experience around the eyes,

Around the mouth and the nose change.

It's like your muscles aren't holding tight to things.

They release,

They relax,

They're open.

It feels so much better.

And some of the emotions begin to calm down as well.

But before I leave the body,

I look at it as a whole.

From my nose to my nose,

My back,

All over the body,

Making sure it's comfortable.

Even this much is beautiful meditation.

Being aware of my body,

Having relaxed it quite deeply.

Everything feels at ease.

It's not just at ease,

It is resilient.

If you have a guitar string which is pulled tight and something falls on that guitar string,

It makes a high pitch bing.

But if that guitar string is loosened,

If something falls on it,

Boom,

A low tone.

If that guitar string has no tension in it at all,

When something hits it,

It makes no sound at all.

That's the meaning of resilience.

When you're relaxed,

At peace,

Your body becomes healthy.

And your mind is at ease,

At peace.

It gets resilient too.

Things hit it metaphorically.

You don't react.

You're at ease.

So how peaceful is your mind right now?

How peaceful are you in this moment?

What is peace?

What makes your mind more peaceful?

Learning how to be in this moment and now.

The past,

People never remember the past accurately.

They always add some more details which never happened.

They take some things away.

The past is unreliable.

So you don't learn from the past as much as you learn from the present and now.

And the future,

Which is fantasy.

What do you think should happen?

I don't know how many times I've been disappointed.

People say this is going to happen.

It never does.

Experts I'm talking about.

So I can't rely on the future.

I can't rely on the past.

But I do know that now,

This moment,

Is where my future is being made.

My happiness,

My health,

My energy is being constructed right now.

I have a good attitude to this moment.

Kindness,

Letting go,

Renunciation,

Gentleness.

The Buddha said that's the best way of looking at this moment.

Call the second,

The second factor of the eightfold path.

Don't judge yourself or compare yourself or compare this meditation with the last one.

That just creates more stress.

You meditate from the opposite.

No stress at all.

Open the door of your heart to this moment.

Whatever it is,

However you feel,

Don't try and suppress it.

Don't be ashamed of it.

Just be with it,

With kindness.

Become a friend of your body and a friend of your mind.

So you trust each other and don't need to change.

Let this moment be with kindness.

And then we'll go on all by itself.

Make sure you're meditating.

Please remember who you are meditating for.

Notice yourself to all the people you serve and help in the world.

To your health and wellbeing.

You do not need to cause distress to others.

Caring for yourself is one of the best ways to care for others.

If you don't know how to care for yourself,

How can you ever know and understand how to care for others?

So you're meditating not just for yourself,

You're meditating for the benefit of all beings,

Big and small.

How do you feel now?

Can you become peaceful?

Does it feel joyful?

Do you feel pleasurable?

If it does,

Well done.

That's what's supposed to happen.

So pleasure of meditation allows the mind to rest there.

And stay there without any effort.

There's a joy which holds you there,

Not your ego.

The more you let go and be kind,

The more of that joy you feel.

So now,

If you could be aware of the next three breaths,

Breathing in and breathing out the next few times.

At the end of the third breath,

Open your eyes to end the meditation.

There we go.

Well,

Thank you for that opportunity.

That was nice.

And if ever you're doing a meditation,

This will be going deep.

Just carry on.

Don't disturb it because of what I say or because of people ringing gongs.

Reviews

Beautiful meditation, especially for a beginner. Not really a Metta meditation, though there’s plenty of loving-kindness baked in. And not much space for silence. But such warm and gentle guidance into present awareness of the body and mind

So precious meditating with you

Fantastic!

Thank you for your kind guidance 🙏🏻

Brilliantly calming

🙏🙏🙏

Short and sweet little practice from dear Ajahn Brahm. Wonderful, thank you! ☮️💖🙏🖖

❤️🙏🏼

My body was freed up in ways I cannot fully explain. Thank you for your guidance

Thank you Brahm 🙏