Let's close our eyes and begin to get a sense for the spaciousness in front of your body.
And as you do that,
See what images or feelings come to mind.
See what images connote to you,
Feeling of spaciousness,
Openness.
And as those form,
Allow those images to come towards your body so you can imagine that image right in front of you,
That spacious and open coming towards your body and especially your torso.
So your heart,
Your chest,
Your abdomen,
All receptive to what's in front of you.
As you breathe out,
You could envision your breath filling that space and energizing that space with the energy of space itself.
Spaciousness,
Openness.
Begin to allow that spaciousness and openness to melt to your heart.
Feel that openness inhabiting your whole torso and begin to allow yourself to be completely receptive to it.
If there's any effort in this meditation,
It's actively allowing ourselves to be open and to receive all that's in front of us.
And stay with that image and feeling for a few moments.
One more.
You you you you you you you you you you simple,
Short meditation like that there's so many like,
Kind of concepts from the yoga tradition that are sort of baked into it one being surrender is always available like that mind shift is always available to all of us and number two,
Which comes out of number one is our reality is changeable by us or another way to say that,
What a lot of yoga traditions would say is the reality we think exists doesn't exist but the way I like to look at it is more that our experience can be changed at any time so therefore there's nothing like fundamentally true about the experience we're having at any given time,
So if we don't like it,
We can change it which is a very radical concept and the traditions that run on that are renunciate traditions that really go for it,
You know,
They really they really go for these like,
You know this is not reality I'm moving,
There is a different reality but I think for most of us,
What's useful to understand is that we are so attached to believing external circumstances are the things guiding our thoughts,
Feelings you know,
We're so attached to that idea that we really need to do practices that prove to our minds that that is not true so even something as simple as imagining a wide open space in front of you and letting that feeling come into your body for three minutes or four minutes shows your mind that the thing you're experiencing right before that is not the only reality and what the monastic traditions do I mean,
From my understanding is they basically do that all the time like they 24-7 walk around being like this is not the reality but when I create all these different realities to prove to myself that none of them are true and eventually I'll get to some sort of ultimate truth and that ultimate truth is the reality and that ultimate truth is that in the end there's only the surrender piece that's what the text says there's only the surrender piece there's only you surrendering to the present that's it,
There's nothing else I can look a lot of different ways but that's the only thing that's the underpinning ananda part in that surrender what comes with that is a natural state of blessing in that that's yoga in a nutshell and then you have all the methods the Patanjali styles there's so many styles so many things that you can't do but there's so many things that you can't do that you can't do and there's so many things that you can't do and that's the whole truth anyway my point is that sometimes you have to do these little practices that just sort of create a new reality for yourself to remind yourself so we can take a sort of chapter out of those the reality but in essence you've created that just as much as you've created the whatever image you had I had like a field you know with a sky in front of me just now and that image is as real as anything else as the dusk I'm looking at so simple so simple but the yoga traditions seek to do is make that permanent make that awareness permanent the tantra traditions seek to do is also make it permanent by understanding that it's not permanent that's the conundrum that we will probably not solve today but one of those two ways will be extremely helpful to everyone here
