Give yourself permission to be as comfortable as possible as you settle in.
Free yourself from any mental habits you might have around striving in your meditation practice to achieve some particular experience,
And simply settle in now.
We're settling into what's here now,
Allowing the attention to settle in being.
In our meditation practices,
Many of us have some conditioning around striving to be present.
There's such beautiful benefit in concentration practices in which we're learning to steady the attention,
Training the attention to be here and now,
And that's not what we're doing here and now.
Here we're inviting the attention home.
Here,
Rather than focusing the attention on the present moment,
This little point in a line of time,
It sits between past and future.
Here we're softening the attention so it can rest in presence.
This construct we call time is like a hologram in the vastness of presence,
In the vastness of being.
Again,
While it can be helpful in some moments to steady the attention by focusing on the breath or sounds around us,
Something arising in the present moment so that we can stabilize the attention in this way.
Here we're taking a stand as presence.
It's not a moment in time that you must try to enter in order to have some particular experience that's favorable to you.
It's your very being,
Ever-present,
Infinite,
Ever-available.
We don't find presence at the end of a long journey full of difficulty and hardship and as if we've made our way through a dark forest and the reward at the end of our path is finding presence.
We remember presence,
The most primary and fundamental experience of being that we have,
The one that we're simply conditioned or habituated to forget.
And then from this remembrance,
We journey.
We journey in whatever way we are called.
So let this remembrance of presence now be a homecoming of sorts,
A quiet celebration of being.
In the fullness of our lives,
Being often gets overlooked.
But like the sun behind clouds,
It's never actually gone anywhere.
It simply appeared to.
Feel now the way being saturates all things.
Lovingly bring attention to the breath as we begin to close out this contemplation,
Just feeling being.
Infusing each inhalation,
Every exhalation,
The breath,
Simply a wave in being,
A ripple in the vastness.
Of presence.
Closing out by taking three of the longest and deepest inhalations and exhalations you've taken yet today.
Thank you.
