Hello,
Dear one.
When I began a meditation practice,
I turned a lot of attention to what was happening in my mind,
What kinds of thoughts were shaping reality or what felt like reality based on what I was thinking all the time.
It was really helpful to me to be attentive to these thoughts and be able to question reality rather than assume the thoughts were simply real and true.
It wasn't until a while later that I began to have a similar exploration with the body.
So this meditation is an exploration of the body.
Thought forms can create suffering depending on the nature of the thought form and our relationship to that thought.
Tension and constriction in the body is often how our felt sense of I am separate takes shape.
As with all of these meditations,
I'll talk for a little bit and then I invite you to stay with your experience in silence as long as you wish.
As you settle into whatever position feels best for you in this moment,
Take particular note of allowing your body to be at ease.
This exploration is not a concentration practice.
It doesn't require any form of discipline.
So don't worry about sitting perfectly upright or in a quote-unquote correct meditation posture.
Feel your inhalations and exhalations like waves in the ocean.
Receive the preciousness of not having to effort or strive to breathe.
You may enjoy taking three of the longest and deepest inhalations and exhalations you've taken yet today to begin.
Now I invite you to choose one pretty neutral sensation to focus on for a moment.
So not a sensation that you would describe as pain.
You might just choose,
For example,
If there's no pain in your left hand.
The sensation in your left hand.
What do you notice about the sensation in your left hand in this moment?
Visualize that the attention is like a rubber band that's stretching outward from awareness to this sensation.
So noticing the sensation,
Attending to the sensation,
Focusing on it,
Ask,
Is this sensation heavy?
Is it dense?
Is it solid?
In the same way that sometimes things we think simply feel real and true,
We don't question the thoughts.
We often don't question whether our body is dense,
Solid,
With a particular heaviness to it.
But with your eyes closed in this moment,
What do you actually know about the body?
Notice how easy it is to reference thoughts about the body.
You might feel like it's very accessible to find even negative thoughts about the body.
We're deeply conditioned or habituated to be critical of our bodies,
To compare our bodies,
To see our bodies as a project that we're trying to improve all the time.
So in this practice we're letting go of those thought forms,
The ones that say you should be thinner or more fit or more flexible,
Fill in the blank.
All those thought forms keep a real sense of solidness in place,
Like it's just real and true,
This is my body,
This is how it looks,
And this is how it doesn't meet the standard.
Can you feel how much that keeps a sense of I in a separate way in place?
Now I have this project,
I have to do something about this.
My body's not okay.
It doesn't measure up.
Sometimes we're so fixated on such thought forms that we overlook our actual experience of our body.
It's like we're looking at our body from the outside the same way society is,
Rather than experiencing it.
So when you notice thought forms like that,
Remember you can always come back to sensation.
And now,
Come back to that neutral sensation you started the meditation with.
Feel the sensation,
Rather than indulging the thinking mind.
Give yourself permission to experience the body as luminous vibration of sensation,
Rather than some fixed,
Dense,
Solid,
Heavy thing that's either right or wrong,
Meets the standard,
Or doesn't.
Now notice how you know this sensation.
Could you know this sensation if you weren't aware of it?
When we identify with the body as,
That is me,
We can feel cut off from life,
Cut off from the vastness of being.
Give yourself permission to let go of any old or stale ideas about where the edge of your body is.
Just hang out for a bit in the body as vibration,
And you as the awareness of this vibration,
Not separate from it.
Give yourself permission to hang out in this openness,
This vastness that has no definition of the body as bound or fixed.
Feel this vibration,
This sensation as floating in vastness,
Not stuck inside a form.
Feel the body as free from stale ideas.
Feel the body as free.
