Settle into a comfortable and easy position,
Inviting your body to feel open and relaxed but also gently alert.
Let the body soften and settle into its own natural ease.
Relax your shoulders,
Unclench your fists,
Let the fibers of your lower back soften and relax.
Release your belly and let the hips settle into the support beneath you,
Allowing you to feel deeply grounded and out of this groundedness.
Let the spine lengthen and open gently so that it feels quietly energized and awake.
Just rest with ease with a quiet sense of dignity and presence.
Become aware of the space around you,
Of the air circulating around your body.
Consider the air circulating in front of you,
Behind you,
At your elbows and your knees.
Sense the air in front of the chest,
At the tip of the nose and even in the space above you.
Just let go and invite the body and the mind to rest in the moment.
Exhale,
Soften,
Relax.
For these next few moments,
Let's concentrate the mind by settling the awareness with the breath,
Just watching the breath rise and fall in its own gentle and lovely rhythm.
Gather your awareness inward and let it rest with the breath.
Invite the mind to grow steady and clear and true as it dives deeply into the experience of the breath.
How do you know you're breathing in?
And what does it feel like to breathe out?
You're not stopping your thoughts or stopping the world.
You're just choosing to focus the energy of the mind on one single facet of life.
The mind becomes like a spotlight shining the light of its awareness on one single thing,
The breath,
And everything else recedes into the background.
Breath by breath,
Moment by moment,
Your awareness grows just a little easier,
A little calmer,
A little clearer.
The waves on the surface of your awareness begin to clear a bit and you can see deeper into the ocean below.
Just rest with the breath.
When you're ready,
Open your field of awareness back up beyond the breath,
Pulling back the lens of your attention so you can see more and more of the view.
Shift your mind into a state of relaxed awareness,
Noticing not just the breath but also the sounds around you,
The sensations in the body and the mind,
Whatever passes through your field of awareness.
Just watch the play of life.
Just be with what is.
What are you aware of right now?
Your job is not to change the sensations you find or to analyze them but to really feel them,
To settle into the roots of each passing feeling of each moment.
Just let everything be.
Just swim in the sea of sensations that surround you.
If you've strayed or wandered,
Just come back.
Come back to this simple exploration of what you are aware of right here,
Right now.
Just watch.
Rest.
Be.
Let your awareness grow as clear and as sensitive as possible.
Feeling ever more keenly what it feels like to be alive right in this moment.
Awash in the shifting sensations of life.
And now let's open the lens of our awareness even farther.
So your mind is able to take in a more panoramic view of life.
Become aware of the space around you.
And let your sense of self expand.
Taking in more and more of the world around you.
Let your mind grow big.
Spacious.
Clear.
Settling into a vast field of awareness.
The shifting and ever-changing sensations of life are like clouds passing across the sky.
And your job is to become the sky.
Let your sense of self grow as vast and as open and steady and true as the deep blue sky.
Draw back into a vast and healing space of timeless presence.
You could be anyone,
Anywhere,
In any time.
There's the breath.
There's the shifting play of life.
And there's that wide open awareness of vast and holy space,
The big mind of life.
Just nestle back into that space and rest.
As the Buddha counseled,
Rest in a mind like vast sky.
As you rest back,
Expanding your sense of self to the far reaches of the universe,
You may be able to shift back into a being mode where you sense a deep,
Deep sense of connection or communion with everything and all.
You drop back into a place where you feel the manifold strands of life all merging into one.
You drop into a space where you rest in the timeless,
Eternal now with a deep and clear and peaceful sense of presence.
Just be.
Enjoy being.
Let your small sense of self dissolve into the vastness of open space,
Into a profound feeling of union with all of life.
Return home to your true nature,
To the open sky of mind,
To your true home,
The whole wide world.
.
And then when you're ready,
Return back to the sounds in the room around you,
To the feelings in your body,
To the sense of life percolating through you.
Take a few deep and uplifting breaths.
Stretch if you like.
And notice the quality of your mind,
Of your awareness,
Of your energy.
And whenever you're ready,
Open your eyes and gently return to that vast and beautiful world that is you.
.
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