The first part of the meditation will be mindfulness of the breath.
So firstly,
Simply become aware of your breath and feel the breath in your body.
Don't try and change the breath in any way.
But just notice how it feels as you breathe in and how it feels as you breathe out.
And see if you can avoid focusing or concentrating on the breath.
You don't want to feel like we're having to make mental effort to concentrate on the breath.
So instead,
See if you can just keep your awareness nice and light and open and just allowing the breath to happen in the center of your awareness.
I'm still aware of thoughts and sounds and everything else that's happening around the breath.
So after a while of paying particular interest to the breath,
Having the breath in the foreground of your awareness,
Everything else just slightly in the background.
See if you can begin to get a sense of the body being breathed by the breath.
So I'm allowing the breath in and letting go,
Releasing as I breathe out.
This isn't taking any effort.
It's more about receiving the breath,
Being breathed by the breath,
Getting a feeling like it's the breath that's doing all the work.
So maybe getting a feeling of the breath now flowing through you,
The breath rising and falling and flowing through the body.
And we're just noticing that happening and allowing it to happen without any interference and without any effort.
So let's see if we can adopt this same approach towards our own thoughts.
So allowing the breath to gently move more into the background of our awareness and instead being more interested in the experience of our thoughts.
Allowing that experience of thinking to be in the center,
The foreground of our light and open awareness.
No concentration,
No focusing,
No effort.
Just simple alertness,
Interest.
And what does it feel like to be aware of your thoughts as you think them?
And just as we did with the breath,
Don't try and change the thoughts in any way.
It really doesn't matter what you're thinking,
Just be aware that thoughts are occurring.
So we're interested in the experience of thinking but completely disinterested in the contents of the thoughts.
They can be anything at all,
It really doesn't matter.
And see if you can get a sense of the thoughts flowing freely through your mind just as the breath flows freely through the body.
Sometimes I find it really helpful to be aware of both the thoughts and the breath fairly equally.
So noticing that I'm thinking and breathing,
That helps me to remain grounded in the body and in the present moment even as the thoughts come and go.
Keeping that awareness nice and open and light,
Allowing the breath and the thoughts to flow freely through your awareness.
And now see if you can get a sense of the thoughts happening to you,
Happening to the mind,
Arriving,
Occurring within your awareness.
Realising you don't have to make any effort to create a thought,
You don't have to remember to think.
But just as with the breath,
The thoughts occur naturally,
Organically,
Spontaneously and most importantly completely effortlessly.
So you're not thinking,
You're just noticing that thinking is taking place.
Allow the breath to breathe the body and allow the thoughts to think themselves within your mind.
Giving your thoughts complete freedom,
Not making any effort to create them or to stop them.
Making no effort to change them or slow them down and really not caring at all what the content of your thoughts are.
It really doesn't matter.
So as we move into a period of maybe six or seven minutes of silence without commentary,
I'll just leave you with one more suggestion,
One more invitation of how we can approach the mind and our thoughts.
And that is to see if you can turn your attention,
Your alertness,
Your interest to what the next thought may be.
Not in the sense of trying to predict or guess the content,
Because remember we're not interested in the content of our thoughts for this meditation.
But seeing if your awareness can be open enough,
Welcoming enough and alert enough to simply catch the arrival of each new thought into your mind,
Into your awareness.
And once a thought has arrived,
Then it's free to do whatever it wants to do.
We completely lose interest in it because we will continuously turn our interest,
Our alertness and our attention to what the next thought is going to be or when the next thought is going to appear.
So see if you can catch the arrival of each new thought into your mind.
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Just asking yourself the question every now and again,
What's my next thought going to be?
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OK,
So we'll begin to bring the meditation to a close.
Feeling the breath in the body,
Being aware of your thoughts,
Aware of everything that's happening in this moment with your open awareness.
OK,
So we can finish that.
