Take a comfortable posture.
Your back should be straight,
Not tense.
The mind relaxed and alert.
Naturally close your eyes.
Before we begin the actual practice,
Just take a moment to settle in.
Settle into this moment.
What we mean by that is really feel this moment,
The sensory experience of it.
We're not just thinking about now,
We're feeling it,
Very naturally.
Don't try to make anything happen,
Just see what's there.
Sensations in the body,
Normal sensations.
The sense of sitting,
Of being in a room,
Feeling the temperature of the air.
Now bring your attention to the simple fact of breathing.
Breathe in,
Air is coming in,
Air is going out.
Is the breath long or is it short?
In this guided practice,
We're going to explore how long,
Medium and short length breaths feel like.
Not only how they feel like in themselves,
But also how they affect how the body feels.
So this practice is really going to be two-fold.
We're going to pay attention to breathing and use a counting technique for that.
We are also,
And you could see this as the main practice,
Monitor how the body feels.
Monitoring how the body feels simply means attending to body sensations.
Your body has a posture right now and you can feel the edges of your body,
You can feel your body being in space.
This,
You should keep in awareness as you meditate.
Sometimes as you focus on one particular thing,
The sense can shrink.
And one of the most important parts of the practice is opening that back up,
Feeling the full body.
So as you keep feeling the whole body,
Take a long but natural breath,
The longest comfortable breath you can take.
And then exhale,
Also naturally,
But make it as long as you comfortably can.
We're not forcing a breath,
But we're just elongating it.
The flow of air should be soft.
The breath should feel smooth.
Now we'll give that long breath the count of nine.
So as you inhale during that long breath,
You count from one to nine.
These are just arbitrary numbers,
It doesn't mean nine seconds.
Just assign that the count of nine,
And count up to nine as you inhale,
And count down from nine to one as you exhale.
As you keep feeling the whole body,
You are taking long,
Comfortable breaths,
Counting up to nine as you inhale,
And counting down from nine to one as you exhale.
Now that was our longest breath.
That's how a long breath feels.
Now let's try just counting up to six,
And then back down to one.
This will be our medium length breath.
Keep opening up as you feel the whole body,
And breathe in as you count up to six,
Breathe out as you count down from six to one.
Now let's adjust that to three,
And explore the short breath.
What does a short breath feel like in the body?
So as you inhale,
You count up to three,
And then as you exhale,
From three to one.
Feeling the whole body.
Let's go back up to medium length breath,
Counting up to six.
Feeling the whole body as we breathe in.
Feeling the whole body as we breathe out.
Going up to a long breath,
Counting up to nine as we inhale,
Down from nine to one as we exhale.
Still keeping awareness of the whole body.
As soon as we notice it shrink,
We open it back up.
Feeling the edges of our body.
As we complete this last breath,
We can go back to natural breathing.
And as I ring the bell,
Maintain awareness of the body as we were doing throughout this sit.
And as you open your eyes after the bell rings,
Maintain that awareness.
This is the main practice.
