Welcome to today's practice.
My name is Heidi,
And I'm glad to be with you all today.
Today's practice is a guided mountain meditation.
So we'll begin by aligning our body for the practice.
So we'll sit with a straight back,
Your head held erect on your neck and shoulders,
Allowing the shoulders to fully relax.
Hands can be placed in your lap,
Both feet flat on the floor,
And we'll gently close our eyes here and bring our attention to the flow of our breathing,
Beginning to feel each in-breath and each out-breath,
Just observing your breathing without trying to change it or regulate it in any way,
Allowing the body to become still and sitting with a sense of dignity,
A sense of being complete,
Whole.
In this very moment,
With your posture reflecting the sense of wholeness,
And as you sit here,
Picture in your mind's eye as best as you can the most beautiful mountain that you know of or can imagine,
Just holding the image and feeling of this mountain in your mind's eye,
Letting it gradually come into greater focus,
Observing its overall shape,
Its lofty peak high in the sky,
The large base rooted on the rock of the earth's crust,
Its steep or gently sloping sides,
Noticing how massive it is,
How solid,
How unmoving,
And how beautiful,
Both from afar and close up.
Perhaps your mountain has snow at the top and trees on the lower slopes.
Perhaps it has one prominent peak or a series of peaks.
Whatever its shape or appearance,
Just sitting and breathing with the image of this mountain in your mind's eye,
Observing it,
Noticing its qualities,
And when you feel ready,
Seeing if you can bring the mountain into your own body so that the body sitting here and the mountain in your mind's eye become one,
So that as you sit here,
You share in the massiveness and the stillness and the majesty of this mountain.
You become the mountain rooted in the sitting posture.
Your head becomes the lofty peak supported by the rest of the body,
Your shoulders and arms the side of the mountain,
The legs the solid base rooted to your chair,
Experiencing in your body a sense of uplift from deep within your pelvis and spine.
With each breath,
As you continue sitting,
Becoming a little more of a breathing mountain,
Unwavering in your stillness,
Completely what you are beyond words and thought,
A centered,
Rooted,
Unmoving presence.
Now as you sit here,
Becoming aware of the fact that as the sun travels across the sky,
The light and the shadows and the colors are changing virtually moment by moment.
Night follows day and day follows night.
A canopy of stars,
The moon,
Then the sun.
And through it all,
The mountain just sits,
Experiencing these changes in each moment,
Constantly changing,
Yet always just being itself.
It remains still as the seasons flow into one another and as the weather changes moment by moment and day by day,
Calmness abiding all change.
And in the same way as we sit in meditation,
We can learn to experience the mountain.
We can embody the same unwavering stillness and rootedness in the face of everything that changes in our own lives,
Over seconds,
Over hours and over years.
In our lives and in our meditation practice,
We constantly experience the changing nature of our mind and body and of the outer world.
We have our own periods of light and darkness,
Our moments of color and our moments of drabness.
We all experience storms of varying intensity.
We endure periods of darkness and pain as well as the moments of joy.
Even our appearance changes constantly.
By becoming this mountain in our meditation practice,
We can mirror its strength and stability and adopt it for our own.
We can use its energies to support our energy to encounter each moment with mindfulness and clarity.
It may help us to see our own thoughts and feelings and preoccupations,
Our own emotional storms.
Even the things that happen to us,
Much like the weather on the mountain.
We tend to take it all personally,
But the strongest characteristic is impersonal.
The weather of our own lives is not to be ignored or denied.
It is to be encountered,
Honored,
Felt,
Known for what it is and held in awareness.
And in holding it in this way,
We come to know a deeper silence,
Stillness and wisdom.
Mountains can teach us this and much more if we come to listen.
We'll close today's meditation by slowly bringing our awareness back into the room,
Bringing some subtle movements back to the body.
And whenever you're ready,
Gently opening your eyes.
Enjoy your day.
