Find your seat and close your eyes.
Find a tall spine and slightly bring the shoulders back so you're nice and wide across the chest.
You can bring the chin slightly back and down to lengthen more through the back of the neck.
Begin by taking a few deep breaths on your own.
Full inhales,
Expanding your torso in all directions,
Front,
Back,
Side to side,
Bottom and top.
Slow,
Long exhales.
With each of these deep breaths,
With each of these long exhales,
Perhaps a little bit more tension melts away.
All kinds of tension.
Real tension,
Tension in the mind,
Emotional tension,
Energy you have wrapped up in to-dos,
In stories,
In obsessions,
Unresolved things from the past,
Worries about the future.
You don't have to identify any of that.
Just trust that perhaps as you drop in here,
More and more of whatever tensions exist in you,
Just melts away.
You can begin to relax the breath.
Just let the breath be easy and natural.
Realizing how you feel after several of those deep breaths.
Ensure that the practice of yoga,
Which includes meditation,
Can be summed up in three words.
Be here now.
That's what we'll be practicing in today's meditation.
So let's begin practicing that through body awareness.
Become aware of your entire physical body in its meditation posture.
Realizing your body as a whole.
Practice as many sensations at once as you can throughout the body.
Let's take a second.
That might include sensations of the parts of you that are in contact with the support below the floor,
Your seat.
There's the feel of your clothes on your skin.
Perhaps the air on your skin where it's bare.
Any aches or pains in the body.
Places of numbness.
Places of expansiveness.
Yumminess.
There's of course the sensations of breathing.
Maybe you also feel your heart beating.
None more.
Becoming aware of as many sensations at once as you can throughout the whole body.
Letting go of any identifying or labeling of those sensations now.
Just feel.
InnITHAWhonorlines individuals.
Notice anytime your mind wants to label what you're feeling and put some kind of judgment on it,
Even if it's a very subtle sense of bad or good.
Look if you're feeling an ache in your back.
Can you just drop into the raw sensation,
Allowing any evaluation to fall away?
Now we'll practice being here now through engaging the senses,
Merging with each sensory field one at a time.
Keeping the eyes closed,
Become aware of your sense of sight.
Feeling seeing through closed eyes,
The light that is falling on the eyelids is gracing the eyelids.
Just experiencing it.
If it's available,
Perhaps even just allowing yourself to merge with the experience.
You don't need to know how to do that.
Just open to the possibility and it either happens or it doesn't.
It's okay either way.
Now,
Allowing your awareness to melt into your sense of sound,
Allowing yourself to receive sounds near and far.
Consider that you,
That which you hear and the hearing itself are one.
One thing.
Yeah.
Now allowing your awareness to melt into your sense of smell.
Letting the breaths flow in and out of the nose.
Becoming aware of any fragrances that might be available.
Sometimes you allow yourself to merge with your sense of smell.
Seamlessly melting your awareness now to your sense of taste.
Opening yourself to any taste you might experience in your mouth.
Allow your awareness to merge with your present moment experience through taste.
Now,
Expand your awareness back out throughout the entire body.
Feeling what you feel.
Allowing your awareness now to gently focus in on the sensations of the breaths.
I recommend allowing the awareness to rest in the low belly for this.
Just allowing the breath to be as it is as you simply observe the sensations of the breath rising and falling.
Letting the breaths flow in and out through the eyes.
And thoughts will flow in and out.
It's completely natural and normal.
Just allow them to flow in and out like clouds in the sky.
Paying them no particular extra attention.
Allowing them to arise and dissolve.
If you find yourself kind of getting caught up in any particular thought or stream of thought,
As soon as you realize that,
You are no longer lost.
You can just remind yourself,
Be here now and simply come back to feeling the sensations of the breath.
Feeling present with your breathing.
Relaxing saidtis the awareness.
Be here now.
Allow your awareness to re-expand to your whole body once again.
Finding yourself here and now.
Take a few deep breaths.
With your exhales you might imagine that you are sending roots down into the earth.
One more deep breath.
Om.
Thank you!
.
