Welcome to the Kelly Russell Mountain Meditation.
For this one you can lie down or you can find a cross-legged seat on a bolster,
A block,
Or a blanket,
And you're welcome to sit up against a wall.
As you sit here,
Let an image form in your mind's eye of the most magnificent,
Beautiful mountain you can imagine.
Let it gradually come into greater focus,
And even if it doesn't come as a visual image,
Allow the sense of this mountain and feeling its overall shape,
Its peaks high in the sky,
The large base rooted in the bedrock of the Earth's crust,
Its steep or gently sloping sides.
Notice how massive it is,
How solid,
How unmoving,
How beautiful.
Observing it,
Note its qualities,
And bring the qualities of the mountain into your own body.
So that your body and the mountain in your mind's eye become one.
You share in the massiveness and the stillness.
You become the mountain.
With each breath,
As you continue,
Become unwavering in your stillness,
Completely beyond words and thought,
A centered,
Grounded,
Unmoving presence.
Become aware of the fact that as the sun travels across the sky,
The light and shadows and colors are all changing virtually moment by moment in the mountain's stillness.
And the surface teems with life and activity,
Streams,
Melting snow,
Waterfalls,
Plants,
And wildlife.
As the mountain sits,
Night follows day and day follows night.
The bright,
Warming sun,
Followed by the cool night sky studded with stars.
And through it all,
The mountain just sits,
Experiencing change in each moment constantly,
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.
In summer,
The mountain may be brown,
Sprinkled with green trees and a few wildflowers here and there.
In the fall,
The mountain may wear a coat of brilliant fire colors.
In the winter,
A blanket of snow and ice.
In any season,
It may find itself at times enshrouded in clouds or fog or pelted by freezing rain.
People may come to see the mountain and comment on how beautiful it is or how it's not a good day to see the mountain.
It's too rainy or cloudy or foggy or dark.
None of this matters to the mountain,
Which remains at all times its essential self.
Clouds may come and go.
Tourists might like its trails or not.
The mountain's magnificence and beauty are not changed one bit by whether people see it or not.
It just sits being itself.
At times,
Visited by violent storms,
Snow,
Rain,
And winds of unthinkable magnitude.
Through it all,
The mountain sits.
Spring comes,
Trees leaf out,
Flowers bloom in the high meadows and slopes.
Birds sing in the trees once again.
And streams overflow with the waters of melting snow.
Through it all,
The mountain continues to sit unmoved by the weather,
By what happens on its surface.
By the world of appearances.
It's remaining its essential self.
In the same way as we sit in meditation,
We can learn to experience the mountain.
We can embody the same central unwavering stillness and groundedness in the face of everything that changes in our own lives.
Over seconds,
Over hours,
Over years.
In our lives and in our meditation,
We experience constantly the changing nature of mind and body,
The outer world.
We have our own periods of light and darkness.
Activity and inactivity.
Our moments of color.
And our moments of drabness.
It's true that we experience storms of varying intensity in the outer world and in our own minds and bodies.
We endure periods of darkness and pain,
As well as the moments of joy and uplift.
Even our appearance changes constantly.
Experiencing a weather of its own.
By becoming the mountain,
We can connect to strength and stability.
We can encounter each moment with mindfulness and equanimity and clarity.
It might help us to see that our thoughts and our feelings,
Our preoccupations,
Our emotional storms and crisis.
Even the things that happen to us are very much like the weather on the mountain.
We tend to take it all personally,
But its 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,
Held in awareness.
And in holding it in this way,
We come to know a deeper silence and stillness and wisdom.
Mountains have this to teach us.
It may be helpful from time to time to remind you of what it means to sit mindfully with resolve and wakefulness and true stillness.
Begin to take deeper breaths.
Let your belly rise with your inhale and fall with your exhale.
As you move through your day or your night,
Allow yourself to resonate in the qualities that you cultivated.
This deep inner stillness,
Stability and structure at your core.
Thank you for listening.
Have a good one.
