Welcome to this practice.
I'll be reading from the book,
How to Love by Thich Nhat Hanh.
Let's begin by settling in,
Finding a comfortable seated position,
Perhaps letting your feet sit flat on the floor,
Or maybe if your legs are crossed,
Letting your hips be above your knees,
And resting your hands gently on your lap.
However you'd like to sit,
Keep a tall erect spine,
Relaxed,
Not rigid,
Yet alert.
And from that quality of alertness,
Begin to bring your awareness into your body,
Noticing how it feels in this moment,
Recognizing any places where you feel tension or holding,
And giving them permission to soften.
As we practice mindfulness,
We're holding an attitude of curiosity and compassion,
A willingness to be with life as it is,
Without trying to push it away,
Without wishing it was different.
So seeing how your body feels in this moment,
And allowing that to be okay.
And beginning to let your awareness come into the sensation of your breath,
Noticing first that you are breathing,
That you are being breathed,
And giving yourself the gift of awareness by being the observer of this breath,
And this breath,
And this breath.
Not needing to change anything about the breath,
Not needing to make it be slow or deep,
But just simply letting it be natural and easy.
And if your mind has begun to wander,
If thoughts have begun to think themselves,
Know that you're not alone.
It's part of the human condition to have a monkey mind jumping from thought to thought.
And our practice of mindfulness is simply allowing that to be part of our experience,
Without making it wrong,
Without judging it,
And without pushing it away.
In fact,
Holding it,
The fact that we think,
With kindness,
With compassion.
Not seeing that our brain is doing what a brain does.
It's thinking.
You might notice that you think the same thoughts many times in a day.
You're not alone.
There's a passage in the book,
How to Love,
On attention.
And Thich Nhat Hanh writes,
As long as we're rejecting ourselves and causing harm to our bodies and minds,
There's no point in talking about loving and accepting others.
With mindfulness,
We can recognize our habitual ways of thinking and the contents of our thoughts.
Sometimes,
Our thoughts run around in circles and we're engulfed in distrust,
Pessimism,
Conflict,
Sorrow,
Or jealousy.
This state of mind will naturally manifest in our words and actions and cause harm to us and to others.
When we shed the light of mindfulness on our habitual thought patterns,
We see them clearly.
Recognizing our habits and smiling to them is the practice of appropriate mental attention,
Which helps us create new and more beneficial neural pathways.
Taking a moment to let those words sink in.
And as we sit now,
Becoming the observer again of your thoughts and noticing what habitual thoughts come up.
And as you notice them,
Seeing if perhaps you can invite a smile onto your lips,
Or maybe just a mental smile as you say,
Aha,
There you are again.
Seeing a thought as just a thought without attaching any meaning to it invites in freedom.
And from that sense of freedom,
We can cultivate allowance and acceptance of ourselves in all that we are.
And as we accept ourselves,
So then we can begin to be more accepting of others.
As we love ourselves more,
So then we can be more loving toward others.
Noticing how you feel now as we come to the end of this practice and gently blinking your eyes open whenever you're ready.
Have a wonderful day.
