The Deep Invitation Of Your Own Life (Recorded Live)

You are invited to feel the original quality of your own life in this profoundly liberating Zen-based meditation. Hold space for all that you are while allowing you to touch into oneness and freedom, and so move into enlightened action through the path of your own life. This practice includes a reading of section 14 from The Tao Te Ching. This meditation is taken from a recent live session.

Transcript

I thought we would just sit with a Zen based practice today.

And I want to invite you within this to not surrender because surrender sounds egoic to me.

It sounds like I have to surrender.

The number of times I know you all love She Let Go,

But the number of times in the comments on She Let Go,

People will say,

I'm trying to learn how to let go,

Or I'm trying to surrender.

And the mind doesn't know how to,

But the heart does,

And the soul is.

It's not surrender,

It's a kind of giving up and a holding lightly rather than a gripping too.

So that will be the invitation of this practice.

Allow yourself to settle for practice.

And I would invite you to allow yourself to be here in the room.

So allow yourself to be in the room that you're in.

And just begin feeling into your body with your sense of awareness of your body.

So not trying to get your mind to feel your body,

But just letting yourself feel your body.

So not trying to get your mind to feel your body,

But feeling from that part of you that is aware.

Being aware of your feet against the floor,

Your legs.

Allowing ease into each body part,

Your buttocks on the meditation cushion and that uprightness that moves through the spine.

Shoulders level,

Your shoulders are relaxed.

Shoulders level and relaxing.

Uprightness through the neck,

Ears level with the shoulders.

Softening your face,

Softening your jaw.

As this is a Zen practice,

The invitation is to keep your eyes open.

And just to gaze five or six feet in front of you,

Softly.

And the reason that Dogen,

Reverend Master Dogen,

Suggests that we keep the eyes open is so that we don't get lost in the tunnels of the mind.

If we have some PTSD,

Trauma,

Depression,

Emotional difficulty going on,

Then this could work for you.

It can be helpful.

Aware of the throat area,

The chest,

The abdomen.

Allowing yourself to be aware of your diaphragm.

And allowing breath at your diaphragm.

And if it's right for you,

And only if it's right for you,

Also being aware of the groins,

The reproductive and your excretory organs,

The perineum.

Because this area is an area where we often close off our energy when we're in fear,

Or we've had difficulty or betrayal or a realm of hurts in our past.

We're not trying to force anything.

We can even be aware of closeness within ourselves.

That's okay too.

And there's an introductory breath for this practice.

And so,

In your own natural breath pace,

The one that's occurring naturally at this moment,

Allow yourself to feel as you breathe out,

It goes out down the front of your body.

This is called turning the wheel of the breath.

In the space,

It goes under your perineum,

And then the in-breath goes up the back,

And then in the space it comes over your head.

So out down the front,

In up the back.

Now,

If your breath flow is in the other direction,

You could be on your period,

Perimenopausal,

Any reason really,

Other,

Then don't try and force it the other way,

Just go with it as it is.

Out down the front though,

Generally speaking,

In up the back.

Out down the front.

In up the back.

Just continuing in your own way now.

Maybe nine or ten turnings of the breath in this way,

Not riding the breath,

But simply moving with it.

It could feel almost like there's a little warm dot of light moving around your body,

If that's helpful to you.

And just notice how you can let go of gripping into the mind,

Let going of gripping into the body,

Let go of gripping into the emotions a little bit,

As that natural,

Just taking the first few minutes of your meditation easy.

And following the breath in this way allows your awareness to kind of begin expanding again.

Out from the repression of the conditioned mind of the daily mind.

Now,

That is enough of a meditation.

If you need a very simple get back to awareness practice,

This first part of the Soto Zen practice is wonderful.

And then sort of letting go of following the breath with awareness,

But allowing it to continue if it wishes to.

And knowing that at any point,

If you get caught in mind,

There's some emotional uprising that's difficult or something like that.

Instead of moving into fight or flight and I've got to get back to meditating.

Just return to that breath.

So you have this as base camp.

Feeling of life in the body.

Turning the wheel of the breath.

Base camp.

And we are the whole mountain.

Not just the top.

We are the roots too.

And so an invitation.

Feeling into the life of your body from this expansive aspect of your natural awareness.

You've not created this awareness.

You're not wishing and hoping awareness.

You are aware.

Just be honest with yourself,

Though the mind can do a pretty good impression of awareness.

The way to know that it's not the mind is that you are aware of your mind.

So feeling the awareness of your mind without judgment or criticism of its content.

Feeling the awareness of the emotions without judgment or criticism of its content.

Feeling the energy of your body without judgment or criticism.

Just awareness meeting your life and awareness of life in the body.

This we might think is a gateway.

This is the gateway perhaps of the body.

Gateway of life in the body.

Gateway of awareness.

So can you let yourself realize from within,

From awareness,

That part of you that is able to see the life in you,

Feel the life in you,

Because surely the one who is seeing is closer to the core or is the core soul.

I can feel that many of you have met that beautifully.

It's interesting how you can tell,

Even though we're all online and all around the world and cannot see each other,

Absolutely tangible.

Nothing to achieve.

Just allowing for this space of our practice in the safe space that we're in together.

That we know ourselves in this way.

We're going to spend our time meditating.

We may as well do it for real.

We may be trying to turn ourselves into something,

But instead revealing the wildness and the beauty of our true nature and allowing that to shine.

Not just through our bodies and our faces,

But into our actions in our own lives and the world as well.

Perhaps those other ways that we've been talking about become available to us in reality rather than idealism.

Feeling the energy of your mind,

Feeling the energy of your emotion,

Feeling the consciousness and unconsciousness within your body.

There is no shame in having one kind of thought or another,

One kind of feeling or another,

Having pain or not having pain.

Awareness sees the forms and the objects of mind,

Emotion and in body.

It's like you can hear between the sounds around you and just like you're aware of the space of the room around you and yourself within the room without any effort.

You're aware of the space between the thoughts,

Between the feeling,

Between consciousness and unconsciousness,

Pain and ease.

So you're aware of both.

And then the great instruction or the great invitation.

Dogen uses the words,

Let go of everything,

Which is in the Vendhava in the Shobhagensal.

But I would roast this chestnut this way.

Notice the things that your mind and your feelings think you are and don't try and change them.

But notice how you energetically hold into them or identify through them.

Your relationship,

Your money,

Your political view,

Your status in the world,

Your education,

Your conditioning,

Your family value and so on.

There's nothing wrong with these things.

These are expression.

But when we try to live through them,

They make terrible masters and mistresses.

If they are where we live.

So can we notice that we can move from a closed handed gripping state with each thing to an open handed state?

And just allow them to rest more lightly.

So letting go is not a rejection.

It's not a throwing away of something.

I am not that.

But just open your hand.

You're more than your relationship,

More than the money in your bank,

More than your name,

More than the family you came from,

More than the status,

More than the schooling.

You are life itself,

The great treasure of the universe.

And that's not a belief.

It's a knowingness.

And we also notice where we can't open our hand.

Notice where we are stuck and holding on for dear life.

And love that holding.

Just love it.

Because what else are you going to do?

Hate it?

Love crosses the boundary.

Love just keeps on knocking at the door.

And awareness,

Or I feel anyway,

Awareness.

And meeting things with awareness is love itself.

Rather than holding and interpreting and living in the stories of.

Awareness is love.

This is so different from self abandonment,

From running away from moving to other things to try and have a space.

This is meeting life in the moment.

And notice how the texture changes.

The texture of the feeling of yourself.

Texture of your relationship to,

Let's just say relationship.

We love our husband,

We love our wife,

Our partner,

Our child.

But we are also life.

Not just that relationship.

Giving yourself back to life.

Giving them back to life.

So this deeper awareness,

This part of you that holds with an open hand or allows things to rest with an open hand.

So that we can see from awareness and make better decisions in each of those roles.

And expressions of our lives and how we meet war.

And how we meet peace.

And how we meet politic.

And how we meet each other.

That open handedness.

We might say,

Or we may feel within ourselves that this is a truer aspect of ourself.

And we can look along our own path from here.

Both forwards and backwards and see things much more clearly.

Your original face before you were born.

Your original face before you were born.

Look.

It cannot be seen.

It is beyond form.

Listen.

It cannot be heard.

It is beyond sound.

Grasp.

It cannot be held.

It is intangible.

These three are indefinable,

Therefore they are joined in one.

From above,

It is not bright.

From below,

It is not dark.

An unbroken thread beyond description.

It returns to nothingness.

The form of the formless.

The image of the imageless.

It is called indefinable and beyond imagination.

Stand before it and there is no beginning.

Follow it and there is no end.

Stay with the ancient Tao.

Move with the present.

Knowing the ancient beginning is the essence of Tao.

Just moving your fingers and toes.

Shrugging your shoulder.

When you are ready,

Rejoin it.

Not throwing away your experience,

But just being.

Thank you for your gift of your presence.

Thank you for all that you are.

Reviews

🙏🏻

A practice I will return to. Beautifully and heartfeltly guided.

Beautiful. Thankyou. ✨

Essential. Thank you 🙏🏼

Beautiful!

Thank you for your guidance 🙏🙏🙏

Another beautiful meditation. Perfect for today John. Xx

Thank you for your guidance to a deep starte o being❣

Beautiful, John. Live sittings have their own quality to it, I can sense everybody‘s presence though it is just a recording. It gives me a glimpse of how time is irrelevant. Thank you for sitting with me, creating this space for us all to be together. 🙏🏻💛

Oh John, what a wonderful meditation. Thank you so much, this was a great blessing today.

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