This Is How We Move & Groove - In Being

How can you 'ungrip' from troubling thoughts and feelings? How can you be freer in your own life and more authentic and self-accepting? This practice based on Zen will give you both grounding and awareness to begin working with the things you've been carrying and bring you back to your sense of basic goodness.

This session was recorded live on Insight.

Transcript

So let me invite you to take your meditation seat.

Observe if something in your mind or your feelings has moved to try to be in a meditative state.

So an idea of what you're meant to feel or what a meditation is meant to be,

And you've somehow tightened into that in some way.

You'll feel that very clearly.

I want to invite you to notice that tension and just see if you can allow yourself to simply be here instead of trying to concoct a sense of what meditation is meant to be,

Because meditation is now not fitting into something.

Inviting you to be aware of yourself on your seat,

Just quite physically aware of your body sitting and aware of the space of the room around you.

Inviting you to notice how you are or where you are might be more appropriate.

So noticing where you are in relation to your mind,

Noticing where you are emotionally,

And noticing your physical aspect from awareness.

Are you here?

So notice the place in you that is seeing this,

And as you allow that place to simply exist within you,

I invite you to be aware of your feet on the floor,

Allowing your legs to be easy,

Allowing the weight on your seat,

The uprightness of your back but without force,

Allowing your shoulder blades to drop,

Shoulders,

Arms easy,

Hands can go on your knees or in your lap of course.

So just allowing yourself to exist.

Nice upright line from the energy in your spine moving up through the neck spine,

Ears level with your shoulders,

Aware of your face.

Can you meet your face in a way that you are adding no extra effort to it?

And the same with the throat area,

Aware of the belly,

The abdomen,

Chest.

And if it's right for you,

But not if it's not,

The groins,

Reproductive and excretory organs,

Allowing yourself to be here without adding extra effort.

And so because this is the Soto Zen practice,

There is a gentle breath that we can engage with in the beginning of this practice.

So just inviting you to notice as if your breath is moving around your body in an orbit,

Moving out down the front in your natural out-breath,

Then in the space goes under the perineum,

And then on the in-breath comes up the back,

And in the second gap in the breath goes over the top of your head.

As if there's like a,

Imagine somebody had a mirror and they were reflecting sunlight around your body in a beautiful way.

Just that feeling of warmth moving around your body or breath,

A little trail of light.

So out down the front,

Under,

In up the back,

Over,

Out down the front,

And so on.

Just allowing 10,

15 breaths like this in your own pace,

Not adding extra to the breath,

But just allowing it to move around the orbit of the breath.

Not adding extra to self,

No extra effort,

Particularly in the face and remaining aware of the feeling of life in your body.

As we drop the more concentrated aspect of our tracking of that breath with awareness,

You might feel that it just simply continues.

Should anything arise emotionally or mentally within you that,

You know,

Sort of takes you over,

I would invite you just to return to the orbit of the breath as a way of just continuing your practice.

Referring to Reverend Master Dogen's instructions on how to practice Zen,

He says,

Give up everything.

I know many of you will have heard me talk about this before.

Give up everything does not mean reject anything.

It doesn't mean push everything away and be isolated and you've got to be like this for the rest of your life.

It means that in this moment,

You ungrip from what you are holding on to.

Just open your hands.

It's like a change between white knuckling to simply open your hands and just let everything rest.

So we ungrip from them,

Not reject,

Not falsely pretend that things have changed.

When we do this,

Or we're enabled in this because we are on in the ground of awareness and it's safe when you stand in the ground of being an awareness.

Aware of the life in your body or your clothes against your skin,

Yourself in the room,

Yourself sitting here with this community,

Not pulling away from the world,

Not adding extra effort and trying to be a meditator,

But just simply an aware,

Alive in this moment,

Human being that is you,

Wonderful you.

You're not meant to be somebody else.

You are you.

With this illumination of awareness,

We become congruent with ourselves more and then the you actually shines.

What an adventure.

So of course,

As we give up everything,

As we open our spiritual hand inside ourselves,

You notice that there are things that you can't ungrip from.

You notice that there are things that you are hanging on to for dear life,

Aspects of identity,

Traumas,

Entrenchments,

Conditioning,

Vasana.

And again,

This doesn't make us faulty.

This just is how it is.

But as we look from awareness,

We can actually meet those things where we hold tight with love rather than rejection.

We can admit to them within ourselves,

Not as an opal me,

But we let the awareness simply meet what is there.

And that is the way that these things begin to be reintegrated,

To be met with love and to change.

You notice if anything is arising emotionally in the same way.

And we notice that we have a choice either to move into stories and drama around each thing,

Incarnate into the same old,

Same old that has been handed down to us through generations and families and cultures and so on,

And identify with those,

Or we have the freedom of being and awareness.

So I invite you just to allow authentic aspect of yourself.

I just want to invite you to feel into that basic sense of self and to realize your innocence whatever age you are,

It's like there's something young and yet eternal.

And you feel that vibrancy right through your body,

Right through your experience.

It's so beautiful.

You are so beautiful.

Notice this is not dependent on anybody else.

You're not depending on the world to change and give you this.

In Zen,

They call this your original face before you were born.

Feel that innocence and eternal newness,

Allowing this innocence through.

Notice the strength of this innocence.

It's not a naive innocence.

Letting that beauty through into our expressions and our actions and letting that basic goodness through,

Letting it actually move into our workplaces,

Into our relationships.

We don't need to sell ourselves or tell anybody anything.

It's just how we groove,

How we move.

And you know it by your sense of presence and authenticity.

And we're not being anybody special.

We become ordinarily beautiful.

One of the great drawbacks I find of guided meditation is that there's an onus on this person who seemingly is holding the space to say things.

So let's just drop out of that for a few minutes and just be with each other.

Let's have five minutes or so of just being in silence with each other,

Inviting you just to be aware of the feeling of life in your body,

Aware of yourself sitting on the meditation cushion,

Clothes against your skin,

The room around you,

The rising and falling of your belly and your chest with breath,

The movement of your back with breath,

Your feet,

Your head,

Your face.

And when you're ready,

Without rejecting the practice or pulling back into story and drama and things,

Allow yourself just to come to the more daily aspect of awareness.

Let's draw this practice to a class.

Reviews

Very nice! Thank you!

It’s always a gift to be able to sit with John. Thank you 🙏

Such a wonderful experience, thank you John. I love the orbital breath, will use that when I get distracted by something. And the idea of loosening the grip, meditation shouldn’t involve effort! Love to you 🙏 🌟

Oh John, this was absolutely wonderful. It was precisely what I needed today and I didn’t know it. Bless you. So grateful.

Such a lovely experience of simply being with myself. I loved the reminder of rejecting nothing and thereby opening to our ordinary beauty. Much needed for me today. Thank you so much John and many blessings 🌻🐢🦋

John, thank you for guiding me with my “ orbiting of my breath “ beauty!