Quiet Mind, Open Heart

This is a 15 minute guided meditation with a focus on deepening mindfulness and sustaining attention in the present moment.

Transcript

Welcome to your meditation practice. Today's practice will be a 15 minute guided meditation with a focus on a few techniques that will help us to deepen our mindfulness and sustain our attention in the present moment over longer periods of time. But we begin as we always do by arriving into the environment that surrounds us and establishing a good posture for meditation. So please take a moment to get comfortable and to make sure that you have all the right support in all the right places as you settle into a good meditation seat. You might welcome a few deep breaths to help you arrive and settle. And then let's let the sound of the singing bowl help us to settle even more deeply. Feel the support that is beneath your body and let yourself begin to relax fully into that support. Feel your spine long, Crown of the head aspiring upward, Shoulders balanced over your hips, Hands resting comfortably on your thighs in a way that supports a feeling of uprightness but also a quality of openness and softness in your heart in the front of your body. Relax any unnecessary tension or tightness. And allow your eyes to remain open but let your gaze soften and rest into the space in front of you. Notice if there are any other subtle adjustments that you can make to the alignment of your posture to welcome a feeling of ease and openness that will help you to settle into stillness and stay. And then within this stillness turn your attention towards your breath. We'll spend more time in our practice this week relating with breathing and explore a couple of specific techniques that can help us to stay with the experience of breath in mindfulness for longer periods of time. So the first thing is to notice where in your body you feel the breath most easily. It might be at the tip of your nostrils where you can feel the sensations of breath coming in and leaving your body. It might feel most poignant in the movement of your lungs as they fill and release the breath. Or you might feel the movement of breath in the rise and fall of your abdomen. So notice where in your body and how you feel the breath moving. Remembering that in meditation we're not thinking about the breath but really feeling the breath in a direct and intimate way. When your attention moves away from the breath simply notice and gently return attention to breathing and when you come back every time that you come back let there be just the briefest moment of rejoicing that you're here and really noticing and becoming familiar with what it feels like when you're here fully and how that feels different than when you find yourself in a state of distraction. So we deepen in mindfulness when we rejoice in our remembering and become really familiar with the experience of being here and breathing. When you recognize that you're distracted remember that you're meditating rejoice in the experience of coming back. Be here fully and deepen further by remembering that everything that arises in your experience is included. Accept everything and reject nothing. There is nothing in your experience that's worthy of rejection. So when you come back and you feel the breath and you tune into how you are and where you are let yourself be exactly as you are. This kind of radical self-acceptance helps us to deepen further in our ability and willingness to stay present. Now perhaps these instructions are enough to help you sustain focus in the present moment but if you feel that you need a further support for deepening mindfulness I'm going to encourage you to utilize for the next few minutes the practice of counting the breaths. So breathing in and breathing out you label the cycle of breath one silently noting and continuing to count the breaths up until ten or until you find that you're distracted and have lost track of the counting and then you simply start again at one. Now release the technique of counting the breaths. Now release the technique of counting the breaths. Allow your attention to gently expand to include greater awareness of the feeling of your body sitting here. Noticing what you're present to mentally and emotionally. And opening further to the space and the environment around you. Just letting everything be as it is. And as we close our meditation for today I'll invite you to once again rejoice, To rejoice in the fact that you have made time and created the space for you to be here. To just inwardly acknowledge the benefit of having done so both for you and for the world around you. May all beings be well. May all beings be happy. Peace, Peace, Peace. Thank you for practicing with me.

Reviews

Lovely as usual. Great balance of guidance and quiet. Thank you!

Thanks for the silences, the techniques shared and giving me space to experiment.
Peace.

Lovely meditation- just what I needed today! Will come back and listen again! Thank you! 💞

This meditation not only advanced my practice instantly, but effortlessly spilled over into my daily activity. “Rejoice, in the coming back to breath.” Soft, gentle voice, caring, calming tone. “Rejoicing.”

I loved the bells
Also plenty of quiet space between gentle guidance