Mountain Meditation.
Making yourself comfortable,
Either sat down or laid down.
Closing your eyes and bringing your attention to the flow of your breathing.
Feeling each in-breath and each out-breath.
Just observing your breathing without trying to change it or regulate it in any way.
Allowing the body to be still.
And lying or sitting with a sense of dignity,
A sense of resolve,
A sense of being complete,
Whole and in this very moment.
And as you sit here picturing in your mind's eye as best you can,
The most beautiful mountain that you know or have seen or can imagine.
Just holding the image and feeling of this mountain in your mind's eye,
Letting it gradually come into greater focus.
Observing its overall shape,
Its lofty high peak in the sky,
The large base rooted in the rock of the Earth's crust.
Its steep or gently sloping sides.
And just noticing how massive it is,
How solid,
How unmoving and how beautiful both from afar and up close.
Perhaps your mountain has snow at the top and trees on the lower slopes.
Perhaps it has one prominent peak,
Perhaps a series of high peaks or a high plateau.
Whatever its shape or appearance,
Just sitting and breathing with the image of this mountain.
Observing it,
Noticing its qualities.
When you feel ready,
Seeing if you can bring the mountain into your own body so that the body sitting here and the mountain in your mind's eye become one.
So as you sit here,
You share in the massiveness and stillness and majesty of the mountain.
You become the mountain rooted in the sitting posture.
Your head becomes the lofty peak supported by the rest of the body.
Your shoulders and arms,
The sides of the mountain.
Your buttocks and legs,
The solid base rooted to your chair.
Experiencing in your body a sense of uplift from deep within your pelvis and spine.
With each breath as you continue sitting,
Becoming a little more like the breathing mountain.
Unwavering in your stillness,
Completely what you are,
Beyond words and thought.
A centered,
Rooted,
Unmoving presence.
Now as you sit here,
Becoming aware of the fact that as the sun travels across the sky,
The light and shadows and colors are changing virtually moment by moment.
Night follows day and day follows night.
A canopy of stars,
The moon,
Then the sun.
Through it all,
The mountain just sits experiencing a change in each moment,
Constantly changing 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.
Someness abiding will change.
In summer there's no snow on the mountain,
Except perhaps for the very high peaks.
In autumn the mountain may wear a coat of brilliant fire colors.
In winter a blanket of snow and ice,
And in any season it may find itself at times enshrouded in clouds or fog or pelted by a 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.
But none of this matters to the mountain which remains at all times its essential self.
Clouds may come and clouds may go.
The mountain's magnificence and beauty are not changed one bit by the way people see it or not.
Or by the weather.
Seen or unseen in clouds or sun,
Boiling or cold,
Day or night,
It just sits being itself.
At times it's visited by violent storms,
Buffeted by snow and rain and winds of unthinkable magnitude.
But through it all the mountain continues to sit unmoved by the weather,
By what happens on the surface,
Or by the world of appearances.
And in the same way as we sit in meditation we can learn to experience the mountain.
We can embody the same unwavering stillness and rootedness in the face of everything that changes in our own lives,
Over seconds,
Over hours or years.
In our lives and in our meditation practice we constantly experience the changing nature of mind and body and of the outer world.
We have our own periods of light and darkness,
Our moments of colour and our moments of drabness.
Certainly we experience storms of varying intensity and violence in our outer world and in our minds and bodies.
We endure periods of darkness and pain as well as moments of joy.
And our appearance changes constantly,
Experiencing a weather of its own.
By becoming the mountain in our meditation practice we can link up with its strength and stability and adopt it for our own.
We can use its energies to support our energy to encounter each moment with mindfulness and equanimity and clarity.
It may help us to see that our thoughts and feelings,
Our preoccupations,
Our emotional storms and crises,
Even the things that happen to us are very much like the weather on the mountain.
But 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's to be encountered,
Honoured,
Felt,
Known for what it is and held in our awareness.
In holding it in this way we come to know a deeper silence and stillness and wisdom.
Please have this to teach us and much more if we can come to listen.
