Bell Come into a comfortable posture,
Either seated or lying down.
With your eyes closed or with a softened gaze,
Take a few comfortable deep breaths.
A nice way to develop energy for meditation at the beginning of a session is to gladden the mind.
Sometimes just bringing a soft smile to your lips does the trick.
Or you can allow happiness to develop in response to the simple fact that you are making an effort to care for your well-being.
Take a few moments to observe any traces or larger perceptions of gladness that you can detect in your mind.
Become aware of your breathing.
Notice each time you breathe in and each time you breathe out.
Your sense of your breath comes from its flow throughout your body.
Notice how the breath and body interact.
See if you can become aware of your entire body at the same time as it breathes.
Allow your awareness to be broad but light.
Now locate a place in your body where some sensation is particularly noticeable.
This can be a sensation of pressure or light contact or something more intense like a painful sensation.
Once you have chosen a sensation,
Try to stay with just that one for now.
Begin to draw your awareness as close to the exact spot of the sensation as possible.
For example,
If it is in your knee,
Can you detect which side it's on,
How deep it is,
How large it is?
Come in on the sensation.
What is the nature of the sensation?
If it is pressure,
What kind of pressure is it?
If it's pain,
Is it pinching,
Pulling,
Sharp or dull?
Watch this sensation.
As you hold it in your mind,
Observe which aspects of the sensation change and which ones stay the same.
Now let this sensation go for now and return to your breathing.
Let your breathing flow very naturally and just observe it within your body.
Again,
Allow your awareness to extend to your body as a whole.
Push the body again for a different sensation than the last one you observed.
If you chose a painful sensation before,
Maybe try a pleasant or neutral sensation this time.
It's up to you.
Take a moment to find a sensation and hold it in mind.
As before,
Become intimately aware of the precise place and nature of this sensation.
How does this sensation change over the course of time?
This time,
Instead of moving right away from the sensation,
Slowly zoom out.
Allowing the context in which you view the sensation to grow.
Starting on the smallest spot,
Begin pulling your attention back to include more and more of your body.
Zoom out to the general area of the sensation.
Now to the quadrant of the body the sensation is in.
Keep very slowly zooming out until you observe the sensation in the context of the whole body.
How does the sensation change as seen in the context of different levels of body awareness?
Return once again to your breathing.
Notice how your breathing too exists within the context of your whole body.
You can observe it in one spot like the end of your nose or your belly.
You can experience the air moving through the whole respiratory system.
And you can experience full body awareness.
In this way,
Explore your breath for a few moments.
Taking this time to develop your mindfulness and concentration in relationship to your body is a very powerful platform for understanding.
At the end of a meditation,
Appreciating the effort that was put forth to cultivate well-being can be a great source of joy.
