Beginning Meditation, Week 2: Bodily Sensations

This guided meditation introduces mindfulness of bodily sensations.

Transcript

Bring yourself into a meditative posture,

Either sitting on a chair or on pillows on the floor.

And position your body in a way that you can be relatively still for 20 to 25 minutes.

And above all,

Make sure that your spine is straight.

Close your eyes.

Now bring yourself into this room,

Into this place,

Wherever you are.

Be present.

Bring yourself into your body.

Experience how your body feels.

And bring yourself into this present moment.

Let go of the past.

Anything that may have happened previously today,

Just set that aside for now.

And let go of the future.

Anything that may be coming up later today,

Just let go of all that too.

And just be here right in this present moment,

Right now,

Without thinking about the future or the past.

Bring your attention to your body and notice what your body feels like.

Is it hurting in any way?

Is there any part of your body that feels especially good?

What are parts of your body that are just neutral?

Notice some of the neutral parts of your body.

We tend to overlook the neutral.

If you're sitting in a chair,

Be sure that your feet are flat on the floor.

Whether you're sitting in a chair or on the floor,

Be sure that you have a nice solid base to sit on.

Check your arms and that they are comfortable and not being held too far forward or pushed too far back.

It's best if you can let your arms just fall from the shoulder down to the elbow.

Because if you pull your arms too far forward or push them back,

It will cause pain in your back.

And now add some alertness to your posture,

Some interest and curiosity and even some nobility because this is a very great thing you are doing for yourself by meditating.

And you can feel that and show it in your body posture.

So come into this very present moment and notice your surroundings.

Without opening your eyes,

Just feel the room that you're in.

Notice the air,

Notice how the air feels on your skin.

Notice any sounds,

If there are any background noises.

Just notice everything about this place where you are right now.

What does it sound like?

What does it feel like?

Are there any aromas passing by?

Be fully present in this room.

Be fully present in this body.

Fully present in this moment.

Now take three deep breaths to just totally arrive.

The next thing we want to do when we begin meditation is bring our attention to the breath.

This is our base,

Our anchor point.

So the first thing we do after we settle in is bring our attention to the breath.

Notice our breathing.

Notice the quality of your breathing.

What is your breath like today?

Are the individual breaths fast or slow?

Are they long or short?

Are they deep or are they shallow?

Is your breath smooth or is it somewhat irregular?

If you were racing,

Running around to get to the meditation,

Can you see that in your breath?

Notice the breath as a complete reflection of where you are at right now.

Not trying to change it,

Very relaxed with it,

Just letting it be.

Now let's refine our noticing of the breath.

Notice the in-breath and notice the out-breath.

Find the location where you are going to pay attention to your breath.

It may be the tip of the nose where you will notice the cool air coming in and the slightly warmer air going back out.

That's the traditional location.

Or you may wish to follow your breath in the area of the chest and notice the rising and falling of your chest with the in-breath and the out-breath.

And some modern teachers recommend keeping your attention on the belly,

Noticing the expansion and the contraction with each breath.

And just so you can note,

Expanding and contracting.

Pick one of these areas,

The tip of the nose,

The chest or the belly,

And keep your attention there for the rest of this meditation during the time that we are following the breath.

That's the place where you are going to watch.

We don't follow the breath all the way in from the nose and through the mouth and down into the lungs and then back out again.

We pick one place on the body and we watch the breath go by,

Like we were sitting on the edge of a river watching the water go by.

So during this meditation,

Try to keep your attention exquisitely on the breath,

Exquisitely focused.

Of course,

You will notice other things,

But let them stay in the background.

Let your awareness of your breath completely fill the foreground.

So notice your in-breath and notice your out-breath,

And notice the difference between them.

For many people,

One of those is longer than the other.

So do you have a very long in-breath and then a tiny little out-breath?

Or do you take in very little and then give back a huge amount?

Could this even be some reflection of your personality?

Maybe.

Try to keep your interest and your attention level very high.

As your mind wander,

Just gently make the choice to come back to the breath.

Because for this short time,

We choose to follow the breath and let everything else go by.

So let's begin.

We talked about how to do these things last week.

For counting,

You would count just the in-breath from 1 to 10 and then start over.

For noting,

You would just note the in-breath and note the out-breath with the very soft words in and out.

Or you may wish to use rising,

Falling,

Or expanding,

Contracting,

Depending on where you're watching your breath.

So we'll do about 10 breaths using counting or noting and seeing if you can really stay with the breath.

And if your mind wanders,

Just bring it back.

If you lose count,

Just start over.

Just stay with the breath.

One more time.

Let's do that again.

Let's do another 10 breaths,

Counting or noting.

Just being with the breath.

Thin.

Now during meditation,

Quite often,

Some part of the body will begin to speak to you.

And perhaps you have an area of your body right now that is calling for your attention.

And if not,

Just pick some part of the body to work with.

And move your attention off the breath and onto the sensation in that part of the body.

For example,

You may have a pain in your knee,

What you call a pain in your knee.

So you move your attention off the breath and into the knee,

Right into the knee to the very location of the sensation that you are calling pain.

And you see if you can hold your attention there with curiosity and interest.

Just like you were watching your breath,

Now you watch this sensation.

When a sensation becomes so strong that it can no longer stay in the background,

We leave the breath and we make the sensation the object of our meditation.

So we ask,

What is this sensation like?

We try to let it in and really experience it deeply.

Experience it with our whole being.

And we ask questions,

Is it warm or cold?

Is it throbbing or is it continuous?

What are the qualities of this sensation?

Is it itching?

Is it burning?

Is it cold?

What does it feel like?

Most of the time we notice that a sensation is not continuous,

Especially with what we call pain.

If we really probe,

We'll find that there are a few moments of pain and then there are a few moments where the pain recedes and there really is no pain going on,

No sensation going on.

It comes back and then it recedes again.

It's like labor,

It comes and it goes.

And we can take refuge in those moments when the difficulty recedes and really relax into them.

We begin to understand that what we call pain is not really so terrible.

So if we really go in and investigate this sensation,

It might get really interesting.

We likely will find that the sensation will shift and change and move around.

The sensation may be on one side of the knee and then it might move to the middle of the knee and then we'll find out it's on the other side of the knee.

And what we thought was this solid thing called pain is really a very living,

Dynamic process.

And a lot of what we don't look at so closely,

We see it a gross way and here we're really refining our experience and it changes everything.

So this bodily sensation is now the object of our meditation.

And one thing we want to do is to try not to judge it,

To try not to push it away,

To just be with things as they are.

It's the purpose of meditation,

To see things as they truly are.

Not to try to get more of the good stuff and not to try to get less of the bad stuff,

But to surrender to things and let them be as they are.

A wonderful thing we can do if we are experiencing pain is to bring compassion to ourselves because you may be suffering a little here.

Meditation is not always so easy.

So we bring kindness and compassion and real caring for ourselves.

And sometimes when we do that you may even kind of break down and cry a little bit and have a release and notice how much less the pain is after that.

While we meditate we can practice and we know that a pain in the knee is not the end of the world,

But it's a practice and can help us to make it easier to handle some of the really big things that happen in life.

Because all of us are going,

If we are lucky we will get older and if we are lucky our body will probably have some troubles as we get older.

And so we need to develop this equanimity and this attitude of being with it as it is.

So that our suffering is relieved to some degree.

So we bring gentleness and kindness and compassion to ourselves.

All during our meditation we keep an atmosphere of approval and kindness.

So many of us have an inner voice that is going on all the time criticizing us,

Tearing us apart.

We want to recognize that voice and ask it to go away.

Tell it that right now we are busy being kind to ourselves.

Meditation should be like a mental spa where we treat ourselves beautifully.

Sometimes if we can really stay with the sensation,

Really focus and investigate,

Especially with the pain,

We may find that the pain disappears.

This is an amazing thing.

In fact lots of what we call pain is preconception and resistance and very little of the experience is actually the sensation that is painful.

We seize up and we hold the body against the sensation.

But if we try to relax around it and just let all the muscles in that area go and gently relax,

Then the pain is not so much.

When a bodily sensation begins to subside and all bodily sensations do subside,

They come for a while and then they go away because they are impermanent.

So when a bodily sensation does start to go away,

We bring the attention back to the breath.

Let's do that now,

Just returning to the breath.

What's the breath like now?

Has it changed from 20 minutes ago?

When we began the meditation?

Is it smoother?

Is it longer?

Is it deeper?

Has it changed during this meditation?

And over the last few minutes of this meditation,

I'm going to be quiet.

You can do counting or noting if that will help you to stay with the breath.

And please just continue until you hear the bell.

You can do counting or noting if that will help you to stay with the breath.

Reviews

For those new to meditation this might be a good place to start as there is quite a bit of guidance and explanation.

Wonderful guidance.

Perfect! Timing great ,focus on breath.