Beginning Meditation, Week 5: Patterns

This guided meditation introduces mindfulness of patterns, both personal and universal.

Transcript

Coming into a meditative posture, Sitting up straight so the spinal energy can flow freely from the base of the spine to the top of the head. And taking a position that you can be still in for 35 minutes. Letting the arms relax and hang down straight from the shoulders. And if you're sitting in a chair, Let your feet be flat on the floor. And taking three deep breaths of arrival. As you take these breaths, You let the mind go down deep into the body. Pulling the shoulders back slightly to open up the chest and the heart. And then just tucking in the chin a tiny bit, Keeping the spine aligned so that your posture is alert and awake and shows some nobility of what you're about. And then coming into the room, Even though your eyes are closed, You sense the place where you are being very present to wherever you are. Feeling the air on your skin, Noticing any aromas, Noticing sounds from inside or outside and just being very present to your circumstances. And coming into your body. Just really letting your mind experience your body. What does your body feel like? And very quickly beginning with your toes, Sweeping up the body, Feeling your feet, Your ankles, Your shins and your calves, Coming up to feel your knees and behind your knees and your thighs, Your buttocks on the chair or the pillow and your hips and your lower abdomen, Feeling your belly and your waist and coming up to your torso, Feeling your diaphragm, Your breasts, Your shoulders and clavicles and moving down to your fingertips, Feeling all your fingers, Palms of your hand and the back of your hand, Your wrists, Your forearms, Your elbows, Your upper arms and your shoulders where your arms join your torso and moving up into your neck, Feeling the vertebrae in your neck and how your vertebrae come up into your back and up into your head, Feeling your whole head, Feeling the back of your head and all the area where your hair grows, Feeling your chin, Under your chin and your chin and then feeling your cheeks and your lips, Your nose, Your eyes, Your eyebrows, Your temples, Your forehead and feeling the crown of your head and that spot at the very, Very top of your head and just feeling lifted up at that spot and now just feeling the entire body again, Breathing into the entire body. Okay. Now examining the quality of your emotional state, Do you have any mood going on at the moment or are you relatively neutral? Sometimes we're in a really good mood, Sometimes we may be in a negative mood, Bored or other negative emotions so if you do have a mood going on, It's like the weather, It will filter everything and so just be aware of it, There's no need to change it, Just bringing everything into awareness. If you're having any strong emotions at this time, Just be aware of those emotions. Okay. And let's turn now to the breath, Our home base, Our anchor point, The place we always start and the place we always come back to if the waters of meditation get rocky. So just find your breath at the point where you have chosen to watch your breath for some weeks or months. It may be the tip of the nose or the chest or the belly. At the tip of the nose you can feel the air passing over the upper lip and into the nostril and then the slightly warmer air coming back out, In, Out. In the chest you can feel the rising and falling. If you choose to watch your breath in the belly, You feel it expanding and contracting. So just stay with the breath for a little while. Just settling down into the breath. Suggest a lot of vibration. Okay. One of the things we first notice when we begin to meditate is how active the mind is, How our thoughts are always going, How our stream of consciousness is never ending and always jumping from one subject to the next, Sometimes without much rhyme or reason. And so we learn to not take the mind so seriously and just to watch our thoughts, Let them stay in the background as we focus on the breath. And sometimes the thoughts may lead us down a garden path. We find ourselves on a long train of thought and suddenly wake up and realize we're no longer following the breath. And that is a moment of awakening and time to be happy that we realized we had left the breath and not to judge ourselves or censure ourselves because it will happen a thousand times. Learn what let's begin with. Always in meditation we want to keep an atmosphere of kindness, Gentleness, Compassion for ourselves. We are doing our best, Making an effort, Wanting to make some kind of peace with ourselves through meditation. We are doing our best, Making an effort, Wanting to make some kind of peace with ourselves through meditation. We are doing our best, Making an effort, Wanting to make some kind of peace with ourselves through meditation. As we continue to meditate we begin to notice patterns. First of all we notice our own patterns, Our personal patterns. We notice them in meditation and we notice them in life. In a way everything that happens in life also happens in meditation. It's called the practice because we can practice in meditation. It's like a laboratory where we can see how things work and try things out. We may notice that we have certain personality patterns, That we have an addictive personality or we have an emotionally dependent personality. We may notice that we have patterns of thinking, Patterns of feeling that we've developed over many years and we really get to know ourselves. We may notice patterns of10, That we can experience with our own dying Lisbon, 0, That we have And sometimes it may be difficult to see these patterns because they're not all so skillful and they may be patterns that we need to change. We can also notice our patterns that are strong and do really work for us. Maybe we're a really good judge of character. Maybe we are very hard workers and we put big effort into everything that we do. So we need to have a balanced look at our patterns, Our strengths and our weaknesses. I'm not sure how I got into this. One of the important ideas of Buddhism is the idea of karma. Karma says that there is cause and effect. Whatever we do, Skillful or unskillful, So shall we inherit. We don't always act out of cause and effect. We're not always in alignment with the facts of cause and effect. And we do things that are going to bring us suffering later without taking the time to be aware of that, Without wanting to be aware of it sometimes. So as we meditate, We see this cause and effect over and over. We can bring it to our actual lives. Another thing we see in meditation are universal patterns, Universal truths. Truths of how things work in this world, The Dharma, The truth of the teachings of the Buddha and the truth of other teachings, Great universal truths, How the world works. We see that there is a lot of suffering in this world. And that we ourselves suffer a great deal. And we begin to realize that our suffering comes from refusing to be with things as they are, Wanting things to be different, And clinging to that, Holding on and refusing to let go. As we understand that, We learn how to let go more and more. So, These patterns are really important. And one of the things we can do in meditation is have times of reflection, Just looking over, Spending 10 or 15 minutes reflecting on our patterns or on universal patterns. That's another form of meditation that you can try. Okay? Since this is our last guided meditation, I'm going to really give you some quiet time to stay with your breath and practice the techniques of counting or noting in and out, Rising, Falling, Expanding, Contracting. Watching if strong bodily sensations come up and making them the object of the meditation while they arise. Watching if strong emotions come up, Letting them be the object of meditation if they become so strong in the foreground. And watching our thoughts and noticing when we leave the breath and run off on a train of thought and how we come back. So I'll stop talking now for a while and you can work with your own meditation in silence until you hear the bell. And, You know, Edibility. Is that in Swami? You you you

Reviews

Namaste 🙏

Just finished day five. I thank you so much,I have learned more than I expected. Will use this course as my go to when I need to get back to my base.
LL&B Dave

Totally absorbing, complete and beautiful.
Thank you Mary. Metta to you.
Namaste.

Time for practice between each "guidence". Well done. Thank you.

Recognizing patterns in ourselves is a powerful tool that can help to further our awareness