Mountain Meditation for Centering

An accessible meditation for calming your mind, adapted from the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn. I offer this to my clients when they're feeling overwhelmed or anxious.

Transcript

This is Nicole Aloni with a guided meditation created especially for my clients and students.

This is a guided mountain meditation.

This accessible meditation for calming and centering your mind is adapted from the mindfulness teachings of John Cabot Zinn.

I recommend you work with this meditation anytime you're feeling off-kilter,

Anxious or fearful.

Mountain meditation is a powerful redirection from our normal doing behaviors to a simply being state.

Many have found that the being-centered or inner-directed state is where we most easily access our authentic connection to ourselves and our spiritual nature.

This meditation is normally done in a sitting position,

Either on the floor or a chair.

Find a position of stability and poise with your upper body balanced over your hips and shoulders in a comfortable but erect posture,

Hands on your lap or your knees,

Arms hanging by their own weight.

When you're ready,

Allow your eyes to close,

Bringing awareness to breath,

The actual physical sensation of it,

Feeling each breath as it comes in and goes out,

Letting the breath be just as it is without trying to change or regulate it in any way,

Merely paying attention.

As you allow it to flow easily and naturally with its own rhythm and pace,

Know you are breathing perfectly well right now,

Nothing for you to do.

Just breathe.

Now let an image form in your mind's eye of the most magnificent or beautiful mountain you know or have seen or can imagine,

Letting it gradually come into greater focus.

And if it doesn't come as a visual image,

Just allow the sense of this mountain and feel its overall shape,

Its lofty peak or peaks high in the sky,

The large base rooted in the bedrock of the Earth's crust.

Notice how massive it is,

How solid,

How unmoving,

How beautiful.

Perhaps your mountain has snow blanketing its top and trees covering its sides or rugged granite cliffs.

There may be streams and waterfalls cascading down the slopes.

Just observe it,

Appreciating its qualities.

And when you feel ready,

Imagine that you are the mountain.

Allow your body to be still,

Sitting with a sense of dignity,

A sense of resolve,

A sense of being complete,

Whole in this very moment with your posture rising up into the air like the lofty peak of that mountain,

Affording you a panoramic view of the land around for many miles.

Enjoy this glorious view.

With each breath,

As you continue sitting,

You become a little more a breathing mountain,

Alive and vital,

Yet unwavering in your inner stillness,

Completely what you are,

Beyond words and thought,

A centered,

Grounded,

Unmoving presence.

And as you sit here,

Become aware of the fact that as the sun travels across the sky,

The light and shadows and colors are changing virtually moment by moment across your mountain stillness.

And the surface teams with life and activity.

There are streams and melting snow and waterfalls,

Plants and wildlife.

Day follows night.

Night follows day.

And seasons move from one to the next.

And year after year,

The mountain abides.

The bright warming sun followed by the cool night sky studded with stars,

And then the gradual dawning of a new day.

Mountains are very,

Very good at sitting.

Spring comes.

Trees leaf out.

Flowers bloom in the high meadows and slopes.

Birds sing in the trees once again.

Streams overflow with the waters of melting snow.

And in the fall,

The mountain may wear a coat of brilliant fire colors.

And in winter,

A blanket of snow and ice.

The mountain is so majestic,

Massive,

Unmoving.

Through it all,

The mountain just sits,

Experiencing change in each moment,

Yet at its center,

Always just being itself.

Still,

As the seasons flow across its surface and the weather changes moment by moment and day by day,

Calmness abiding all change.

Through it all,

The mountain continues to sit,

Unmoved by the weather,

By what happens on its surface,

By the world of appearances.

Remaining its essential self through the seasons,

The changing weather,

The activity ebbing and flowing on its surface.

In the same way,

As we sit in this meditation,

We can learn to experience the same unwavering stillness and groundedness in the face of everything that changes in our own lives.

For seconds,

Over hours,

Over years.

And when thoughts or emotions come,

We can watch them move through us,

Through our mind,

Like birds flitting through the sky above the mountain.

We don't need to pursue them or reject them or hold on to their content.

We can allow it all to be like the seasons on the mountain,

Weather patterns that we don't have to identify with as being intrinsically us,

Ourself.

Simply resting from moment to moment in the awareness that like the boundless sky,

Our mind can hold anything and everything that arises,

Pleasant or unpleasant or neither.

We can take residence in the mountain in the only moment we ever have,

At the crossroads of here and now.

Allow yourself to really be at home here,

Just like the mountain,

Fully here,

Fully awake,

Fully.

Way beyond name,

Story,

History,

Narrative.

Just this moment,

Just this breath.

Just this sitting here with no agenda.

Just this being human.

Of course,

We are interesting mountains because we can dance and we can sing.

In our lives,

We constantly experience the changing nature of mind and body and of the outer world.

We have our own periods of light and darkness,

Activity and inactivity.

Even our appearance changes constantly,

Experiencing a weather of its own.

By becoming the mountain in this meditation practice,

We can embody its strength and stability and adopt them for our own.

We can use its wisdom to remind us 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.

We tend to take it all personally,

But really,

It's just our path.

The weather of our own lives is not to be ignored or denied.

It is to be encountered,

Honored,

Felt,

Known for what it is and held in awareness.

Mountains have this to teach us and much more if we can let it in.

In the time that remains,

Continue to embody the strength and stability of the mountain on your own in silence,

Moment by moment,

Until you hear the sound of the bells.

Now the mountain can open its eyes.

If you've found that you resonate in some way with the strength and stability of the mountain meditation,

It may be helpful to use it from time to time to remind you of what it means to sit mindfully,

With resolve and with wakefulness in true stillness.

Blessings be.

Reviews

A wonderful reminder that we are bigger than our feelings and thoughts.

Thank you 🙏🏻

Great grounding meditation

just what was needed now

After experiencing rock climbing on half dome, this meditation fit everything I needed perfectly after a hard morning with my kids.
Thank you

Beautiful, and just what I needed.

I love this meditation for grounding and sitting silently. Thank you so mich for sharing.

I found this meditation to be something that calmed my anxious mind and easy to enter into. Very beautiful.

Be the mountain...😉

This is a powerful grounding meditation, thank you

I just wish the visualization didn't include the snow and the flowers in the meadows because my mountain is in the desert. Just as beautiful and majestic. And I sort of have to visualize past the visualization. Which is okay. But would love to hear a meditation about a mountain that's jagged and rugged and hot and somewhat desolate.

Really helped me calm down. I was feeling overwhelmed and full of anxiety about work and upcoming events/due dates. This really took the edge off. Thank you!

Wow! Definitely will remember mountain meditation(s)....love the weather analogy. Thank you so much!!

What a wonderful experience. Thank you.

I love this meditation, and I like this one in particularly, thank you!

Excellent calming and wonderful visualization!! Also insightful and gave me a lot to think about, thank you!!

Lots of essential insight on the nature of being. Thank you!

Much appreciated. I like the short explanations at the beginning and end of the meditation. Will revisit this one. Bookmarked! Thank you

Lovely thank you