Today we're going to look at doing a mindfulness glimpse.
Basically a short mindfulness practice that will help you to investigate mindfulness,
Clarify some illusions that you might be perceiving,
And to start seeing reality for what it is.
So what I want you to do for this mindfulness glimpse is to close your eyes,
Take a big deep breath in through the nose and out through the mouth,
And draw your attention to the sensations coming from your hands.
Notice any feelings of warmth or coolness,
Pressure or pain,
Any feelings of tension or itchiness.
Now I want you to focus on the general shape.
Notice that rather than feeling a specific finger or all of our fingers,
And our hands,
And every aspect,
We instead feel this sort of cloud of sensation.
It's constantly changing,
It's very subtle,
But it's not a sensation of each individual finger and the entirety of our hands.
This concept of a cloud of sensation goes against what our initial assumptions of what our physical sensations of our hands will be.
Before we investigate it,
It's easy to assume that we will just feel every aspect of our body,
Because our mind has this way of interpreting sensation data and filtering it through what it knows to be the truth of reality,
In the sense that your brain knows that you have a set of fingers on your hands,
And it knows that you feel from those fingers on those hands.
The reality of the sensation is that you feel a cloud,
Not a distinct individual sensation from each finger.
This might seem a little bit trivial,
Like why am I driving on this point?
Well the reason is that when you investigate the sensations coming from your hands from a mindful perspective,
That is,
Notice what you're actually feeling,
Not what you think you're feeling.
You'll see the truth of reality.
There is an analogy here to all of sensation.
This mindfulness glimpse shows you in a micro sense some of the potential illusions that we're experiencing on a macro sense.
Prior to this meditation,
We may assume that we feel one way,
But the reality is,
When we look at it mindfully,
We experience it another way.
So then the question becomes,
What else are we confused about?
What other illusions are we currently living through?
With continued mindfulness practice,
We can start to pull back the veil of illusion and see reality for what it is.
So I encourage you to do this mindfulness glimpse every so often and just feel what you're actually feeling,
Rather than what you think you're feeling.
Good luck.
