This meditation is designed to help with the pain and suffering that one might be enduring and navigating through life,
You know,
Through difficult times and trying to find footing for something that might feel unstable,
That might feel ungrounded or incredibly unclear.
In our human experience,
Life will systematically gift us or teach us through suffering.
And the suffering is an invitation.
It's a reckoning with the way we've seen things and an invitation to look at it a different way.
And although not to minimize suffering,
Suffering is a sacred experience.
It's profound in its depth and intensity.
And so when we're being met with difficulty that feels unfathomable or just hard to hold,
We need practices that help us sustain ourselves so that our minds have a place to travel that feels sustainable and that our hearts have a place to rest in that doesn't constantly feel destructive.
And so bring yourself into a seat.
And when you're ready,
Close your eyes.
And take a full breath in.
And a long breath out.
And start to track your breath.
And the tracking of your breath is a visceral one.
It's one that you start to feel into your body.
And so that your inhales start to grow in length.
And your exhales start to grow in length.
And the exhale emulates that length,
Length of the inhale.
And there's these slight little pauses between the inhales and exhales and the exhales and inhales.
Yet as you're breathing,
The breath starts to take a rhythm in which it almost feels like you're not dominating it,
It is just occurring.
The breath starts to move in these rhythmic ways that takes away the focus of the mind onto the external.
And the mind can slowly start to ride the wave of attention through the breath.
And see if as the mind interrupts,
If you can slowly bring yourself back to the rhythm of your breath.
Yet as you're doing this,
It's not a dominating over of the mind.
It's an allowing of the mind to allow itself to soften.
And it softens through the rhythm.
It softens through the oceanic flow of the breath where it starts to develop more natural way of floating through the body.
And it's so the tendencies of the mind to fixate on stories that feel unhelpful and possibly unsustainable,
Get washed away.
And the undulation of your breath becomes the most interesting thing.
And you stop trying so hard and you start receiving.
You begin to receive the medicine of the breath and the medicine that is shared through that flow state for the attention.
And begin to relax your shoulders and continue with that movement of breath.
So that my cues are the things that draw you into attention outside of that rhythm of your breath.
So your focus oscillates between your breath and my cues,
My offerings.
Begin to relax your lower jaw and soften your lips.
And move up to the band of your eyes.
And begin to relax your eyes.
So that the mask of the eyes,
Kind of like a Zorro mask,
That softens.
And the eyes go wider and softer.
And the strain that inhabits the temples relaxes.
And start to bring your awareness to the bridge of your nose.
And soften the bridge of your nose.
Now merge those three regions of the face,
The eyes,
The bridge of the nose,
And your softness of your mouth and your lips.
So that they can form a bridge of your nose.
And the region of softness.
They become more unified.
And the maintaining of that is not an over-efforting.
Notice how it requires a softening,
A releasing into.
A surrendering,
If you will.
Bring into your awareness that which you are struggling with.
And see if you can receive it through the softening of the face,
Through the relaxing of the shoulders.
And if you can knit your way through the suffering,
The struggle,
So that you can surrender to the strength of the suffering.
And receive whatever tonic,
Whatever messages that you might have missed up until this point.
And in receiving those,
It's not that you're minimizing the suffering.
You're widening the aperture of your own experience of what you can see.
And as you start to receive that,
Float back into the breath so that your next inhale expands into your body in a way that helps open the places that feel tight and constricted.
And the exhale helps you surrender that which you don't know how to surrender.
So the inhales help create expansion in the body.
And the exhales help release that which you are struggling to release.
You can gently allow that to rest,
That practice of breath.
And notice how you can rest yourself,
Rest a little bit from that struggle that you've been inhabiting.
And receiving some of that sweet nectar that is hidden underneath the suffering.
And you start to receive or feel into that sweetness.
And the sweetness helps open the spaces that you might have missed.
It helps soften the struggle.
And take a full breath in.
