Welcome to our 15-minute guided meditation called Absolute Freedom.
Let's start.
So by now you're sitting down either on a cushion on the floor or on a couch or in a chair and if you're sitting on anything with a backrest go ahead and slide back and let that backrest support your back and if your legs are crossed uncross them place both feet flat on the floor and simply let your hands tumble down and fall into your lap and rest wherever they fall.
Also I invite you to lift slightly the top of your head while you relax the shoulders just a slight lift on the top of the head as you relax your shoulders and let them drop.
This elongates the spine ever so subtly and leaves the body in a wonderfully alert but restful posture ideally suited to meditation.
And now I invite you to close your eyes if you haven't already and let's take three nice deep cleansing breaths.
Breathe in and out and again in and out and one last very deep inhalation and release and remember to keep that pose of the head slightly lifted shoulders dropped restful alertness and now I invite you into a deeply relaxing process beginning with the muscles of the face simply let all of the muscles of the eyes and the mouth of the jaw relax and rest feel all of the tension draining out of them like water into sand leaving the face soft and open and free and again with the neck and shoulders these powerful muscles that carry this 10 pound head around all day and also bear a lot of our anxiety and worry and grief regret let's let all of that go that tiredness that tension and all of that emotional pain that we don't need right now let all that slide away like water slipping into sand and moving our attention now down into the chest and to the hips all of that tension of the body mind let it all go all the preparations of the last days and weeks and all of the aspirations for the coming days and weeks let all that go for now it'll come back when we need it but for now release it and feel it all draining through the legs and out through the bottoms of the feet and into the floor and into the ground beneath the floor and into the core of our Mother Earth who bears all leaving us clean and empty and restful and ready to move into a deeper state of meditation and now I invite you to bring your attention to the mind's eye and the awareness that we have and can direct anywhere we like and move that awareness now into the area of our thoughts our thoughts are like a river that never stopped flowing like a flow of clouds across an open sky and the question arises are we the clouds or are we the sky we are habitually conditioned to identify with our thoughts and say things like I am worried I am afraid I am happy but in the coming minutes let's practice shifting into something different let's practice letting go of our egoic attachment to our thoughts and playing with the possibility that we are the field of awareness through which our thoughts move not our thoughts thoughts happen to us they are not us and by making this one shift we make the most important shift in any meditation practice to shift into a Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita calls the inner witness we are not our thoughts and this can be experienced directly not as doctrine or as a passage in an old book but as an experience when we simply witness a thought come and go without having an opinion about it or a judgment about it and when we practice witnessing our thoughts it becomes clear to us in a moment that we are not our thoughts that we are the awareness through which thoughts come and go and in this realization is absolute freedom to experience directly the fact that we are the infinite spaciousness through which thoughts move not our thoughts we are not our social roles we are not our gender we are not our political affiliation we are not our DNA our race we are not our culture we are not our nation of origin we are not our career we are the spaciousness in which all of these beautiful qualities and attributes coalesce into the ego mind into the person but beneath the level of the person is the universal consciousness which knows no persons and that deep restfulness of the inner witness is beyond all stories and names and masks and as we now prepare to move into a time of silence continually practice shifting back into the inner witness and watch all of the labels and thoughts and feelings float by and in this shifted identification into the inner witness experience yourself absolute freedom you you you you you you you you you you I invite you now to open your eyes and come back into the space of the room that you are in and take in the sensory world and surface consciousness stretch and move about and as we prepare to bring this time of meditation to a close reflect for the rest of your day on this experience of deep deep and absolute freedom beneath the names and forms that so define us we of course are all of those things and play all of those very important and beautiful roles but ever present beneath the waves is this continual changeless absolute freedom and as we prepare now to move into the rest of our wonderful day know that we carry this freedom with us and can check back into it in a moment any time we want thank you namaste you
