Hello,
Welcome to this practice.
I invite you to find a comfortable position,
One that respects the needs of your body.
My name is David.
We will sit to simply rest here together with a sense of equanimity,
Simply to feel as we are.
What would it be like to radically accept what we feel?
Allowing your body to shift and sway,
As if moved by a summer breeze,
Releasing tension where you can,
Allowing an active,
Flexible fluidity to be alive within and through your posture.
Even now,
Perhaps you can feel the glimmers of ease and grace arising.
Perhaps you feel tension or whispers of a difficulty too.
All is okay,
Whatever presents itself to you.
Equanimity breathed into it all.
Equanimity,
The radical acceptance to feel.
Perhaps you may feel your forehead soften a little,
Your eyes giving up the need to turn to the world,
To know,
To see,
The muscles in your face,
The need to show who you are to anyone,
Your jaw,
The need to speak words to the world.
There is no need to find your breath.
Simply,
I invite you to recognise it has always been here,
Flowing,
Moving through you,
Within you,
As you.
It has never been something lost,
That now must be found or returned to.
Rest now,
Falling totally and unconditionally into this moment,
This time,
This space.
Nowhere to be,
Nothing to do,
No thing to achieve.
Feeling the magic of your breath,
In-breath and out-breath.
One indivisible flow of breathing,
A single organic thread,
Forever running through you,
Carrying you aloft in life.
Feeling how deeply the air falls into your body,
How it feels for your breath to fall out from you,
The world once more.
Noticing what is alive in you now,
How in the story of past and future to fall away.
Giving up the idea of what's not here,
Releasing the hope of what should be here,
Accepting radically what is here,
And gentle attention to the dance of physical sensations here,
What is happening here,
Where you are.
How do you brace against being here?
How do you lean into being here?
Noticing any resistance to being here,
Now,
On this day,
This hour,
This time,
This moment.
There is only this moment,
There is only this being here.
Even carrying the idea of healing,
Maybe a subtle resistance to now,
Possibly what calls to be healed,
Yearns only to be held.
Be curious,
Open-hearted curiosity,
Receptivity to what is.
Allowing all radical acceptance to feel,
To feel the rhythm of your humanity,
Without leaning,
Without bracing against dark.
This is how equanimity moves and flows through you.
You are not trying to make anything happen,
Can you simply be here,
And everything flows as change.
Can you sense you are here,
Dancing at the edge of an orchestra of chaos,
Where we are always changing in millions of unknown magical ways,
In order to remain the same.
You are not seeking a different experience or state from what is already here,
Only here now.
This experience,
This state,
This day,
This hour,
This moment,
This immediacy,
Where you can only be.
What is it like to be alive,
Here?
What is it like to be uniquely,
Exquisitely,
You,
Contacting this moment in its freshness.
Could this moment be your anchor,
Your cosmic home in a chaotic,
Ever-changing world?
Resting back a little,
Surrendering simplicity,
Eventually,
Inevitably,
Move into patterns of thinking,
Cascading into more patterns of thoughts,
Flickers of images,
Murmurs of memory,
Swirls of sensation.
It is okay when this happens,
I ask you to feel the softness of a gentle smile being written to the edge of your lips.
Perhaps this smile can fall into your body too,
As an emerging embodied sense of gratitude,
Perhaps.
In these moments of patterned thought we can recognise that knowing our mind has moved is simply an act of being mindful.
And we may even embrace the delight of this moment by saying to ourselves,
Right now it is like this.
Possibly,
Once again,
To thought,
Smiling,
Acknowledging with grace that right now it is like this.
It is often encouraged to return to the breath,
But I ask you,
Where was the breath?
If not here all along,
Is it possible instead?
All we may need is a remembering that our flowing breath has always been here since we were born,
An ancient rhythm binding us all as one.
Thoughts are not the truth,
Not even yours,
Not personal,
Not truly who you are,
They are voices,
Suggestions,
Judgments,
Opinions of mind,
Emerging,
Ebbing and flowing,
Like a flock of birds singing.
Every bird singing a different tune,
A different song,
A different opinion,
A different suggestion or perspective.
Is it possible to sense you are not the birds,
The wide open space within in which the birds can sing?
You are the awareness that holds it all,
You are the serene silence underneath and in between,
Infuses birdsong,
Infuses thoughts,
So that they may claim their place in the world,
The page behind inked words without which they could not be.
Perhaps,
Like the breath,
Like the open space,
Like the page,
Always there,
Something to return to,
Always,
Awareness is there,
Undefinable,
The silence underneath and in between thoughts,
Between song,
Written words on the opaque page.
All is in fluid flow,
Always changing to remain the same,
Always a blossoming,
Always a beginning,
Resting back now,
Surrendering fully,
Totally to this moment.
Perhaps you can sense there was only ever this moment,
In which our continual becoming blooms and unfolds this practice,
This embodied feeling you may have,
To whatever you may wish,
Not even a gift to you or a gift to the world,
Or just a gift.
Practice never ends,
Meditation flows,
Breath flows,
Thoughts flow,
Practice flows like a river,
Always in transition,
Always becoming a ghostly cloud to rain,
A swirling stream to river,
Once again,
Meditation.
When this meditation is finished with you,
As it will,
Is it possible for you to move into your day,
Greeting whatever happens in this day with equanimity,
With a subtle smile,
Known only to you,
Possibly with a feeling of radical acceptance,
Held in awareness,
Sensing that just now,
Whatever happens,
It is like this.
Schopenhauer said,
There is something in you wiser than your mind.
