IRest Meditation For A Balanced Workday - Introduction

During this talk, I'll introduce you to a series of short practices that will help you develop focus, clarity, energy, ease, joy, and resilience in your workplace. Doing these short practices regularly will serve as anchor points throughout your day, either setting you up for success or helping you shift out of work mode when it's time to relax. I invite you to join me for the following five guided meditations in this series, "iRest Meditation for a Balanced Workday" that easily integrate into your day and can be practiced whenever you need to tune up or wind down.

Transcript

While we all experience comfort and discomfort,

Ease and pain during our lifetime,

There are many easy interventions for meeting pain and discomfort,

Helping us move through them with grace,

Ease,

And well-being.

During this upcoming meditation,

I'm offering you a series of interventions that you can try out one at a time.

Find ones that work for you,

Then make them your own by practicing them during this meditation and learning how to make them your own so that you can use them at any time,

Wherever you are,

Whatever your circumstance.

We'll start out by welcoming ourselves as a witnessing presence.

As you're listening to me now,

Notice you can be a warm-hearted witnessing presence.

And how does this affect your body and mind?

When instead of getting involved with what's present,

You just simply feel yourself as the one who is aware of it,

As a warm-hearted witnessing presence.

Another intervention is simply noting what's present,

Noticing it,

And welcoming it as sensation without getting involved,

Without going into thinking or analyzing.

Noting is a powerful practice when we don't go into the thinking mind,

But we simply note what's present as sensation.

I also offer an intervention,

What I call nostril breathing,

Where you're simply noticing the touch of air as it moves in and out of the nostrils and sensations of warmth or coolness becoming absorbed in these flows of air and sensation.

Another intervention is what we call abdominal breathing,

Where you simply notice the natural expansion and release of the belly as breath comes in,

As breath goes out,

Noticing yourself again as the one who is aware of this movement of the breath and the sensations that accompany exhalation and inhalation.

Another intervention is noticing preferences.

As you come upon a particular sensation that you might label discomfort or pain,

Notice your preference for it to be other than it is,

Where you might want more of comfort and ease and less of discomfort and pain.

We want to notice our preferences and set them free to be here,

But without then getting involved in them.

By setting them aside,

We can then meet what's present,

Unencumbered,

Without our thinking mind.

I also offer you an intervention of perceiving opposites of comfort and discomfort,

Discomfort,

Comfort,

And pain.

Pain always arrives with its opposite.

Sometimes we get absorbed only in the opposite of pain or discomfort without finding its opposite somewhere else in the body.

So in this intervention,

I ask you to find some area in your body where there's a level of comfort.

Could even be a lack of anything in your finger or somewhere else in your body.

And then finding the area of discomfort or pain and alternating between these opposites and learning how to feel both opposites at the same time.

Welcoming opposites of pain and comfort is powerful.

We don't welcome opposites with the thinking mind,

But by gently feeling our way into the sensations that represent the concept of pain and comfort,

And then learning how to welcome them and feel them at the same time,

Noting the effect this has on our body and our mind.

I offer you another very powerful intervention that I call body sensing.

By setting attention free to wander about the body and noticing specific locations where I start you in the jaw,

Then go into the mouth,

Sensations in the face,

Scalp,

Shoulders,

Arms,

Torso,

Pelvis,

Legs,

And feet.

We're following the sensory motor cortex of the brain,

Which can sometimes help us move beyond pain and discomfort into this present moment where we might find relief that we otherwise couldn't come upon.

It's important as you're sensing,

Say,

The hinges of your jaw or anywhere else in your body to take time to become completely absorbed in the sensations that are present before moving on to the next area of your body.

While in the meditation I'm offering here,

I move fairly quickly.

I'm trying to showcase the intervention to you in your own.

Take time with each sensation becoming absorbed before moving on to the next.

I also offer you the intervention of what I call breath counting.

Here's where inhalation and exhalation are being asked to be of equal lengths,

And we're actually counting them internally.

So you hear the count as you're inhaling,

One,

Two,

Three,

And the same as you're exhaling,

One,

Two,

Three.

And depending on your ability,

You might have a count of three or five,

Seven or even eight counts or more.

But where you're making the count of the inhalation and the exhalation of the same duration.

This can be a very powerful intervention that soothes the nervous system and restores a sense of well-being and ease and comfort,

Even when you're in the midst of discomfort.

Also by being absorbed in the count,

It gives you a mini vacation away from pain or discomfort.

I also offer you an intervention where I ask the exhalation to be longer than the inhalation.

Exhalation stimulates our parasympathetic nervous system and feelings of ease and well-being and calm.

Pain and discomfort stimulate the sympathetic nervous system and can make us feel tight and tense.

So by lengthening the exhalation and making it longer than the inhalation,

You set up a dynamic within your nervous system to help soothe the tension,

The pain,

The discomfort that may be present and take you into a greater sense of ease and well-being,

Even in the midst of what else you're experiencing.

Another powerful intervention I'm offering in this meditation is what I call center and periphery,

Where I ask you to find some place in your body where you may be feeling comfort or discomfort,

Ease or pain,

And to sense into where is its innermost center,

Where is its outermost border,

Boundary,

Or periphery.

By doing this both with pain and with comfort,

We can find a powerful exercise or intervention that sometimes moves us beyond the concept of pain into an intensity of sensation and even beyond the intensity where we find ourselves suddenly free of pain in an open spaciousness that feels a sense of well-being,

Ease,

Health.

It's an amazing intervention when you go way deep into the core center of what we might call pain.

The concept pain peels away,

We move beyond intensity,

And we find ourselves in this spacious openness that lies at the center of every sensation,

Whether it's pain or comfort.

Another intervention I'm offering you is working with color.

Every sensation can be assigned a color that comes spontaneously to you.

So when you're in the midst of,

Say,

Pain or discomfort,

Welcome in.

What's the color that best represents it?

Where and how you're experiencing it in the body?

And then if it had an opposite,

What color opposite might that be?

And where and how might you experience that and its effect in your body and mind?

Taking time to be absorbed in each color,

First one,

Then its opposite,

And then welcoming both colors to be here at the same time.

Whereas they begin to come together at the same time,

In the midst of what we call pain or discomfort,

You might find a resolution that comes spontaneously in working with these opposites of color.

Another powerful intervention in working with pain or discomfort is to take yourself on a journey,

As I do in this meditation,

Where I invite you to come to a place in nature that spontaneously comes to you in your mind's eye and imagination,

And fill it out with colors,

Sounds and textures,

Sights,

Sensations where you're perhaps leaning your body against a warm rock or tree,

Listening to the babbling of water nearby,

The felt sense of the sun and warmth on your body.

You might take a vacation to Hawaii or somewhere else in your mind's imagination,

Which distracts you from whatever you're feeling that you may label comfort or discomfort or pain,

And bringing you into a whole new delight where you find a momentary vacation from and release from whatever it is you may be experiencing.

Journeying is a powerful intervention that I highly recommend experimenting with,

And finding the images and the places that best suit you,

Where you can become more and more absorbed in them.

And it may even bring you into restful sleep where you were finding it difficult because of the pain or discomfort that you were experiencing,

And all of a sudden you find yourself waking up from a restful sleep that you fell into spontaneously.

And again,

A powerful intervention that's interwoven between all of these is feeling yourself back into being an awaring presence of awareness.

Pain and discomfort are changing sensations.

They're coming and going.

Sometimes we feel them,

Sometimes we don't.

In the midst of deep sleep,

They're completely absent.

Even though we may be in chronic pain during the day,

There are times a day where we're absorbed in reading a book or some sound or conversation where the pain and the discomfort is completely absent.

We know that it's possible to find relief from pain.

Knowing this and all these different interventions,

We can find pain as a changing circumstance that as we rest more and more in our wholeness of being and well-being,

In our resting in awareness,

We find awareness and a sense of wholeness as unchanging in the midst of the changing circumstances.

So that the changing circumstance of the pain can move into the background and our unchanging sense of ourself as a warm-hearted witnessing presence or awareness can move fully into the foreground where there comes moments of complete relief and absence and freedom from pain.

So listen to this meditation over and over.

Find the interventions of the interventions that work for you,

Then expand on them in your own imagination.

Make them their own,

Make them your own,

And they will carry you and be your allies for the rest of your life.

Reviews

Oh I like this! A succinct overview of the many options in the iRest toolkit for cultivating peace and presence. Soothing to just be reminded of each. 1-6-26