This meditation is going to provide some opening guidance to get you comfortable,
Get you focused,
And get you ready to begin your meditation practice.
It will end with two minutes of silence with some gentle music playing in the background.
So to begin,
I want you to take a comfortable seated position.
Some people find it most comfortable to meditate while sitting in a chair,
And other people prefer to sit cross-legged on the ground.
So you can experiment with both and find out which one is most comfortable for you.
If you're seated in a chair,
You'll want to make sure that your feet are both resting on the floor,
About a natural space,
About hips-width distance.
And you're going to want to have your hands resting around your knees,
On your thighs,
Just above your knees.
For a more grounded position,
You might have your hands with your palms down on the thigh,
Just above the knee.
And if you want to feel more receptive or more open,
You might flip your palms up.
Now if you're sitting on the floor and you're able to comfortably sit cross-legged,
That's great.
Again,
You can have your hands face down for a grounded posture near your knees,
Or face up.
You might also have your hands folded in your lap,
Whichever is most comfortable.
So now that you're seated,
Just noticing the connection between your sit bone and the surface that you're sitting on.
Feeling this grounded energy from the tailbone,
And perhaps inviting that grounded energy of the earth up into your body.
Drawing that grounded energy up through the spine,
We come and we place our attention on the lungs.
We're just going to focus on the breath and usually when people say focus on the breath,
What we naturally want to do is start to breathe more deeply.
Maybe we take long inhales and exhales,
And if that's something you want to do,
That's fine.
But that's not necessary for this exercise.
We just want to focus on our natural breath.
So just notice at your own pace what it feels like for air to be coming in through your nostrils.
Feeling that sensation of air coming inside your nose,
Comes up your nose into your brain.
How your chest expands as you breathe in this air,
And then noticing what it feels like on your natural exhales.
Noticing do you naturally exhale out the nose or out the mouth,
Whichever one is just fine.
Just keep it natural.
Notice how your chest falls on those exhales,
How your belly pulls in.
Just going through these breaths for a few rounds at your own natural pace.
Noticing what it feels like to be breathing in,
And what it feels like to be breathing out.
And it's important to realize that right in this moment we are paying attention to our breath while it's doing its natural thing.
But we're breathing all day,
Every day,
All night,
Every night,
And we're normally not paying attention to it.
And yet the breath just does its thing.
It breathes.
And so now we're going to turn our attention to the mind,
Which is also doing its thing.
Every day and every night,
Running all of these thoughts.
And normally we're not really looking at them.
We're not really paying attention to them.
We're wrapped up in them.
We're identifying with them.
We're reacting to them.
And just as we were watching the breath,
Now we are going to watch the mind.
Noticing how we have the capacity to look at our thoughts and go,
Oh hey,
There's a thought.
I have a thought coming in.
And when we turn our attention to our thoughts,
We pay attention to them,
It means that there is a part of us that is not the thought.
There is a part of us that is able to look at the thought,
Which means we're not the same thing as that thought.
The purpose of meditation is to cultivate this capacity to distinguish ourselves from our thoughts in the same way that we distinguish ourselves from our breath,
Something that can be watched.
And so,
During these two minutes of silence,
I want you to just watch your thoughts.
And just like we didn't need to change the breath,
We didn't need to make it deeper or slower,
We just watched it.
I want you to do the same thing with your thoughts.
You don't need to change them.
You don't need to be more peaceful.
You don't need to do anything,
But notice when and if you have a thought.
And something that can be helpful when we have thoughts,
Rather than getting wrapped up in them,
In the story,
In the feeling of the thought,
We might give the thought a label,
Like a tag,
To identify what it is.
So,
Common tags might be worry,
Planning,
Remembering,
Hoping.
It doesn't really matter what words you use.
Just come up with some categorical tags for your thoughts.
And so,
I'll stop talking and leave you to your thoughts for two minutes before I welcome you back to conclude this meditation.
Let's begin.
Beautiful work.
Now we're going to shift our attention back once more to the breath.
Maybe you didn't notice the breath so much while you were focusing on the thoughts,
Which is perfectly fine.
So,
We're going to come back into our bodies now,
Breathing in this clean air that we're so lucky to breathe,
And exhaling out.
Coming back into these last few rounds of breath before we open our eyes and re-enter the world,
Hoping to bring a bit of this stillness,
This clarity,
This focused attention into our regular lives.
