Find a position of stability and poise,
Your upper body balanced over your hips and shoulders in a comfortable but alert posture.
Hands resting on your lap or your knees,
Your arms hanging by their own weight,
Stable and relaxed.
Sense into your body,
Feeling your feet,
Your legs,
Your hips,
Lower and upper body,
Your arms,
Shoulders,
Neck and head.
When you are ready,
Allow your eyes to close if they haven't already and bring your awareness to your breath,
The actual physical sensations of your natural breath.
Feeling each breath as it comes in and goes out,
Letting the breath be just as it is without trying to change or regulate it in any way.
Allowing it to flow easily and naturally with its own rhythm and pace.
Know that you are breathing perfectly well right now,
There is nothing for you to do.
Allowing your body to be still and sitting with a sense of dignity,
A sense of resolve,
A sense of being complete and whole in this very moment.
And as you sit here,
Let an image form in your mind's eye of the most magnificent or beautiful mountain you know or have seen or can imagine.
Let it gradually come into greater focus and if it doesn't come as a visual image,
Allow the sense of this mountain and feeling of its overall shape,
Its lofty peak,
The large base rooted in the bedrock of the earth's crust,
Its steep or gently sloping sides.
Noticing how massive it is,
How solid,
How unmoving,
How beautiful,
Whether from afar or up close.
Perhaps your mountain has snow blanketing its top and trees reaching down to the base.
There may be streams and waterfalls cascading down the slopes.
There may be one peak or a series of peaks.
Observing it,
Noting its qualities and when you feel ready,
Seeing if you can bring the mountain into your own body,
Sitting here so that your body in the mountain in your mind's eye become one.
And as you sit here you share in the massiveness and the stillness and the majesty of the mountain.
You become the mountain.
Grounded in the sitting posture,
Your head becomes the lofty peak,
Supported by the rest of the body.
Your shoulders and arms,
The sides of the mountain.
Your buttocks and leg,
The solid base,
Rooted to your cushion or the chair.
Experiencing in your body a sense of uplift from deep within your pelvis and spine.
With each breath as you continue sitting,
Becoming a little more like a breathing mountain,
Alive and vital,
Yet unwavering in your inner stillness,
Completely what you are,
Beyond words and thought,
A centred,
Grounded,
Unmoving presence.
And as you sit here,
Become aware of the fact that as the sun travels across the sky,
The light and shadows and colours are changing virtually moment by moment in the mountain's stillness and the surface teems with life and activity,
Streams,
Melting snow,
Plants and wildlife.
And as the mountain sits,
Seeing and feeling how night follows day and day follows night,
The bright warming sun followed by the cool night sky and the gradual dawning of a new day.
Through it all,
The mountain just sits,
Experiencing a change in each moment,
Constantly changing,
Yet always just being itself.
It remains still as the seasons flow into one another and as the weather changes moment by moment and day by day,
Calmness abiding all change.
In any season it might find itself at times enshrouded in clouds or fog or pelted by freezing rain.
People may come to see the mountain and comment on how beautiful it is or how it's not a good day to see the mountain,
That it's too cloudy or rainy or dark.
None of this matters to the mountain which remains at all times its essential self.
The mountain's magnificence and beauty are not changed one bit by whether people see it or not.
Seen or unseen,
In sun or clouds,
Day or night,
It just sits being itself at times visited by violent storms,
Buffeted by snow and rain and winds of unthinkable magnitude.
Through it all,
The mountain sits.
Through it all,
The mountain continues to sit unmoved by the weather,
By what happens on its surface,
By the world of appearances,
Meaning its essential self through the seasons,
The changing weather and the activity ebbing and flowing on its surface.
In the same way as we sit in meditation,
We can learn to experience the mountain.
We can embody the same central unwavering stillness and groundedness in the face of everything that changes in our own lives,
Over seconds,
Over hours and over the years.
In our lives and in our meditation practice,
We experience constantly the changing nature of mind and body and of the outer world.
We have our own periods of light and darkness,
Activity and inactivity,
Our moments of colour and our moments of grey.
It's true that we experience storms of varying intensity and violence in the outer world and in our own minds and bodies,
Buffeted by these high winds,
By cold and rain.
We endure periods of darkness and pain as well as moments of joy and uplift.
Even our appearance changes constantly,
Experiencing a weather of its own.
By becoming the mountain in our meditation practice,
We can link up with its strength and stability and adopt them for our own.
We can use the mountain's energies to support our energy,
To encounter each moment with mindfulness and equanimity and clarity.
It may help us to see that our thoughts and feelings,
Our preoccupations,
Our emotional storms and crises,
Even the things that happen to us are very much like the weather on the mountain.
We tend to take it all personally,
But its strongest characteristic is impersonal.
The weather of our own lives is not to be ignored or denied,
It is to be encountered,
Honoured,
Felt,
Known for what it is and held in awareness.
And in holding it this way,
We come to know a deeper silence and stillness and wisdom.
Mountains have this to teach us and much more if we can let it in.
So if you find you resonate in some way with the strength and stability of the mountain in your sitting,
It may be helpful to use it from time to time in your meditation practice to remind you of what it means to sit mindfully with resolve and with wakefulness in true stillness.
