This guided meditation was recorded at a live event.
I hope that you'll find it useful and supportive of your meditation practice.
Please take a posture that is comfortable to sit in,
Where the body can be upright and relaxed,
Where your breath can move easily and freely.
Let the attention drop into the body and settle into the present moment as you listen to the instructions that follow and let them guide or inspire or inform your meditation practice.
Allow your attention to settle into the experience of sitting and breathing.
Next giving attention to the contact of the body with the floor,
With the seat.
Notice the sensations of the hands touching.
Allow the spine to be upright so that the body is aligned with gravity and yet relaxed.
Let the face relax.
Let the shoulders relax.
Let the chest and belly relax.
Let the hips,
The knees,
The ankles,
The toes relax.
Settle into the experience of sitting and observe the sensations that are occurring as you are sitting.
Among the experiences you might notice are the sensations associated with breathing.
You might feel the changing sensations as the body takes in a breath and expels a breath.
Notice the sensations on the inhalation and the sensations on the exhalation,
Allowing this movement of the breath to help ground your attention in the present moment experience of sitting and breathing.
After settling the attention in the body,
I'd like to work a little bit with thoughts.
And I'd like to in particular notice that a thought is just a thought.
It's a discrete mental event,
A mental event that appears and then disappears.
It's impermanent.
It's distinct.
It's so distinct that I think we can count them.
And so as you're sitting,
Observing the experience of sitting and breathing,
When thoughts arise,
Count them.
You'll be counting mostly the distinct thoughts,
The stronger thoughts.
There may be a subtle undercurrent of very subtle minor thoughts that can slip by uncounted.
But when you have a distinct thought,
Please count it.
Count one and then two and then three.
One word to as many thoughts as you can count.
Between each thought though,
Please direct your attention back to the experience of sitting and breathing.
Just settling the attention on the breath,
Settling the attention in the body.
It's true that it is a thought that directs your attention to the body and the breath.
It's a thought,
A subtle thought,
A useful thought that adjusts the quality of your energy to meet the experience of sitting and stay there.
This thought that remains interested in the meditation practice of sitting and breathing.
You may not count all those thoughts,
But when you find yourself pulled off your meditation subject and lost in some thought of past or thought of future or thought of how you're doing and who you are and what's the meaning or significance of this or that.
When you find yourself caught in a story of any kind,
Count it.
And then set it down,
Drop it,
Let it go and return again to the experience of sitting and breathing.
I would recommend doing this exercise of just counting thoughts for perhaps about 10 or 15 minutes.
It's not an exercise that you need to repeat many times.
It's not a technique you need to bring into your meditation practice,
But I think it has a value.
It helps us discern that a thought is a thought.
It's a discrete mental event that has a beginning and an end.
It helps us know what it is we are looking at when we are speaking of thoughts so that as we develop mindfulness of the mind and notice what a thought is,
How it arises,
How it is known,
How it affects the quality of our mind,
We'll be much clearer as to what this mental impulse is that we are calling thought.
So please take 10 or 15 minutes to sit and observe the body sitting and breathing and count those thoughts.
