Welcome,
We offer these meditations freely and your donations make a real difference.
So thank you.
I need to be too serious about any of this.
So let yourself find a place where you feel supported and you're able to be with a straightish spine.
So if that's lying down or sitting in a chair or sitting cross-legged on the floor,
You find your space and take your time.
This morning we're going to be practicing Tonglen together.
The art of giving and receiving Tonglen sometimes feels like it can be quite a challenge.
So very helpful I find to remember that this is just a curiosity that we're working in.
Nothing needs to be perfect.
We're just exploring what it would feel like to give away that which we cling to and to invite in that which we usually push away.
By doing this Tonglen turns our instincts inside out and upside down,
Which is helpful.
It's helpful because it stops those habitual grooves of neural responses from sort of becoming like carvings in stone.
It helps them to stay more fluid,
More elastic,
More playful.
As we go through the process of Tonglen,
We start with the practice for ourselves and then we move through different relationships,
Helping us to remember that we are not in isolation.
We're not separate.
We are part of a shared experience of being human and experiencing all that that brings.
So perhaps let's start by finding the parts of you that are connecting to the floor or the foundation.
Depending on how you are lying or sitting,
Let's notice the parts of you that are connecting to the floor or the chair or the bed or the sofa.
You press them down so that you become heavier.
It might help to notice how it feels to exhale.
Sometimes the exhale allows us to settle,
To deepen,
To drop.
And noticing the quality of the inhale,
Perhaps it brings with it a sense of lightness.
Tuning awareness inwards so that we actually can feel how it feels to be in the body.
You might notice the clothing that you're wearing,
How that feels as it presses against your body.
You might notice the very warmest parts and the very coolest parts.
You might naturally start to circle the head,
Freeing up some space in the neck.
Or just noticing how it feels to move through the neck,
Perhaps switching directions.
Circles might drop down to shoulders and slowly that might drop down to heart.
As you circle your heart,
Slowly and gently around the circumference of the hips.
Maybe the hands might want to circle.
Any part of you where movement would feel helpful.
We don't need to hold any tension,
So sometimes there's a release that happens with a wriggle or a circle.
And then settling back down into stillness.
As the body becomes still,
We can bring our attention to awareness,
Becoming aware of being aware.
Noticing that there's two parts to this.
There's the experience,
Perhaps feeling turn or sensation or an occurrence.
That's one part.
And then there's the place that is aware of the experience.
So kind of dropping back from the sensation or the emotion or the feeling or occurrence.
Just noticing that it is held in awareness and the awareness doesn't change,
Although the experience does.
And to begin to explore Tonglen,
Let's start by noticing the experience of heavy,
A heavy feeling when you breathe in and light,
A light feeling when you breathe out.
We're just staying curious about our own palette of feeling,
Sense,
Experience.
Breathing in heavy,
Breathing in lightness,
Breathing out lightness,
Sorry.
Another one we could play with is the breathing in a feeling of small and cramped,
Tiny,
And breathing out expansive,
Open,
Spacious.
And maybe for today's practice,
We can start to play with the feeling of being in your body,
Being embodied,
How that feels,
And the feeling of being in your head when it's all strategy and planning and rationalizing.
So we could breathe in the rationalizing,
Heady feeling and breathe out the deeper,
Slower,
Embodied feeling of being in your bones.
Staying playful with it,
It might be something that's not so easy to access,
So it might be a sort of an invitation to feel those things or an imagining.
Let's just play with it.
So breathing in the heady,
Rationalizing,
Strategizing feeling of being in your head and the breathing out the deeper,
Embodied,
In the bones sensation of feeling in your body,
Being in your body.
Let's head straight into relationship with someone that we love deeply,
Someone who we care for,
We wish the world for,
And there is no effort required for loving.
And as we breathe in,
Let us breathe in their experience of being stuck in the head,
Rationalizing,
Strategizing,
Planning,
Busyness.
We willingly breathe in their experience of that,
Taking it from them,
Bringing it into ourselves,
Breathing it all the way down to the depths of the torso.
And as you breathe out,
Breathing out your experience of embodiment,
Being slow,
Deep,
In the bones of your body,
No rush,
Belonging to the limbs,
The muscles,
The pelvis,
Offering up that sensation,
That experience as your gift on the out-breath,
Sending it to them so that it fills their body.
Seeing what happens with a smile,
With a curiosity,
Sometimes we drift down rabbit holes,
The practice becomes too challenging and so the mind takes us away.
Sometimes there's resistance,
If that's true for you,
Just practice with the resistance,
Breathing in and sending out.
We can take whatever occurs and use that as our practice,
It doesn't have to look one way.
And then taking our practice to someone whom we find a challenge.
You could choose someone that is the most challenging or you could just choose someone that recently you found tricky.
You know that this person has the full shared experience of what it feels like to be stuck up in the head,
Making plans,
Being busy,
Trying to solve and find solution to everything in rational ways.
And maybe they have experienced what it is to be in the body,
To be grounded,
Embodied,
To have dropped deeper,
To have slowed and trusted.
We'll take that person and explore Tonglen with them,
Inhaling their heady space,
Drawing it in and exhaling the gift of embodiment,
Being in the body and how that feels.
Sometimes the practice just feels like glimmers,
Moments that we touch on,
Perhaps it's just about allowing what is with the practice today.
We open up our practice to encompass and include all beings.
Across earth,
All beings have experienced the feeling of being up in the head and at some point all beings have experienced the feeling of being in the body.
Although our stories are wildly different,
The palette of our feeling experience is the same.
So as you breathe in,
Breathe in the heady,
Rational headspace of all beings and as you breathe out,
Offer up the deeper embodied feeling to all beings.
And then releasing the practice,
Taking a moment just to be aware of how it feels to have practiced Tonglen,
Maybe dropping awareness down into the heart,
Allowing and accepting whatever is,
Doesn't need to fit any kind of agenda,
Bringing a friendliness into your field of awareness,
Offering up the fruits of our practice to all beings so that as we practice our individual well-being rituals,
They become collective.
Namaste.
