Welcome,
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Settle into your comfortable position knowing that that's not fixed you don't have to stay perfectly still for the next 20 minutes but there is a sense of stillness of settling and as the limbs and the torso become a little bit heavier see if you can maintain your spine as tall,
Chin tucked under so the back of the neck is tall,
Resting the tongue up on the roof of your mouth,
Allowing the palate to soften,
Sensing the tidal push and pull of your in-breath and your out-breath.
Dropping into your sense of hearing,
Noticing the sounds in the space around you,
Perhaps you can hear your breath,
Perhaps you can hear neighbors or outside,
Perhaps a birdsong or traffic,
Maybe you can just hear silence and then drawing the awareness of your hearing,
You're listening to your body in-breath and out-breath,
Maybe even a sense of the sound of your heart.
I'm going to bring your awareness deep into your belly and just notice the sensation you can feel,
What you find,
See if you can soften whatever it is that you find so that it's more expansive and open,
Less tight and knotted and then dropping awareness down into the pelvis,
Noticing what you find and then whatever it is that you find as you take a slow and deliberate breath.
Perhaps you can sense that there's nothing stationary about a feeling state and just as the breath carries a tidal current with it of in-breath and out-breath,
There's a tidal current of felt sense that moves within you.
Our breath offers us a very interesting gateway to inner awareness but it doesn't end there,
Beyond the breath there is another flow of expansion and contraction,
It's a watery movement like a wave almost.
When you feel a strong emotion it moves almost like a tsunami,
You can feel the flush of embarrassment as it moves up through your body and then stings your your cheeks or a flush of pleasure or even this the cold steely flush of dread.
There are weather patterns,
These emotions and these feelings and they move through you just as clouds move across the sky but don't define the sky.
No matter how many clouds there are the sky remains constant,
The clouds can come and go.
And so it is with these sensations that we're exploring today,
They're not fixed and often we're able to let them move through,
Not always or in my experience not always,
But often when we let them be and allow them they move through.
So let's experiment with some feeling states today.
The practice of Tonglen is breathing in and receiving,
Breathing out and giving away and whereas our usual human patterning is that we want to receive and breathe in the things that we enjoy and we like and we don't want to receive,
We want to push away the things that are uncomfortable that we don't like.
So Tonglen experiments with turning that on its head and it's not always necessarily that easy to do but we are just being playful and we're learning about ourself as we play the game of Tonglen.
So there's no fail,
It's just I wonder,
I wonder how this will feel today.
Let's begin with the feeling of heaviness,
The breathing in heavy and then breathing out the feeling of lightness.
It's just experimental,
Nobody can tell you that you're doing this the wrong way,
You're just experimenting.
Is this a spectrum of feeling that I can access or a palette of emotion?
And then we might play with the feeling sense of spatial,
So breathing in feeling cramped and small,
Tight like a bud and then breathing out open expansiveness like a huge horizon.
And then we can play with the feeling state of when things don't go the way we want them to,
So a kind of feeling of control.
So the feeling we're breathing in is how it feels when things don't go as expected.
It might be just as mild as you're driving in the car and someone takes a different route to the route you're used to,
Or it might be that you're expecting this practice to be a certain way and it's going to be different.
It's that feeling,
Can you locate the feeling of when things don't work out in the way that you'd imagined or hoped for,
How that feels in your body.
And then the feeling for the out-breath is the feeling of letting that go because someone else who is a benevolent loving kind being who you trust is in charge,
So you don't have to control.
You can hand it over,
How that feels in your body.
So there's a bit of story sometimes to get you to the feeling,
It's not so much the story that we're breathing in and breathing out,
It's the feeling sense,
Trying to be in control,
That feeling sense,
And trusting enough to let go,
The feeling sense of trust as you breathe out.
And then we can picture someone we care deeply for.
You can start to play tumbling with them,
So as you inhale,
Taking their experience,
Their felt sense of trying to be in control,
Working so hard to get everything perfect,
How that feels in their body.
And then breathing out the gift of your experience,
How it feels when you hand it over and trust.
Taking the practice to someone whom we feel neutral towards,
Someone that doesn't really elicit much charge.
You might smile at them most days,
Perhaps you pass them in your daily routine.
Notice how it feels to play the game of tumbling with them,
Inhaling their feeling of desperate effort to control,
Exhaling your offering,
The sensation of surrender,
Handing over.
And then moving the practice to someone who we find challenging.
It doesn't need to be the worst of the worst,
It can be someone that just currently at the moment we're finding a little bit difficult to be around.
Pressing our buttons,
As you inhale,
Drawing their experience of trying to control the variables.
As you exhale,
Sending out your offering of how it feels to trust and let go.
And then opening the practice up to all beings,
Extending the practice to every sentient being on earth,
Inhaling the shared collective experience of trying our best to control all the variables.
We're all trying to be safe and sometimes we just believe that safety comes from control.
And then breathing out and letting go,
Trusting life's process,
Sending it out to all beings.
And then releasing the practice,
Just noticing how it feels as you drop into the tummy,
Into the pelvis,
Into your heart,
Bringing hands to heart and dropping chin to chest,
Offering the fruits of our practice to all beings.
Namaste.
