This is the fourth guided meditation on calm,
Serenity,
Concentration,
Samadhi in the Sanskrit,
The fourth of the five powers.
Samadhi means gathering.
So let's gather ourselves,
Collect ourselves,
Land in this moment,
Come home,
Settle,
Feel we are alive,
Present,
Awake and totally here.
More than that,
Samadhi has a sense of steadiness,
Unmovability.
Get a sense that we are sitting like a rock.
Nothing can move us or knock us over right now,
Held by the earth,
Like a rock in a stream,
The water is passing by and the rock is undisturbed.
The sense of steadiness is helped by a feeling that we have of being at home,
Safe,
Finding refuge or shelter from the storm,
Storm of life.
What's the shelter?
We are,
Our awareness,
Our quality of knowing,
Being is a place where we find shelter.
As in the other meditations,
We settle into the body.
The body is the easiest place for us to explore some of the qualities of the powers.
The body is always in the now,
We can't breathe in the past or the future.
So let's connect with our body right now,
Feeling the bodiness of the body.
It's not looking at the body,
It's knowing what the body feels,
It's being the body.
Samadhi in its essence is merging,
Not looking at an object but being the object of meditation.
As the Buddhist saying,
Not looking at water like a person looking at water,
But like water looks at water.
So being in the breathing,
Letting go into the breathing,
Merging with this breath,
Dropping into this breath right now,
Feeling the breath breathing us,
Staying with it steady.
As we experience the breath flowing through the body,
With mindfulness we follow the breath as it touches different parts of our body.
We get close,
We get intimate,
We merge with the breath,
Our awareness mixes with the breath as it reaches and touches different parts of our body.
As we do so,
We can feel our awareness is like a bath of warm water that we get into.
We are filled with awareness,
Touched everywhere.
And this sense of immersion,
Of merging,
Of intimacy is the concentration of meditation,
Is Samadhi.
Stay with it.
As we connect with our breath and our body,
Get a sense that this helps us to settle,
To be calm and quiet.
We can't hunt for quietness.
We can't fish for calmness.
If we drop into the object of awareness,
Such as the breath or the touch of the hands,
Dropping into brings calmness,
Brings quietness.
Let's try it with the mind.
We may think our thoughts are noisy,
There's a cacophony of thoughts running through our mind,
The past,
The future,
Issues,
Questions,
Reactions,
Pictures.
So now let's look at the mind with the mind.
Be the witness.
Watch the pictures flowing past.
Watch thoughts floating by like clouds in the sky.
And our awareness is like the sky,
Which is not touched and not disturbed by the clouds.
If we're not identified and disturbed by every thought that comes and goes,
But we step out and hold these passing stories with awareness,
We'll find quiet.
They're no longer disturbing.
The cacophony turns into music.
Imagine us relaxing,
Enjoying,
Watching the best movie in town.
Watch the flow of thought in the mind.
And come back to the body.
We can let the mind go,
We can get off the train of thought.
Let the train go to the next station without us.
We can get off the train and come back into the body.
Let's do a small visualization of daily life.
Remembering a time when we're feeling distracted,
Disturbed,
Restless.
Let's go back into it,
A time or a memory,
Can be yesterday,
Can be last week,
Can be ten minutes ago,
Where we couldn't settle.
Now imagine that same experience when we paid attention to one aspect or one object,
Such as the carpet or the light or the eyes of another person.
And feel ourselves really settling into this experience with concentration and focus.
Imagine that we're a painter,
That we really need to study this experience in order to paint it.
Imagine we're painting a picture so concentrated,
So focused we don't need to eat or drink.
Look at that scene with those eyes,
With that sense of total awareness,
Concentration and closeness and see how it would be lived differently.
Coming back to the body-mind and remembering for a moment that it's coming back home.
We return home.
We come back to our refuge,
Our safe seat,
Where we are settled and watching and aware and quiet looking at our life.
It's no different in the end from deep rest,
As if we are just totally taking time off from all the disturbances and struggles of life,
Deeply resting but with awareness,
With presence.
And let's feel that together.
Resting,
Knowing,
Connecting with our bodily life calmly,
Easily.
It's like being an island in the stormy seas or being in the eye of the storm.
The storm of life is going all around but as we sit here quietly with our life experience,
Softly,
Closely,
Easily,
We can sense that this place is always available to us.
The eye of the storm.
So in the last couple of minutes of this meditation,
Again come back to the breathing.
Again,
Drop into the breathing and remember how it is to be breathed by the breath.
To let go.
To go inside the changing flow of the experiences in one breath,
In which both mindfulness and samadhi,
Calm,
Concentration are joined.
So I'm going to ring the bell and this time when you hear the sound of the bell,
Really stay with it.
Feel that it's like a bath and stay with the sound until it totally disappears.
