So go ahead and seat yourself comfortably in your meditation posture.
Start with three to five nice big belly breaths,
Really taking the breath all the way in,
Filling your lungs,
Belly and diaphragm fully.
And then expelling,
Exhaling all the air you can.
Exhaling all the air you can.
By doing this deep breathing,
It both relaxes us,
Centres more of our awareness in our belly from our head,
And also orients us more to time and place,
To being right here.
So feel your feet on the ground.
Feel the support of the building you're in holding you right now.
And if you can sense it,
The earth beneath,
Holding all of us in this moment.
I'm going to do something a little different in that I'm going to do this as a guided meditation.
So we're going to start by,
I'm going to start by describing the qualities of the absolute that are here.
Starting with the unmanifest,
And then moving to the manifest where innate goodness originates or abides.
So one of the main qualities making contact with the absolute is blackness.
Rich,
Dark,
Velvety smooth blackness.
The blackest blackness you've ever seen.
And vast,
Spacious,
Unending without boundary.
So as though you're looking into space,
Far off in a galaxy,
So deep into space,
There's no stars or planets,
Just vast,
Vast blackness.
And the felt sense here is of absence.
You might call it emptiness.
This is the source of all emptiness.
And even though it's absent,
It doesn't mean there's nothing here.
Absence is here.
One of the principal ways we know the absence is through its peace,
Its peacefulness.
So we can touch into the blackness,
Be touched by the blackness,
And feel the sense of peace that's already here.
It's not a peace in contrast to anything else.
Just deep,
All accepting peace.
And with the peace is stillness and contact in the blackness and the absence.
You may feel that quality of stillness in your consciousness.
Everything that stillness touches becomes still.
You can feel any place in yourself,
In your consciousness that feels like a tightness or contraction.
See if you can open that mental or physical contraction just a little bit to allow a little bit of peace and stillness to come in.
You're probably experiencing the black vastness principally in your head,
In the head center,
Feeling like the inside,
The interior of your head is in vast unending blackness.
Just take a little deeper breath and let that vast blackness move into the heart area if it wishes.
So now you may be feeling it both in the head center and the heart center at the same time.
In our head it quiets thoughts.
In our heart it quiets emotion.
And with a few deep breaths,
See if this black stillness wants to move into your belly area,
Your belly center.
So taking a nice big belly breath all the way down to the perineum,
Let this still peace move into your belly if it wishes.
Let it inhabit any part of you it wishes.
Keep in contacting the unmanifest side or the unmanifest function of the absolute.
From the unmanifest comes the manifest.
And as contrast to absence,
In the manifest there's fullness,
A brightness,
A brightness that's so bright we can barely look at it.
It's not even a color,
It's just bright.
In that brightness you might be able to detect a bit of a pure white color,
Like fluffy clouds.
And this too is vast,
Unending,
Like no boundaries,
Borders,
Or end.
And the felt sense to the manifest is pure presence,
So a real quality of here-ness right here is the feeling.
And pure love.
This is a love so magnificent that it embraces and welcomes everything,
Everyone.
No matter what you've done,
No matter the shame or guilt you feel,
No matter the core wounding that you have,
None of that disqualifies you from pure love.
It accepts and loves everything,
Every part of you.
And in the manifest is also pure awareness.
So awareness without concept,
Direct awareness,
Knowing what it is by making contact with it.
And from pure love we can differentiate innate goodness.
As a feeling of buoyancy,
Of lightness,
Of freshness,
A kind of flow.
And it feels very objective.
It doesn't have any markers or any kind of a flavor of any one of us in particular.
It's universal.
So it feels objective,
Yet somehow intimate.
If you're feeling the innate goodness in any particular center of your body,
The head,
The heart,
Or the belly,
Use your breath to invite the innate goodness to all the centers of your body,
The head,
The heart,
The belly.
Let all of you be touched by innate goodness.
You happen to notice an area that's not receiving innate goodness in your body.
Have the intention to invite innate goodness.
Whether it goes there or not is not important.
The invitation is what's important.
So staying with innate goodness,
I'm going to ring the bell and we'll all come back together.
