Welcome to Meditations Part 2.
In this session,
We'll be looking at the sensory world.
As we sit in meditation,
We have basically two options.
We can be caught by the narrative of the mind and that could include particles of language,
Thought,
Memories,
Projections.
These things are conceptual in nature.
They're not tangible.
The other option we have is to notice what's actually happening in the present moment.
The easiest way to do this is to notice the sensory world.
We're going to start today with,
Instead of the breath,
We're going to start with the tactile world,
The feeling world,
What it feels like to have a body,
What it feels like to be in a field of gravity.
These things are happening at the moment and we tend to disregard them.
So take a few moments now and settle into your seat.
You lean back if you're in a comfortable chair.
It's always a nice thing to close the eyes to begin with,
Just let the eyes and face relax.
And also to prepare yourself for meditation,
You may want to just take a few long inhales and exhales just to begin a process of settling or relaxation.
Now you'll notice as you do this,
And you can do this along while I'm talking,
That the inhale pattern will give you a sense of lifting and expansion and it is related to the excitement of the nervous system.
And the exhale pattern has really the opposite quality,
Has a polar quality to it.
It tends to relax and settle and ground and is related to what's called the parasympathetic nervous system,
The rest and restore response in the body.
So take a few moments to just gradually and slightly elongate the pattern on the exhale and allow the breath to kind of fall comfortably out of the body and be in no rush to take in the next breath,
To inhale.
Just let that happen by itself.
And in this way,
The breath will begin to relax.
Your effort behind the breath can relax.
And if you feel any residual tension in the body,
If there's a background level of tension,
We can actually increase that for a moment here.
So you can make your fists,
Your hands into fists,
Make them a little stronger,
Make the arms more tense,
The legs a little more tense,
The whole body for a few moments,
Increasing that tension.
And then just on the exhale,
Let it go,
Let the hands go,
Let the muscles in the body relax.
You may want to do that one more time.
Again,
Just increasing the tendency at first to hold on,
To see what that feels like,
To see the discomfort and the energy necessary there.
And then a complete let go as you exhale and relax into your meditative seat.
Now as you sit,
The eyes closed,
You're trying to stay away from names,
So I'll have to use language to facilitate this,
But see if you can feel any sensations of pressure through parts of the body that are touching the surface you're sitting on.
You can call it pressure or weight,
Warmth,
Coolness.
Take a few moments to locate where you feel these sensations.
Just allow the mind and your attention to rest on these sensations.
And you may find,
Along with the sounds that I'm making as I speak,
There may be sounds outside or in your room,
There may be the sound of your thoughts drifting through,
Maybe interrupting your attention on the sensation of the body.
You simply lean back into the sensations themselves and allow the mind to play at what it's playing in the background.
We'll take one minute here.
And now,
Again,
Just let go.
Just check to see whether you have remained attentive to the sensations or whether my voice has brought you back from a story.
And now we'll bring awareness to the sensation of temperature.
See if you can notice a difference in how you notice the difference between your body and the surrounding environment,
The air that surrounds the body.
Is it warmer or cooler or is the sensation that of movement on the skin?
Just allow the mind's attention to capture that sensation,
Temperature of differentiation between you and the environment.
You may also feel in this that the temperature difference appears in your breath as it comes in and out of the nose or the mouth,
In the surface of the lips or the tongue.
We'll just take a few moments here to savor these sensations and become like a connoisseur of sensation.
We can now return back to a comfortable,
Voluntary breath,
Taking in slightly longer breaths,
Allowing them to move out and empty.
And you can also associate a phrase or value,
An idea,
Some way that you might like to feel today,
Clarity,
Spaciousness,
Anything you choose and associate that with the breath.
Notice as if you're breathing in that quality.
Take a few more breaths like that.
And finally you can let that practice also dissolve,
So you're simply sitting.
Now you can begin to gradually blink,
Open the eyes,
See the world of color and form appear.
You just feel the vitality of the body,
The presence of your mind.
And that will conclude session number two of meditations.
Thanks for listening.
