So posture,
Then we have to worry about the mind,
And I'll talk a little bit about what we can focus on.
Usually people use the breath here for the meditation object,
And so I'll be referring to the breath quite a bit.
Okay,
So please make yourself comfortable.
Please bring your attention to the body.
Notice how the body feels.
Many times the first thing we do notice is the body,
Whether it's the aspect of breathing or maybe how the body feels comfortable or uncomfortable.
And interestingly,
When our meditation is going well,
The body is usually the first thing that falls away,
That we lose contact with.
But the body can tell us a lot of things.
In our everyday living,
We can feel fear and anger within the body.
If there's something unpleasant that we have to do,
We can also often feel it in the body.
If we're experiencing a lot of stress,
We can feel that in the body.
And of course the body can bring us a great deal of pleasure as well.
And even in meditation,
Sometimes it feels like this is exactly what the body needed just to relax a little bit,
Have the eyes closed,
The body relaxed.
And again,
Sometimes in meditation,
We feel discomfort within the body,
Like it's some type of yoga practice or something that we're.
.
.
Sometimes we wonder if we're doing it correctly.
And one part of the body that is used probably more than anything else as far as meditation goes is the breath.
Bring your attention to the breath at this moment and notice where you feel it.
And when I say bring your attention to the breath,
Where does your attention arrive at?
Where do you feel the breath?
And wherever you feel the breath,
This is likely what we could call our sweet spot because it's a very valuable tool for us to bring our attention to that point where the breath and the other aspect of the body,
Whatever it might be,
Come into contact.
So,
As far as coming into presence,
We need an object to focus on.
And it's almost an artificial way to bring us into this presence of mind.
It's like we're almost attempting to stop the thoughts,
Although in meditation we're not really trying to do anything.
But our intention is to come into this presence so we find something to very subtly focus on.
And we can focus on the breath where we feel the breath touching another aspect of the body,
Maybe the tip of the nose,
The throat or the sinuses,
The windpipe,
Sometimes just the overall temperature of the breath or maybe even the dryness or the moisture of the breath,
All these different things that we can notice.
We want to find some aspect of the breath that we can be very keen to rest our attention on.
For many people it is some place around the tip of the nose,
The nostrils.
And so the breath can point out many things for us.
Breath can be short,
It can be long,
It can be shallow,
It can be deep,
It can be moist or dry or hot or cold,
Constantly changing one breath after another,
One breath different than the next.
Really without our interference,
Without us even thinking about it,
The breath goes on and on,
Constantly changing,
Doing what it has to do.
So when we focus on it,
When we concentrate on the breath,
We're not trying to change anything,
We're not trying to improve upon anything.
It's perfect just the way it is.
We're just noticing,
We're being aware.
And so that awareness is very,
Very key,
That awareness or that consciousness.
And in this case it's very light,
We're not trying to apply a great amount of concentration,
But more like a soft awareness as mentioned,
We're noticing.
And so we can also notice a thought when it comes up in our meditation or a feeling within the body.
If we feel something within the body while we're meditating,
We can really do ourselves a favor by just noticing whether it's pleasant or unpleasant and then coming back to the breath.
So it's really just a shifting of awareness,
That noticing.
We come back to the breath and we notice that the mind might wish to think about something that recently happened,
Or it might wish to go into the other direction of planning something that might be going on this evening.
And so we are aware of that,
But our intention is to stay with the breath,
So we shift our awareness back to the breath.
And after a while this becomes very automatic.
We don't have to train or condition our awareness to do this.
We set the intention for the awareness to come back to the breath.
And it is a conditioning,
But it's a positive conditioning rather than allowing the mind to stay in the past or the future.
And so it's a very functional part of the mind when we set the intention to come back to the breath again and again,
And it does it by habit more than anything else,
Rather than the habit of wandering,
The mind wandering in the past or the future.
And seemingly there's nobody behind any of this.
And we can just simply be the awareness that is aware of the awareness coming back and forth from the wandering mind to the breath itself,
Which is presence,
Stillness.
That's when we begin to realize that our meditation is really working well for us.
It starts paying dividends in the area of rest and energy.
And it can actually provide a great deal of clarity of mind as well.
And so it's not hard to bring our attention to the breath,
But it's hard to train the mind to accept that and to make it easy and allow it to be just an awareness that keeps coming back to it almost automatically,
And sometimes very automatically.
It starts just by knowing and getting to know the breath very well,
Finding that sweet spot and becoming familiar with it and trusting it,
Having faith that this is a beneficial practice.
We can do that by setting our intention to do the practice on a daily basis.
And then in doing so,
We realize that our days are much more mindful.
We become much more aware,
Much more present in every activity throughout the day.
And a lot of it is trusting and giving up the idea of control in the fact that we can just condition the mind to be free by allowing it to come back to the breath,
Just keep coming back to it.
