So if you'd like to start by settling yourself into a comfortable position for the meditation,
Closing your eyes very gently in much the same way you'd close your eyes to go to sleep.
Breathe deeply to yourself,
Maybe for two or three breaths.
When you breathe in,
Try to notice the refreshing air from around you.
As you breathe out,
You may feel that you're letting go of any previous worries or concerns that you may have had.
Try to feel your body is merging with the atmosphere around you.
And for good measure,
We do what's known as a body scan,
Which means starting at the top of our head and working our way gradually downwards,
Relaxing the muscles first of all of our forehead,
Of our eyebrows and our eyelids.
The way we close our eyes is quite important.
You try to close our eyes in much the same way you might close our eyes to go to sleep.
So not squeezing our eyes tightly closed,
Just letting our upper and lower eyelashes touch gently together.
From there,
We allow the muscles of our face to become soft.
We relax our jaw,
Taking special care not to clench our teeth together.
Before moving on down to relax our neck and letting our shoulders drop to their natural height.
Moving on down we relax our arms,
Our forearms and then our hands and fingers.
Notice that even the way our hands rest in our lap is as light and gentle as possible.
Continuing on down we relax all the muscles of our torso,
Chest,
Trunk and abdomen.
Relaxing both legs all the way down to our feet and our toes.
Until no part of our body remains with any sort of stress or tension anymore.
If we do notice any tension remaining and we adjust our posture to minimize it.
Ideally our whole body will be so relaxed that it will feel as if it melts away into the atmosphere around us in much the same way that our body might disappear.
Even only our sense of awareness,
Our sense of feeling on the inside of us that warmth and well-being.
If we are totally connected with the world around us,
At which point we can turn our attention to focus instead on our state of mind.
State of mind which is somewhere within the space of our own body.
And in order to relax our mind in preparation for the meditation ahead,
We let go temporarily of all the worries and concerns in our everyday life.
Any thoughts of work,
Friends,
Family,
Studies,
Of the stresses and strains of our contemporary times.
Any regrets from your past or any plans for the future.
Keeping our mind 100% in the present moment and on the task in hand.
Reminding ourselves that we have nowhere to go and nothing to do.
And this is the real purpose that we are here together meditating.
We focus in the present moment while conjuring up a sense of happiness and joy in the mind.
Some of you happiness and joy may come immediately to mind,
If not then cast your attention back to a time in your life when you felt truly happy.
Thinking not so much about the actual situation as the feeling it gave you.
Maybe when you were able to do something nice for another person.
But in helping that person you also felt good about yourself on the inside with a warm fuzzy feeling.
And thinking now of that warm fuzzy feeling on the inside,
It will return to you.
Almost like tiny particles of happiness and joy inside you.
You allow it to grow and spread within yourself until it fills the whole of your body and mind.
Keeping you up to the point that there's no space left in your mind for any other sort of thought.
When you feel relaxed and refreshed both in body and in mind,
Very gently and using no effort at all.
You can imagine your whole body to be nothing but a hollow cavity.
An empty space with no organs or tissues,
Muscles or bones.
Alternately you might think of your body as being like a transparent bubble with nothing on the inside.
Those who have been meditating longer may have the feeling as if your whole body has disappeared altogether.
If you are at the center of some great empty space,
A space of your own creation.
Whatever your experience of that inner space,
Now would be the time to remember back once again to that picture of the shining sun,
Which you had a few moments ago.
Bright sun,
Maybe orange in color or yellow,
White or gold,
Shining with a cool clear light.
Doesn't matter if the picture is not very clear.
Even if it's fake or fuzzy,
You can accept it.
Remembering that it's not your eyes that you're using to see the picture,
But your mind itself.
The nature of seeing with the mind is that pictures tend to start out vague and gradually get more well defined in their own time.
So work with whatever you have and allow that inner picture to make its way slowly downwards within the space of your body.
Almost as if you were slowly breathing the object down to the point of the deepest breath.
Or as if you were gently swallowing the object down to the pit of your stomach.
Either case it will bring you to a point at the very center of your diaphragm,
The central gravity of the body.
A place which is particularly calming for the mind to be.
We gently maintain our awareness at the center of the body.
By means of that inner picture,
As continuously as we can for as long as we can.
Not letting our attention slip away anywhere else so we can help it.
We find our awareness wanders off.
Each time we realize we just bring our awareness back again to the center of the body as before.
For as many times as it takes for the mind to start to settle at the center of the body.
As for the possible problem of there being thoughts in the mind.
If the thoughts are at a low level,
We try to ignore them,
Not giving them the time of day.
Treating them like unwanted guests that have ignored for long enough will gradually go home all by themselves without even a confrontation.
Thoughts arise in the mind we try not to elaborate on them.
We let them die down into silence.
Because beneath that superficial layer of the thoughts there is a deeper awareness within the mind.
It will allow us to access the deeper processes,
Things like our gut feelings,
Our intuition,
Our wisdom.
All of which are already within us,
But they're usually obscured by the superficial working of the mind.
This is the point where we start to chase away some of those clouds.
Some of the things that obscure the deeper working of the mind.
Working with the mind we need to be both patient and gentle.
Letting the mind be too forceful in the way it rests at the center of the body.
Because sometimes we are used to hurrying,
Forcing,
Competing with others,
Trying to get to a possible goal or what we imagine to be progress in meditation.
But what we find is that the more relaxed we are about the meditation,
The more quickly we will move towards our possible progress.
It's almost as if the less we care about progress,
Then the easier it will come.
And as for being gentle with the mind,
Sometimes it's useful to point out a few metaphors for just how gentle we need to be.
Sometimes you can talk about the gentleness of a feather touching upon the surface of some water,
So gentle that it doesn't even create a ripple on the surface.
Another possible metaphor is that of threading a needle.
You really need to be careful,
Gentle,
In order to get that thread to the eye of the needle at all.
The same sort of gentleness that we need when practicing meditation.
So we cultivate our mind lightly and gently on track at the center of our body.
Each to your own practice now,
In silence for a few more moments,
Until we come to the appropriate time.
Now,
Forget if your mind wanders off onto other things,
Each time you realize,
Simply bring your attention back again to the center of the body as before.
Keep on bringing the mind back to the center of the body for as long as it takes for the mind to build up that sense of being at the center of the body almost by a second nature.
Just as if there's a stickiness that keeps the mind in place at the center of your body,
Where it's contented to remain there rather than slipping away anywhere else.
As for the thoughts,
Let them die down into silence,
Only using the mantra of the thoughts are really persistent.
Otherwise notice the spaces between the thoughts.
As time goes on,
You'll find that the spaces between the thoughts are more frequent than the thoughts themselves.
Until at a certain point in the meditation,
There'll be a sense of unification at the center of yourself.
As if all your mental faculties are drawn to the center of your body,
Whether it's perception,
Memory,
Thought or cognition,
All at the center of the body,
As if that were the center of your mind.
Each to your own practice now,
In silence for a few more moments,
Until we come to the appropriate time.
