You can start just by gathering awareness in the physical body.
And even if you've done this 10,
000 times,
Especially if you've done this 10,
000 times,
You can do it this time like it's your first moment,
First breath taken in a human body.
Really just feel the freshness of sensory experience.
Feel the ground beneath you,
Supporting you.
Feel the constancy,
The stability of the ground.
And experientially you can play with a quality of trust in the ground.
What would it feel like if you trusted the ground beneath you 10% more?
You really just allowed the earth,
The Great Mother,
The Ma,
To hold you,
To embrace you.
Notice what impact that has on your being.
So often in every moment of life we bring an idea to each moment,
Like we're going to get something out of what we're doing.
We're doing this to get somewhere else,
To end up in a better place than where we currently are.
And if we practice meditation in this way,
We'll end up just reinforcing this deep-seated impulse even more deeply.
So right out of the gate as we're settling in,
I want to invite you to just sit with no gaining idea.
In other words,
Sit as openness and the quality of already having arrived.
This is it.
This moment in all its fullness.
This is it.
We're not here to gain something or lose something for that matter.
It's the wisdom that recognizes that we're not running because we're afraid.
We're afraid because we're running.
The same wisdom applies here.
Because we're seeking,
We're experiencing lack.
We think that because we experience lack,
We start seeking tirelessly in life for something else.
But it's actually the seeking itself that confirms this bias.
In other words,
The act of seeking sustains the illusion that something's missing.
Sit right now in completion.
In this moment,
Affirm that aspect of yourself that does not seek,
Does not grasp,
And does not struggle to gain something.
Everything is just radically here.
When you sit as non-seeking,
Non-grasping mind,
Perhaps you feel a tremendous relief in your being.
Like,
Finally,
I can just rest.
I can just be myself.
If this is the case,
You can make space for this.
Just allow this relief,
This joy to spread.
Perhaps,
On the other hand,
As non-seeking,
Non-grasping mind,
You feel resistance.
You feel sorrow.
You feel grief.
There's still challenging emotion and memory and sensation present that you hoped you would escape from one day.
And all of a sudden,
You realize that you could feel this way on and off the rest of your life.
And with that admission comes a kind of grief,
A kind of defeat.
And you can treat this grief the same way you treat the joy.
Giving it a wide pasture,
Giving it all the space in the world to just be here in the fullness of right now.
Stated very simply,
In this very moment,
You can drop any claim that something's missing.
Drop any claim that there's a problem with how things are in this moment.
This doesn't mean that life doesn't ask us to respond to it.
Of course,
We are called to live our lives.
But that reality is not inherently problematic.
Reality just is.
And we are reality.
In other words,
Dropping any claim there's a problem,
You come to the mind of non-seeking,
Non-grasping and become totally alive to what arises.
Totally alive to the display of form and totally willing to let it go the next instant.
It's very natural in the practice to notice awareness attaching itself to the flow of thought.
If you notice this happening,
You can just notice the moment and practice unhooking.
Practice falling behind the display of the thinking mind.
And as awareness opening back up to a quality of spaciousness through which an endless stream of moments is flowing.
And it's not just that events forms rise and pass through the spaciousness of awareness.
As you practice in this way you begin to recognize that there's no separation between the awareness and the event.
They're two sides of the same coin.
And in this sense the self,
Others,
World are closer than close.
No distance between a subject and object.
Any more than there's distance between a wave and the ocean.
Check in with yourself in this moment.
Just noticing the quality of experience.
Do you detect struggle in the body and the mind?
Is the self trying to get somewhere?
Trying to make something happen or trying to stop something from happening?
Take a final few moments to just sit as the mind of equanimity.
No need to make something happen.
No need to stop anything from happening.
Everything just happening.
Mind of equanimity totally open and willing to allow form after form to rise and to pass.
Like waves in the ocean never separate from their source.
