Anchored In Awareness: Mindfulness Meditation

This is a simple guided mindfulness meditation in which we allow awareness to settle on a variety of anchors – sensation, breath, sound and awareness itself – for short periods. As always, the practice is all about noticing when awareness has wandered and patiently returning to mindfulness.

Transcript

Begin by sitting comfortably.

Upright but not strained.

Close your eyes if you're happy to do it.

If you prefer open eyes,

Downward gaze.

Let your hands rest in your lap comfortably.

See if you can get a sense of your body weight dropping down into your seat.

If you're trying to let your seat,

Let the earth hold you a little more.

Trying to give up a little bit more muscular effort to the support you're on.

Be aware of the verticality of your spine.

We'll begin with a short body scan.

So to start off with,

Just bring your awareness to your forehead and notice the sensations there.

Can you soften the forehead a little?

Coming to the eyes,

The eye sockets,

Muscles around the eyes.

Can you soften a little around the eyes?

Down into the low jaw.

Can you let the jaw soften a little bit?

Letting your awareness flow down the neck into the upper back and shoulders.

Is there any possibility of releasing the shoulders some?

Moving your attention down through your arms now and into your hands.

Let your awareness settle in the palms of both hands and notice what you're feeling in your palms.

Whatever sensations are there.

Might be sensations associated with the room temperature you're in or the various internal tinglings etc that come with having a body.

Just let your awareness settle on the palms for a short while.

Coming back to that if your mind wanders.

Moving now into your belly.

Just noticed the sensations you feel around your belly now.

Those might include the movements of the breath.

But notice if there's any tightness,

Any clenching around the belly that you might be able to let go of.

Anyway you can let your belly be a little bit softer than it is right now.

And then let your awareness flow down through your legs all the way down into your feet.

And bring your attention to the soles of both feet.

And as we did with the palms,

Spend some time simply noticing whatever sensations you feel in both soles.

Let your awareness now take in the sensations of the body more globally.

So just wherever sensation presents itself to you anywhere in the body,

Just go there with your awareness.

Allowing it to freely move.

You feel something somewhere,

You bring your awareness there for a short time and notice what you notice.

And then somewhere else another sensation signals and you go there.

Maybe seeing if you can forget about all the various parts of the body that we that we checked in with and just feel your body as an ever fluctuating cloud of sensation.

Let awareness or the sensations of the body fall into the background.

And carry your attention to your breath wherever you feel the breath most.

Be it in the belly,

The chest,

The inflow and outflow of the nostrils,

Wherever it works best for you.

Just let your attention settle there now for a short while.

Trying to cover each inhale and each exhale with complete awareness.

And when your mind wanders,

Just kindly leading yourself back to the breath.

That's presuming you happen to notice that your mind has wandered.

Sometimes it takes a little time.

But always doing this kindly,

Never giving yourself a hard time,

No matter how many times you return to the anchor,

In this case,

Our breath.

Just feel the breath coming and going now for a while.

Another thing you can notice in breath meditation is the little pause between the exhale and the inhale.

When you get to the end of the exhale,

There's a little pause before the inhale arrives.

And it can be an interesting place to let your awareness drop into for a short while.

It'll be different for everyone.

That pause might be a split second,

It might be a couple of seconds.

And there might be something you're interested in looking at.

Being with the inhale,

Being with the exhale,

Being with the little pause,

And waiting for the inhale to arrive,

Not snatching for it.

Being carried off by thoughts,

Taken away by distraction,

Noticing it,

Coming back.

This is the practice.

So it's a good result when you notice yourself having been carried off.

It gives you the opportunity to start again.

Allowing the breath to fall into the background of awareness now.

And this time,

Settling on sound as the anchor for meditation.

Meditation.

So simply noticing whatever sounds you hear,

Be they right nearby or further away.

Just allowing your awareness to move from one sound to another as they attract your attention,

As they present themselves to your awareness.

And maybe you're somewhere really quiet and you've got a lot of silence to listen to.

If you're somewhere noisier and there's a lot of sound,

Maybe from time to time you can notice the deep silence in the background.

That noise presents itself against,

Or sound.

Trying not to make any judgments about the sound,

Not interested in whether it's.

.

.

We don't need to give the sound a story,

Whether it's a pleasant sound or an unpleasant sound.

It's just being aware of sound as a form of raw energy.

Appearing in our consciousness.

And just sit and notice sound for a while.

Coming back when you wonder.

Notice how with sound you've no idea which one's going to impinge on your awareness next.

It's just there.

All of a sudden.

Before the next one does the same thing.

Allowing sound to fall into the background now.

And bringing your attention to the darkness in front of your closed eyes.

Even though you've got the closed eyes,

You're still looking into something.

So just actively look into the darkness in front of your closed eyes.

The yogis call this cittakasha,

Means mind space or mind sky.

And looking into that as if into a night sky,

Or indeed into space.

It's not pure darkness,

You'll see there might be flickerings,

Various occurrences.

But I invite you as you look into this mind space,

Into this darkness,

In front of your closed eyes,

I invite you to see if you can discern an endpoint anywhere there.

In any direction.

Can you see an endpoint?

Anywhere?

Or are you able to get a sense of the wide open nature of the mind?

Of this mind space.

Kind of an analogy for consciousness,

This space,

This wide open space of awareness.

From which we notice the various occurrences.

Sensations in the body.

The sensations associated with breathing,

Sounds,

Thoughts.

These are all just things that emerge into the space of awareness.

And seeing if it's possible to kind of drop back and be that space of awareness.

And just allow whatever presents itself to come and go.

Just being the space of awareness.

No need to control anything at all,

Just let everything that appears there,

Appear as it will.

And vanish as it will.

We're approaching the end of this meditation,

Just allow some movement back into your body,

Might be tiny little movements,

Wriggling fingers and toes,

It might be a big old stretch,

But let your body have whatever it instinctively feels like it needs.

And as you're ready,

Open your eyes again.

And just pause for a few moments.

Notice how you feel right now.

Brings us to the end of this meditation.