So making yourself comfortable lying down on your bed or on the floor or wherever you can be comfortable,
Maybe putting a pillow of some sort under your knees.
Allowing the breath to be at its most natural state.
Allowing your eyes to close and your body to just melt into the floor or the bed.
And allowing your attention to gently come into the body and to the flowing of the breath.
Take a slow deep breath in and a full deep exhale.
Realizing the sense of the body as a whole simply lying here extended and breathing.
When you feel ready picturing in your mind's eye the image of a lake.
Perhaps a lake that you know well and frequent or one that you've seen in a photograph or even an imaginary lake.
Just seeing if you can bring that image into vivid focus in your mind's eye.
Noticing how it's an extended body of water held in a depression in the earth's surface and perhaps fed by a spring or a stream.
If you watch and observe the lake carefully you'll notice that it's always changing and yet it's also always itself.
It changes as the sun moves across the sky.
The light is reflected off the water in different ways.
The colors change yet the water remains.
It changes depending on the weather.
Sometimes on very calm days the surface might be like glass and reflect virtually everything with great precision that comes by.
Clouds,
Birds,
The trees that might surround the lake,
The sun as it makes its journey across the sky and the moon and stars at night.
So there are times when the lake is extremely reflective and contains in a certain way everything that comes by or over it.
In different periods of time the surface might be choppy or roiled and sometimes quite pronounced in the waves in which times the light might sparkle off the waves in different ways.
Of course the lake changes through the seasons.
In the winter depending on its location it might actually be frozen over or at least on the surface.
Through day and night and through the seasons and through the years the lake is constantly changing but always is its own essential nature.
Let's see if we can't invite the lake to become coextensive with our own body lying here so that our body becomes the lake itself.
We also feel held and embraced as we lie here aware of the many ways in which our own mind is like the surface of the lake,
Sometimes highly reflective,
Sometimes choppy.
Getting in touch with the sense of the entirety of the lake,
The full body of water not only in the surface but down below.
As we lie here just experiencing the fullness of our own being so that even at times when our mind is choppy and upset or reactive or dealing with difficult things we can drop down beneath the surface of our own minds waves and find a stillness and a calmness that's always here and always available to us with each moment,
With each breath and certainly when we come down to lie in this way.
Lying here under the canopy of our vast awareness experiencing the moment to moment changes in the body and sensations,
Thoughts,
Feelings,
Impulses,
Sounds and all the while lake like just simply lying here watching the play of the weather of the mind and body.
Allowing the awareness to hold it all moment by moment,
Breath by breath in our own fullness,
In our own completeness moment by moment.
Starting to become aware of the breath,
Quietly taking a full breath in,
A full breath out.
Allowing all the muscles in the face to relax and rest.
Namaste.
