Tara Brach - 2015-03-18 - Meditation: Awakening from the Dream

Episode Date: March 21, 2015

2015-03-18 - Meditation: Awakening from the Dream

The following meditation is led by Tara Brock, meditation teacher, psychologist, and author. Become aware of the movement of the breath and with a listening quality of attention. Just bring your awareness to the heart area. Notice the state of your heart right now. This might be the first time today or in a while that you've very purposefully just contacted your own heart. sensed, okay, what's it like right now? I just offered a kind of listening attention. You might notice what mood is here.

You might notice the physical sensations of the heart, whether there's a quality of numbness or a quality of tightness, flow, openness, or squeeze. Density, weightiness, lightness, deepening your attention and sense, what is your intention, your heart's intention, for being here tonight? What do you wish or long for? Letting yourself connect with your own sincerity.

We continue to awaken a relaxed quality of presence by scanning through the body. You might notice if there's any areas of particular tightness or tension. Just invite a loosening, a softening in those areas. Scanning down the body you might start, the head, find that area of the eyes and the brows and feel from the inside out the possibility of relaxing so the brow is smooth. You might sense that you're smiling into the eyes. Let the corners of the eyes lift a little.

The flesh around the eyes soften. So there's a receptivity and ease in a similar way, bringing a slight smile to the lips, sometimes called the half-smile of the Buddha. You might see if you can feel the insides of the mouth smiling and sends a direct message to the nervous system. It's a shift out of the fight-flight-freeze mode into more ease. Relax down to the root of the tongue. You might feel the breath at the throat, sense the throat filling the neck.

You might bring that smile to the heart. Just imagining and sensing the curve of the smile through the heart, not to cover over anything, but to create the space for the life that's right here. Let that space of ease and openness widen out to include the shoulders so the shoulders can fall away from the neck a bit, relax back and down, and placing the awareness inside the shoulders, just sensing the aliveness and sensation that's there,

softening, perhaps sensing the shift of ice to water that's dissolved in, ice to water, water to gas, feeling the length and the volume of the arms, the life and sensations in the arm. Right down into the hands. Notice that you can soften the hands, letting them rest in a very easy and effortless way, and then feel the sensations from the inside out.

What do you notice when the awareness is inside the hands? You might soften even more. Can you sense the tingling or the vibrating that's there? Perhaps pulsing, warmth, pressure? pressure. You can bring this same intimate attention throughout the body, feeling a sense of openness at the chest, and then feeling the chest from the inside out, feeling the heart area in a very precise, immediate way, as a constellation of sensations, warmth, pressure, flow, tightness, openness, so that you're again experiencing the heart with the direct and immediate presence.

Scanning down the torso and letting this next breath be received in a softening belly. This breath and this one and again, you can feel that from the awareness inside out, the aliveness in the belly, and letting the awareness fill the whole pelvic region. the whole torso, feeling from the inside out this play, this dance of sensation, feeling the legs, the length, the volume of the legs, the aliveness there, let the awareness fill the feet. So you're feeling the feet from the inside out. And sensing that aliveness extending to the earth beneath and around you.

So you can feel this whole sphere, vast sphere of aliveness. letting it flow into you, through you, since you're belonging to it, so that you can feel the entire body as a field of sensation, intrinsically a part of this whole field of life. You might discover in the midst of this field of sensation the sensations of this life breath, not controlling anything, just receiving the sensations of the breath, the inflow, the outflow, relaxed, open awareness, letting the breath be a kind of home base

when you notice the mind's traveled back into thoughts, as it will inevitably, to gently notice that and then to relax open again into this field of sensation and aliveness and then again resting in a simple way with the movement of the breath. Am I dreaming right now? Just notice where the mind's been. We time travel and leave presence regularly. So just noticing that is something you can appreciate. It's a moment of waking up from the dream.

Notice the difference between any thought you've been inside and what's right here. These sounds, this field of aliveness, sensations, this immediacy of the inflow and outflow of the breath. Just like waking up from a dream, sensing the vividness and immediacy of what's actually right here, resting again in the flow, moment to moment, the inflow, the outflow. Again, the inquiry, am I dreaming? Sometimes the thoughts are real obvious. And other times it's just a subtle veil of commentary

that separates us from what's right here. Any thought activity is a subtle or not subtle contraction so you can relax open to listening and feeling, the liveliness of the moment. From the poet Wu, 10,000 flowers in spring, the moon in autumn, a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter. If your mind isn't clouded by unnecessary things, this is the best season of your life.