Tara Brach - 2015-03-25 - Meditation: Relaxing Back into Presence

Episode Date: March 27, 2015

2015-03-25 - Meditation: Relaxing Back into Presence

The following meditation is led by Tara Brock, meditation teacher, psychologist, and author. In this stillness, you might let the awareness scan through your body and notice if there's any areas of holding, tightness or tension. Just sense you could bring the awareness to those areas and allow a natural, releasing, softening, letting go. Paying particular attention to the shoulders. We tend to carry so much there. Sense that you can let the shoulders fall away from the neck a little.

You might feel them from the inside out. Just imagine a quality of melting. Ice to water. Water to gas. See if you can feel the shoulders from the inside out. and sense inside them space and aliveness, movement, flow. It feel down the arms into the hands and sense and check that the hands are resting in a very easy, effortless way and now softening the hands and feeling them from the inside out.

Again, can you imagine and sense the space and aliveness inside your hands? can you sense tingling or vibrating? You might soften just a little bit more and then notice how much more life you can feel as you begin to relax and deepen attention. Let there be an openness to the chest area and feeling from the inside out the heart,

the region of the heart. Again, can you imagine and sense the space and aliveness that's there? The movement of energy. letting the awareness scan down the torso, feeling the belly from the inside out. Letting this next breath be received in a softening belly. This breath, now this one, and again, as you begin to soften the belly, can you imagine and sense the space and aliveness that's there, feeling from the inside out, the movement

of sensation, continuing to scan down the torso, letting the awareness fill the whole pelvic region, hips, buttocks, genitals, and imagining and sensing the space and aliveness and the movement of energy that fills this region, scanning down through the legs, feeling the feet, contact with the floor, pressure, warmth. from the inside out. Just feeling the aliveness inside the feet. You're just sensing how the aliveness and the feet like roots go deep into the earth so you can feel the earth's aliveness below and around you. Just imagine and sense that completely fill in your body now. Opening the attention so you feel simultaneously this whole field of sensation, vibrant

It's a dance of aliveness, not opposing anything, just letting this life live through you. It's resting in a receptive openness, including this play of sensation, including the dance of sound, the sounds that are close in, like these words that appear and disappear, sounds of the space in the room, listening, including the more distant sounds, resting in that openness that includes the most distant sounds you can perceive, listening to and feeling the entire moment of the sounds changing sensations in the foreground. Where in the background of that alert, inner stillness, most subjective experience of your being, sense that you can relax back again and again and just be that presence.

The space that sound and sensation appears in, disappears in. And quite naturally the conditioning of mind is to carry us away from presence. into thoughts, remembering, planning, commenting. So when you notice that, let that be an invitation to relax back again, to re-relax open, listening again to this symphony of sound that's right here, listening to and feeling the play of sensation. Let this be a home base, listening to and feeling the whole moment. your senses awake so that every time your mind carries you off, you can practice this beautiful

pathway of relaxing back, reopening to the sounds that are here, reopening to the sensations that are here, and resting in that receptivity and that openness, moment to moment flow of experience. You might sense if it's possible to relax or let go just a little bit more right now, literally slowly softening, relaxing the shoulders a bit, softening again in the hands, loosening and softening the belly, letting the breath be received deep in the torso, and just noticing the sense of aliveness and presence that unfolds as you relax, as you relax back.