Tara Brach - 2024-04-24 - Meditation: Awakening through the Inner Body

Episode Date: April 25, 2024

When we attune to the inner body, we discover a field of energy and aliveness that is the portal to pure presence. This meditation guides our attention to the inner body, opens to the play of sound and invites us to rest in the awake awareness that includes and is the grounds of this living world.

The following meditation is led by Tara Brock. To access more of my meditations or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com. We begin each week with a meditation, and you might take this as a moment to pause, as the poet Martha Apostlewaite says, create a clearing in the dense forest of your life. So we pause, let the attention go inward.

and gently arrive right here, right now. The basic guidelines for the sitting posture are to sit in a way that allows you to be alert, to sit in a way that's relaxed. You might explore the posture a little, lean forward a bit and lean back, lean to the left, to the right, and then sense what really feels, right, balanced, and aligned in the center. Let the breath deepen. So you're breathing a nice full deep breath

and see if you can bring the breath and your attention to the area of the heart. So you're listening to and feeling that region. It's noticing whatever mood or emotions might be here right now, in the state of your heart, whatever you might have brought in with you, the kind of atmosphere you're in right now, emotionally. And as you, you have, you're in, you know, and as you, you're in, you listen to and feel your heart, to inquire what is my most sincere intention for practicing right now, for meditating, and what really matters to me is to ask and listen, listening to sounds, feeling the aliveness inside the body, feelings or emotions, the weather systems that move through us, deepening this presence by gently scanning through the body to feel

the full aliveness of our inner body, the energy that's here. You might sense the scalp and skull. Just feel the tingling and vibrating, letting the brow be smooth and the eyes soft. Again, feeling the aliveness there. I sense how everything's moving. and dancing, letting the jaw be unhinged, relaxing, the tongue right down to the root. See if you can feel the movement of energy inside the mouth, the tongue, gums, teeth, lips. You might imagine that the throat is completely filling your neck and see if you can sense

movement and energy and aliveness and the space inside the neck, very receptive. of presence. Just noticing how life is, not trying to change anything, letting the awareness fill the shoulders and feel the shoulders from the inside out. Again, that very receptive inner stillness that can perceive movement, aliveness, energy. Sense if you can feel the length and the volume of your arms, let the hands are in a very easy way. And you might soften the hands, soften again, and bring the awareness inside the hands. See if you can feel the life that's there. From the inside out, you might

bring the awareness inside the thumbs. Can you feel the tingling and vibrating there? the index fingers, middle finger, ring fingers, and pinky, the small fingers, can you feel the aliveness? Again, letting the awareness fill the whole hands, pulsing, warmth, cool. In a similar way, see if you can let the awareness fill the area of the chest, in the front of the chest, through the backbone in the back, the whole chest cavity, just sensing the aliveness that's there right inside the heart area. You feel pressure, flow, density, light, heavy, warm, cool, scanning down to the belly. Again, letting the awareness fill the belly. From the front, the navel to the backbone, the sides of the waist, feel the space that's there and the

aliveness that fills it. With the awareness fill the pelvic region, very receptive, just feeling the play of sensation through the hips, the buttocks, the genitals. And sense if you can feel the length and the volume of your legs and you sense energy or movement, sensation there, placing the attention and awareness inside the feet receptive to the movement of sensation. places of pressure, warmth, vibration, feeling the aliveness in the feet, softening the hands again, feeling the aliveness there. And sense how this awareness and aliveness fills the whole body simultaneously. You can sense this inner body as a field of sensation.

Just let everything happen, open presence, allowing this whole dance of sensation. to live through you. The inner body is this ever-changing play of sensation, energy, aliveness. There's no boundary, no inside, no outside, no center, widening the field to listen to the sound that's appearing, disappearing in awareness. I think sounds just washed through you, a global kind of listening, sensing how this aliveness of the inner body, this energy and sound, it's all appearing in awareness, arising, dissolving, in a vast and receptive presence. You might notice in a bit that the conditioning of the mind is to leave this open presence

and narrow into thought forms, the past, the future. And so meditation practice is to notice when we do that leaving of presence and gently re-arrive. You realize you've been often thought to relax open the attention again, aware of the sounds that are right here, listening to and feeling the inner body, this play of awareness and energy right here. If it helps to collect your attention a bit with the breath aware, the inflow and the outflow of the breath, moment to moment, noticing the difference between any thought, that virtual reality inside the thought clouds and this living, moving, vibrant

mystery of presence right here. You might check and see where your attention is, even if the mind's been drifting. Let this be an opportunity for coming home to presence again, to deepen that pathway home. Just gently widen and open the attention to include sounds, open in the body a bit, to perhaps softening places that get tense, like softening the shoulders, letting the hands be soft, loosening around the belly, relaxing your heart, reopening, sensing this inner body of aliveness, energy, letting this life live through you, resting in the awareness that includes this whole play of sound and sensation feelings, in these last few moments, sensing how deeply you can relax with what's right here,

relax your heart and being with a life that's right here. We close these last moments of silence by sending a blessing inwardly to our own heart, our own humanness, and then widening that heart space to include all beings, sending our prayer to all beings everywhere.