Tara Brach - Guided Meditation: Listening to and Feeling the Moment (2)

Episode Date: February 6, 2014

2014-02-05-Guided Meditation: Listening to and Feeling the Moment (2)

Take some moments to adjust how you're sitting, so you're sitting in a posture that supports the meditation. So coming into stillness and as a way of collecting the attention, we'll just take a few very conscious, long, deep breaths together. Let's inhale deeply, a slow, deep full breath, filling the lungs, and a slow out breath. so slow that you can actually feel the sensations of releasing and again inhaling deeply filling the chest the lungs and a slow out breath letting go

letting go and once again inhaling deeply you might even hold for a moment feel that fullness and then a slow gentle out breath softening down the length of the body as you release the breath, letting go, letting go, letting the breath resume in its natural rhythm. See if you can relax with the inflow,

relax with the outflow, noticing the quality of presence that arises just after a little bit of intentional practice, just sense yourself being here with a gentle kind of listening, let the attention come to the heart, you might just drop the question in, what is my intention for being here this evening? What really brings me? And take your time just to feel that quality of sincerity or innocence that comes when we connect with what really matters to us. Feeling the heart, we chant together.

together as community. The simple mantra, om, this sound current of connectedness, if you'd like to let the hands touch gently in front of the heart, please do. Just to feel that connecting with that sense of dedication, heart presence, chant three times, inhaling deeply to begin. Perhaps the most direct way to awaken into presence is through awareness of the body. You might scan through the body and notice if there's any areas of particular tightness or tension, sensing bringing the awareness to those areas and see if there can be a natural loosening or releasing. It can be very helpful to sense the shoulders, to feel them from the body, from the inside out, imagine, feel a kind of melting or dissolving to soften the hands.

Let them rest in a very easy and effortless way. And just notice as you relax the hands, the sensations that arise from the inside out and just feel the aliveness, space inside the hands, letting the chest be open and gently soften, relax the belly, letting this next breath be received in a softening belly. This breath. Now this one, and again, feel the awareness, the wakefulness spreading through the body deep into the torso, aware of the legs, where of the sensations in the inside of the feet, and then in a comprehensive way, just feeling the whole field of bodily sensations. letting everything happen, not opposing anything, tingling, vibrating, places of tightness,

feelings of flow, heat, cool, this whole dance of sensation, widening out the attention to include sound, the appearing, disappearing of sounds, listening not just with your ears, but with your whole awareness, it's letting the sounds wash through. So you're listening to and feeling the whole moment, sensing the presence that's here, this background of awakeness, noticing space of awareness. It's quite natural that the mind will drift and move off into thought forms,

comments, judgments, worries, plans. Just let the practice be simple. When there's a recognition of being in that trance of thoughts, just simply relax open the attention. Again, become aware of the sounds that are right here, aware of this whole dance of sensation, listening to and feeling the whole moment. And if you find it helps you to steady your attention,

attention, to have an anchor or home base, you might let the sensations of the breath, the inflow, outflow at the nose or the rising, falling at the chest, inflating, settling at the belly, picking some area where you feel the breath, where it's most easy to detect the breath, most pleasant perhaps. Letting that be in the foreground as your portal to presence. Relaxed attentiveness, moment to moment. You can begin fresh in any moment. If you've noticed the mind's been off time traveling, just appreciate the noticing that this is a moment of waking up and gently relax open the attention so that you're listening again rather than to the thoughts to what's actually happening right here.

To these sounds, re-relax in the body. You can't relax too often. Softening the shoulders, softening the hands, relaxing the heart, so that you're listening to and feeling, again, this moment-to-moment flow of aliveness.