Tara Brach - Meditation: Alert Inner Stillness (2017-12-06)

Episode Date: December 7, 2017

Meditation: Alert Inner Stillness (2017-12-06) - Behind the changing sounds, sensations, feelings and thoughts is an alert inner stillness that is purely aware. This meditation begins with accessing the receptivity of a smile, awakening through the body and opening the senses. We then sense the background of awareness and relax back to inhabit that wholeness. When the mind is distracted, the pathway home is a relaxing back, and the essential practice is non-doing, allowing life to be just as it is. Free download of Tara's 10 min meditation: "Mindful Breathing: Finding Calm and Ease" when you join her email list.

The following meditation is led by Tara Brock. To access more of my meditations or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com. Sense from the inside out the sitting posture. Just feel a quality of uprightness to help you with really being awake and at ease, relaxed. You might become aware of the breath as it feels. close in and out of the heart.

Gently let your attention come to the area of the heart. We begin with a reflection on intention, what your intention is for practice right now. This is a deep question really of what brings us here, what really matters to us most. So just listen inwardly and sense what you feel most sincere about. And we sense our shared intention attention and that our practice might wake up our hearts and minds in a way that ripples out

and really brings more peace and understanding love and freedom to all beings. You might let your practice be held in an atmosphere of kindness and care by visualizing the curve of a smile. You might sense wide open space and sensing the curve of a smile spreading through it like a great open sky filled with that receptivity of a smile and then let the smile merge with the mind. So the mind is filled with the illumination and warmth of a smile, letting the eyes soften and smiling into the eyes so the outer corners lift some and the brow be smooth, very soft eyes.

Sensing the smile at the mouth, very slight smile there. Zen master Ticknathan calls this smile yoga and even sense perhaps the inside of the mouth smiling and if you widen the attention to the whole face, feeling the tingling and vibrating in aliveness, that spreads through the face as you relax with the image and sense of a smile, letting the shoulders drop away from the neck, softening, relaxing inside the shoulders, letting there be an openness at the chest and smiling into the heart,

visualizing and sensing the curve of a smile spreading through the heart, mouth still smiling, eyes still soft. You start feeling the radiance and openness, the field created by the sense of a smile. You might check your hands, making sure they're resting in a very easy and effortless way. Softening the hands and noticing the aliveness that you feel inside them. The eyes still soft, slight smile at the mouth, visualizing and sensing the curve of a smile spreading through the chest. You might imagine the curve of a smile at the belly,

visualizing and feeling the smile, loosening and softening the belly, being aware of the whole aliveness and tingling and vibrating that fills the abdominal air. Eyes are still soft, slight smile at the mouth, curve of a smile spreading through the heart, the belly, a smile there, soft, letting the breath we receive deep in the torso, open and receptive, vibrant and alive, scanning down and sensing, visualizing and feeling the curve of a smile filling the pelvic region, relaxing open, receptive to feel the whole field of

aliveness and sensation in that region. Opening the lens of perception to sense the whole body as a field of sensation, edgeless, fast and alive, sensing that field permeated with the atmosphere of a smile, completely receptive, including the changing sounds in the foreground, changing dance of sound and sensation, and in the background, an alert inner presence and alert stillness, mind drifts. We notice that we're often the virtual world of thinking to gently relax open back into this changing dance of aliveness, sensation, sound, recognizing in the background, the alert inner stillness of our own awake nature.

It's helpful to check and notice where your attention is. If there's been a veil of thinking, ideas, plans, worries, to simply recognize that and And relax open the attention, listening, scanning through the body and re-relaxing where there might be tightness, softening the eyes, slight smile at the mouth, letting the shoulders relax back and down. Relaxing your heart, listening to and feeling the whole moment and sensing in the background, that alert inner stillness, that which is aware. resting in that, being that awareness.

For this last few moments to really explore what it means to not do anything, not controlling anything or directing anything, simply relaxing back, close in a simple way by bringing attention to the heart, and with a listening presence sensing whatever wish you'd like to offer to your own being in this moment, whatever prayer is here for your own being and then to sense this heart space that is boundless and includes all beings extending your prayer, your wish for the welfare of all beings.