Tara Brach - Meditation: Beyond the Veil of Thinking (2018-01-31)

Episode Date: February 2, 2018

This meditation awakens us to the space and aliveness in these bodies, and to resting in wakeful openness. When we get lost in thought, we practice relaxing open, and exploring the gap between thoughts. By opening beyond the veil of thinking, we discover the Beingness that is home. 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. As you come into stillness, you might sense the breath at the heart, so you can just kind of breathe in and out of your heart. We open with a simple inquiry or reflection on intention. So the invitation is to sense what your de-reve-you-reve-a-revelde.

deepest intention is right now for practicing meditation. What is it that really matters to you? That you feel most sincere about. Feeling your body breathing and gently scanning through the body, waking up from the inside out, relaxing from the inside out. You might begin by bringing the attention to the region of the eyes, softening. softening the eyes, smiling into the eyes as if you can feel the outer corners lifted some. The brow smooth and letting that same slight smile spread through the lips. You might even sense the inside of the mouth smiling. This sends a message through the vagal nerve to the whole nervous system

to relax, fight, flight, freeze, to just allow us to. to be more at ease. You might let the tongue fill, lower palate, feel the root of the tongue relaxed. The eyes are smiling, the mouth. Just open to feel the face, all the sensations in the face simultaneously, the tingling and vibrating there. Allowing the shoulders to relax back and down some, falling away from the neck.

fill the shoulders with awareness. So you can feel from the inside out the life that's there. It can help to imagine a melting of ice to water inside the shoulders. Let's try that ice to water, a kind of dissolving and water to gas. See, if you can sense inside the shoulders, the space that's there, the movement of energy, the aliveness. Let the hands rest in a very easy, and effortless way, softening the hands and softening again so that you can feel from the inside

out, the movement of energy, the tingling and vibrating that's there, sense the space between the palm and the back of the hand, the space that fills the thumb, the forefinger, and the space between the fingers, sensing how the whole hand is filled with space and aliveness. Feeling an openness at the chest. Feeling the area of the heart, you might smile into the heart, visualizing and sensing the curve of a smile spreading through the heart. Not to cover over, but to create space for whatever's there. Building that region with awareness.

Can you sense the space inside the heart? The movement of energy, sensation, aliveness there, relaxing the belly, letting this next breath be received in a softening belly. This breath and now this one and again filling the belly with awareness. Feeling from the inside out, can you imagine and sense the space that fills the belly, space in aliveness, filling the whole pelvic region with awareness and sensing the space, that fills that region, the movement of energy, awareness to fill the legs, sensing the length,

the weight, the volume of the legs, filling the feet with awareness. Can you imagine a sense the space inside the feet between the toes, feeling the aliveness that's there, widening the lens to feel this whole body as a field of sensation, field of space with aliveness, appearing, disappearing, like points of light in a night sky, not stopping anything, not controlling anything,

including the sounds that appear and disappear. You're resting in the openness that include sound and sensation, listening to and feeling this changing life, sensing in the background, this presence that's here, wakeful openness. At some point you'll notice the mind has been inside a cloud of thought, kind of in that trance of thinking, not to judge in any way, to simply relax open again the attention, listening to the sounds that are right here,

perhaps re-relaxing a bit in the body, noticing what wants to let go right in this moment, relaxing the heart, listening to and feeling the changing flow, resting in that wakeful openness, resting in presence, being the presence that's here. For some in the silence that comes, if it's supportive to feel the breath, the movement of the breath in the foreground to sustain your attention, Let that be a support. Know that you're here.

Right here. Every time you notice thinking and you reopen the attention, you're strengthening the pathway home. If there's any judgment, then that actually creates more thinking. So just to notice thoughts, you might even mentally say thinking, thinking. Relax open, reconnecting with the senses, coming home to presence. You might notice the difference between any thought, between any thought, and this living, vibrant reality that's right here.

Discover what it's like in the gap between thoughts, the pure, wakeful presence that's here when there's no veil of concept. From the poet Rumi, Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open? Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking. Live in silence. Flow down and down in always widening rings of being.