Tara Brach - Meditation: Embodied Awareness (2016-02-17)

Episode Date: February 19, 2016

This guided meditation includes a full body scan, and the recognition of the formless awareness that includes and is source of all experience. By recognizing that awareness we discover the silence and stillness that is the ground of all experience. Free download of Tara’s new 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. In the stillness, allow your awareness to scan through the body, relaxing and waking up from the inside out sense of living presence. You might feel the domain of the eyes and just gently soften your eyes.

Let the brow be smooth. Feeling the mouth, letting there be a slight smile at the mouth. Letting the inside of the mouth smile. Letting the tongue be relaxed, spreading into the lower palate, and the root of the tongue relaxed. So you can feel the sensations filling the mouth.

You might sense the throat filling the whole neck. and feeling from the inside out the sensations that are there. Letting the shoulders fall away from the neck, relaxing back and down some, and feeling from the inside out the aliveness of sensation inside the shoulders, letting the hands rest in an easy and effortless way, explore softening the hands

and feeling them from the inside out. Can you sense the tingling and the vibrating inside the hands? An intimate attention, just as a cup is filled with water, this whole body can be filled with awareness, let there be an openness at the chest, and feel the heart area from the inside out, directly experiencing the sensations, the aliveness, the vibrating,

the energy of the heart. Can you also sense the space that that aliveness is floating in and unfolding in? Perhaps maybe can you sense the interior space that those sensations of heart arise from, loosening down through the abdominal area,

letting this next breath be received in a softening belly. This breath, and now this one, And again, peeling from the inside out, this region of the belly, sometimes described as the dantien, this energy vortex, an intimate direct attention. Just receiving the aliveness there

and seeing if you can sense the space that the energy and aliveness is floating in, the space it's arising from, letting the awareness scan down, into the pelvic region. And in a similar way, receptivity to the whole play of aliveness there. The movement of sensation, sensing the space that energy is moving in and arising from. Sensing the earth and atmosphere below and around us, this massive dance of aliveness

and space, sensing it flowing through you, through the feet, through the legs, through the whole body. So you can feel your whole body as a field of sensation, part of this living earth. And just let everything happen, not opposing or resisting anything, including in awareness the dance of sound, the appearing and dissolving of sound. so that you're listening to and feeling the whole moment, the whole play of sound and sensation. Can you sense the vast, boundless space that sound and sensation is appearing in the vast space that it's arising from? Can you sense that this vast space is filled with the light of awareness, everything that's happening, sounds, feelings, sensations, are all known by awareness,

appearing in and dissolving in awareness. Continue to let everything happen, let life be just as it is, and when the mind quite naturally as it does drifts into thoughts, to simply pause noticing that, Then arrive again in the senses. Sounds are known by awareness. Sensations are known by awareness. Discover how this whole living world arises from, dissolves into awareness, is known by awareness.

There's nothing to do. are known spontaneously by awareness. Be the silence that's listening, receptive, open. Be the stillness that's aware of this living world. And for these final moments, bringing awareness to the domain of heart, letting this whole experience of heart of emotion, sensation in the heart area, let it be received in awareness.

Sense the heart space, that tender awareness that can hold this living and dying world.