Tara Brach - Meditation: Quieting the Mind (2017-01-04)

Episode Date: January 5, 2017

Meditation: Quieting the Mind (2017-01-04) - We open with a reading on silence, and then relax our bodies, calm our minds and rest in the inflow and outflow of the breath. This simple meditation on relaxing with the breath ends with a verse on the blessings of quieting our mind. 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 a way of opening this meditation and this new year, I begin with a brief reading from Gwynelah Norris called Sharing Silence. Sharing silence with others is a political act. Silence brings us back to basics, to our senses, to ourselves. It locates us.

Without that return, we can go so far away from our true natures that we end up quite literally beside ourselves. We live blindly and act thoughtlessly. We endanger the delicate balance which sustains our lives, our communities, and our planet. I believe that each of us can make a tremendous difference. Politicians and visionaries will not return us to the sacredness of life. That will be done by ordinary people who gather neighbors and friends together and say, remember to breathe, remember to feel, remember to care, remember life. Let us do this together for ourselves and our children and our children's children.

As a way of settling and arriving in silence, we take some moments to relax and quiet through our body. You might soften the eyes, let the brow be smooth, unhinging the jaw, relaxing right down to the root of the tongue, perhaps a slight smile. smile at the mouth, letting the shoulders fall away from the ears, softening the hands, and then softening again so that as you feel from the inside out, you can feel the life that's here, the vibrating and tingling, perhaps the areas of warmth or pressure, let there be an openness at the chest, and feeling deep into the heart, sensing the areas of warmth, Sensing the aliveness, the space, the energy,

the region of the heart, relaxing the abdominal area, letting this next breath be received in a softening belly. This breath, and now this one, and again, relaxing down through the pelvic region, feeling from the inside out the aliveness, space and energy that's there. where of the length, the volume of your legs, feeling the feet from the inside out, the sensations,

liveliness that's there. You might open the attention now to sense this whole body as a field of sensation, to widen out even further, sense the appearing and disappearing of sound, listening to and feeling the whole moment. In the midst of this whole change, changing flow of sound and sensation.

You might gently rest the attention on the movement of the breath, relaxing with the inflow, relaxing with the outflow. You'll notice before too long that the mind drifts into thoughts. It's not a problem. It's natural for the mind to talk to itself and it's natural to begin to recognize that's happening and gently reopen the attention, aware of the sounds around you, the living sensations that fill this body, the movement of the breath, a kind of home base again and again just coming back gently, relaxing with the inflow, relaxing with the outflow, making

yourself at home in the flow of the present moment. It's helpful to periodically pause and check your state of mind. Notice if you're here or if there's some dreaming, some trance of thinking going on. If you sense that avail of thoughts then to appreciate that this is a moment of waking up, to notice and to relax open again, listening to the sounds that are here rather than the sounds in your mind. Relax open by re-relaxing a bit in the body. You might see if it's possible to let go just a little bit more through the body.

Relaxing by softening the heart. Just feeling what's there with a gentle attention and breathing with the life that's here. relaxing with the inflow, relaxing with the outflow, knowing that you're here, right here, in silence, in present. We close our time of shared silence with a simple verse from the poet Wu Men, 10,000 flowers in spring, the moon in autumn, a cool breeze in summer, snow, in winter. If your mind isn't clouded by unnecessary things, this is the best season of your life.