Tara Brach - Meditation: Refuge of Living Presence

Episode Date: November 16, 2023

Meditation: Refuge of Living Presence - Our thoughts keep us removed from this living world. This guided practice invites us to open and relax with the moment-to-moment experience of our senses. It includes a poem by Ingrid Goff-Maidoff, "Wherever you are, Find a Trail."

The following meditation is led by Tara Brock. To access more of my meditations or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com. Take some moments to feel as you come into stillness, this body breathing. And you might ask yourself what wants to let go right now, sensing the possibility of releasing any unnecessary tension or tightness as a way of deepening presence to scan through the body, relaxing, letting go.

You might soften the eyes, let the brow be smooth. It's helpful to bring a slight smile to the mouth and just feel the mouth from the inside out, the tingling, vibrating, letting the awareness spread through the face, letting the features be at ease, scalp and skull, feeling tingling, vibrating, aliveness. You might let your shoulders relax back and down some. It takes some more time if you haven't already to feel the shoulders to the inside out, perhaps sensing a dissolving, a melting, ice to water and water to gas. and let the hands rest in an easy, effortless way, softening the hands, and feeling from the inside

out the aliveness that's there. And let there be an openness to the chest, feeling with the movement of the breath that you can contact the aliveness inside, feeling the region of the heart. And if it helps to smile into the heart, to feel a sense of a smile spreading through the heart in the chest to make room for what's here, letting this next breath be received in a softening belly, letting the belly continue to be soft, awakening, a sense of presence throughout the midsection and down through the pelvic region. Just feeling awareness waking up through the body, down through the legs, and feeling the places of pressure and contact where you're sitting, are lying where your feet contact the floor, warmth, contact, contact, pressure, grounded,

sensing the earth below, feeling the aliveness of the earth flowing into you, filling you. Again, aware of this whole breathing body, sensing a field of sensation. You might include the sounds that are here. sensing the sounds, sensations all received in an awake field of awareness. And when the mind drifts from this open presence, just noticing without judgment, and then stepping back from the thinking, reopening from the thinking, reconnecting with the senses, the sounds that are right here, the sensations and aliveness that's right here, resting in the awareness that's listening to and feeling the changing flow of experience.

It doesn't matter how many times the mind drifts. Each time you step out of the preoccupation of thinking, Each time you relax back to this aliveness and presence that's right here is a moment of homecoming, gently releasing thoughts, opening back into this living presence, relaxing with the life that's right here. And this is a poem by Ingrid Gough-Madoff called, Wherever You Are, Find a Trail. The sky is not falling for the cedar tree.

The heron's infinite blue world has not changed. The marsh shows no signs of Wall Street volatility. Trees and grasses are golden with the sun. The ocean and sky still join like levers here, now, and on the horizon too. the swan content faces a gentle breeze the cormorant dives resurfaces belly once again filled follow that trail find the bench or stone that waits for you there we must learn to walk away from the carnival of the world to become still and remember what it is that holds us. What in us is held.