Tara Brach - Meditation: Relaxing Open into Full Presence

Episode Date: June 20, 2024

The pathway to presence does not involve efforts or striving. As you will find in this simple, gentle meditation, a vibrant and healing presence is possible as we wake up all our senses and intentionally relax with our changing experience. The gift is a true sense of homecoming, and with that openheartedness and peace.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Okay, so we're going to be moving into our meditation and especially if you're new, begin by checking your sitting posture. You might close your eyes and with your eyes close, begin and adjusting of your posture so that you might sense, instead of sitting and leaning forward or leaning back, and you can actually play with that, coming into a balance of sitting upright, sitting tall.

For some, it's actually helpful not to lean against the chair, but rather feel that uprightness, so if your tailbone could go deep into the earth with roots and then your spine rising up like a tree to the heaven, sitting tall and then notice the possibility of relaxing with that tallness. See you let your shoulders be loose and your hands soft. Take a nice full breath and another. Let your attention come gently to the heart area.

Just feel a quality of presence of being right here. And you might ask yourself what your intention is for practicing right now, for meditating right now. What is that your heart longs for? We open our time together as community and it's really a global community just to feel that shared heart aspiration for awakening, for freedom. You might bring the palms together as a way of centering at the heart and we'll chant the simple mantra oom which is a sound current of connectedness. We'll chant it three times. We'll begin by taking a nice deep in breath.

As you relax your hands down again, feel the sitting posture, this body breathing and feeling the body from the inside out. We'll just scan down the body, waking up our attention. You might let the eyes be very soft. Let the brow be smooth. Just allow yourself to feel the tingling and vibrating and aliveness in that region of the face. Perhaps the sparkling of light and dark at the eyelids. You might feel a scalp and the skull.

tingling and vibration. You might sense a slight smile at the mouth, a smile in the inside of the mouth. And then relaxing the tongue right down to the root, feeling the sensations inside the mouth. See if you can imagine the throat filling the neck area. Feeling the sensations of the neck from the inside out, allowing the shoulders to fall.

away from the neck. And if you could place the awareness completely inside the shoulders, letting the sensations just float, perhaps feeling a dissolving ice to water and then water to gas, feeling from the inside out the aliveness, the sensation, the energy inside the shoulders, going the hands to rest in an easy and effortless way. And now soften the hands, soften the hands and feel from the inside out the tingling and vibrating and aliveness that's there. See if you can let there be an openness to the chest. You might imagine smiling into the heart area, not to paper over what's there,

but to really create the space that allows life to unfold. Feeling the heart space from the inside out, intimate with the energies that are there, continuing to scan down, relaxing the abdominal area by letting this next breath be received in a softening belly. This breath and then this one and now this one and again letting the awareness fill the belly. Notice the aliveness of sensation, feeling from the inside out the life that's here. Continuing to scan down the torso, opening to the sensations that fill the pelvic area. Again, feeling your body from the inside out, the region of the hips, the buttocks, the genitals,

very receptive to the aliveness, the play of energies. There are touch points, places of pre-tuce of pressure and warmth where your hands contact your legs or touch each other, where your bottom is on the chair or cushion, or your feet touch the floor. You might feel the feet from the inside out, aware of the play of tingling and vibrating sensation there and then widening the lens to feel simultaneously this whole energy body this whole dance of sensation, everything happened to you, let everything live through you, including in this changing dance of aliveness, the sounds that appear and disappear.

So you're listening not just with your ears, you're listening with your whole awareness, letting sounds wash through like these words. that appear and disappear the silences between sounds, listening to the space in the room, to the most distant sounds you can hear, and sensing that boundless space that even the most distant sounds appear in and disappear in. So there's a listening to and feeling the whole moment,

it's changing flow of sounds, and sensation in the foreground. And in the background, this stillness, this awake stillness that's aware. Our practice is simply to relax back again and again into that openness and stillness, that which is aware of this changing flow of life.

For many, it's helpful to have in the foreground the simple anchor of the breath, the kind of home base, just feeling the in-flow and outflow with the light and clear attention, the natural dynamic of meditation practice is discovering we've been distracted and then coming back. So there's nothing wrong with being distracted. It's truly the conditioning of the mind. But what will really bring alive your practice is the attitude of coming back. So when you notice you've been lost in thought to just value that moment of noticing,

oh, okay, been in a kind of trance and re-relax open. Let it be an invitation to relax open hearing. So you hear the sounds that are here. Right here, these sounds, relax open in the body, perhaps letting go again in the shoulders, softening the hands, relaxing your heart to can gently re-arrive, feeling again that inflow and outflow of the breath. And just know that you're here, right here. You might notice where your attention is and that the mind has become distracted.

if your attention is often thoughts. This is a great time to practice relaxing, open the senses, listening, letting go a little in the body, relaxing the heart. So you can listen to and feel the full life of the moment, closing by bringing a gentle attention to the heart and sensing whatever prayer most resonates that you'd like, to offer to yourself in this moment, resting in that heart space that includes all of life, closing by offering your wish your prayer to all beings.