Tara Brach - Meditation: Silence, Presence and Care (2022-01-19)

Episode Date: January 20, 2022

Meditation: Silence, Presence and Care (2022-01-19) - Quieting our busy bodies and minds brings alive our heart and spirit. This practice begins with a reading on silence by Gunilla Norris, and then includes guidance in letting go of tension, opening to aliveness and resting in a caring and wakeful awareness.

The following meditation is led by Tara Brock. To access more of my meditations or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com. Welcome, welcome. I'd like to start this meditation with a reading. This is a reading from Ganilla Norris that I've always loved. So you might just sit back and sense this is the beginning of your reflection, this reading. She writes this, she says, within each of us, there is a silence, a silence as vast as a universe. We're afraid of it and we long for it.

When we experience that silence, we remember who we are, creatures of the stars, created from the cooling of this planet, created from dust and gas, created from the elements, created from time and space, created from silence. In our present culture, silence is something like an endangered species, an endangered fundamental. The experience of silence is now so rare that we must cultivate it and treasure it. This is especially true for shared silence. Sharing silence is, in fact, a political act. When we can stand aside from the usual and perceive the fundamental, changes begins to happen.

Our lives align with deeper values and the lives of others are touched and influenced. Silence brings us back to basics to our sense. to ourselves. It locates us. Without that return, we can go so far away from our true natures that we end up literally beside ourselves. We live blindly and act thoughtlessly. We endanger the delicate balance which sustains our lives, our communities, and our planet. each of us can make a difference. Politicians and visionaries will not return us to the sacredness of life. That will be done by ordinary beings, those who together or alone can say, remember to breathe, remember to feel, remember to care. Let us do this for our children and ourselves

and our children's children, let us practice for life's sake in that spirit of presence and caring. You might begin to be aware of the movement of the breath, perhaps intentionally extending the breath, letting the in-breath for five counts come in smoothly and fully filling your chest and lungs. and for five counts matching the in-breath and the out-breath, a smooth release, breathing in, filling the chest and the lungs, and that slow, conscious out-breath, feeling the sensations of the breath as you exhale, breathing in long and deep, and with the out-breath a sense of releasing, of letting go, breathing in, filling the chest in the lungs, and breathing out, sensing the possibility of softening down the body, letting go, letting go.

And then allowing the breath to relax in a resumed natural rhythm, noticing the quality of presence that's here, just with a few moments of intentional being, observing the breath, noticing that you can still continue to let go a little bit. little with the out breath and perhaps scanning through the body, sensing if there's areas of obvious tension or tightness and inviting those areas to dissolve with the out breath to let go a bit and release. Let the eyes be soft, slight smile at the mouth. All the micro muscles in the face can relax and smooth. You might feel a sense of the throat filling. the neck, relaxing inside the neck, allowing the shoulders to relax and fall away from the neck, and continuing to breathe and feel the shoulders from the inside out, noticing the possibility of letting go a little more with the out breath.

We carry so much conscious and unconscious tension, letting the hands rest and relaxed, effortless, easy way, feeling them from the inside out. Again, with the out breath sensing the possibility of dissolving, softening, relaxing through the hands and let there be an openness to the chest, letting the breath go deep into the abdominal area, receiving the breath with a softening belly, this breath and this one, and again. aware of the length and the volume of the legs, feeling the feet from the inside, the tingling, the vibrating, and widening the lens to sense this entire body as a field of sensation, not opposing anything, not stopping anything, letting this life live through you, open and receptive,

noticing the sounds that appear in the space of awareness, letting the sounds wash through you. So you're listening to and feeling the whole moment with the same receptivity of listening, receiving the sensations, receiving the movement of the breath, letting the sense of this whole body's aliveness or the particular movement of the breath be a kind of home base. So when the mind travels as it does quite naturally into the future or the past, you have a way of coming home right back to the senses, to the sacredness of presence right here. When there's a noticing that the mind has drifted, it's actually an opportunity to deepen the pathway back to presence, to simply reopen the attention, listening to the sounds that are right here,

listening to and feeling the aliveness in the body. And if there's a sense of tension or blockage, to invite that letting go, to see what wants to let go, invite tension to dissolve. what happens, feeling the simple movement of the breath, saying yes to whatever wants your attention, whatever feelings, emotions are here, breathing with the life of the moment, receptive, relaxed, here right now, aware in the foreground of sounds, of sensations, feelings, and in the background, that vast silence that's listening, that boundless awareness, that's our source, our essence. Within each of us there is a silence, a silence as vast as a universe.

The experience of silence is now so rare that we must cultivate it and treasure it. remember to breathe remember to feel remember to care let us do this for our children and ourselves and our children's children let us practice for life's sake