Tara Brach - Meditation: Spacious, Loving Awareness (from retreat)

Episode Date: May 28, 2020

Meditation: Spacious, Loving Awareness (from retreat) - When our awareness is awake and open, we naturally respond to this changing life with warmth, tenderness and love. This practice helps us discover the spaciousness of awareness by realizing the space and aliveness that is in the body, and then sensing the continuous space that holds all life. We then sense how this continuous space is filled with the light of awareness and pervaded by love. Includes a short talk that contexts the meditation. 

The following meditation is led by Tara Brock. To access more of my meditations or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com. This meditation is one of awakening our capacity for loving awareness. And just as a preface, and you can keep your eyes closed and listen, this will be a short contexting. If we really investigate awareness, there are three primary qualities that we discover.

And one of them is a cognizance or knowing, that there's knowing going on, moment to moment. And another is that that knowing is a boundless spaciousness. There's no limit, no central point to that knowing. It's a wakeful sea of awareness and they're completely interrelated these qualities. So there's knowing and there's that openness, boundlessness. And the third quality is sometimes described as this capacity to respond, this tenderness. that when we're fully wakeful, cognizant, and fully open, there is an innate kind of warmth or tenderness in response to whatever arises.

What we find as we deepen practice is that there are times that there's a lot of a sense of warmth and tenderness, but it's conditional, it's conditioned. It's not all-inclusive because there's not really that full spaciousness and cognizance there. So it's love without the qualities of equanimity of that openness. So that love is conditional love and it's intrinsically good and yet it's still limited because there's not that full awakeness and openness. On the other hand, there are times who are quite open and wakeful, but it's a kind of dry, what they call dry emptiness.

It's spacious, noticing, but without any sense of tenderness or warmth. And that's because it's disembodied. There's not a real inhabiting and feeling of the aliveness that's right here. It's like being the ocean but really not sensing the movement. movement of the waves. So for there to be unconditional loving awareness, we need all these qualities, this very embodied presence and yet quite spacious and open and awake. So we'll explore a meditation that I don't lead very often. I do it a lot in my own practice. I find it really powerful.

You'll hear in it that there's a kind of repeating question and that's just a form of the meditation for you to just find for yourself what's there. The way that I find helpful to begin this or any meditation really is to take a moment, to sense the sitting posture and to scan through to notice the very obvious places. of tightness, tension, and just see what wants to let go right now. It's also helpful to have an initial openness to imagine, sense a great sky, a great blue sky extending outward and outward. And sense that curve and felt sense of a smile spreading through the sky.

So there's a very, a feeling of light and openness and receptivity. and let your mind merge with that openness, an open, light-filled, receptive sky mind. I might sense that smile spreading through the eyes, that area of the eyes, corners lifted up a little, as if that smiles floating in the sky mind in the region of your eyes. And similarly, slight smile at the mouth and the inside of the mouth and letting a smile spread through the heart. Imagine the smile and the spirit and energy of a smile spreading through the body. Just further creating presence, openness, receptivity.

We begin with a more subtle scanning down, opening in and in really. Can you imagine and feel and sense the space between your eyes Just check that out Imagine and feel the space between the eyes Can you imagine and feel the space inside the nostrils Imagine and feel the space inside the tongue the aliveness there and the space the volume of the tongue Can you imagine and feel the space inside the lips

The aliveness and the space it's moving in Imagine and feel the space inside the teeth, the gums, and the space that fills the whole mouth. Imagine and feel the space that fills the neck, the aliveness, the space that's moving in, perhaps even the interior space that sensations arise from. The image of sub-atomic particles appearing and dissolving into space. Imagine and feel the space inside the shoulders, the space that fills the shoulders, and sensing, sensation, aliveness, moving in space, appearing from interior space. Can you imagine and feel the volume, length of the arms, the space that fills the arms?

Imagine and feel the space inside your thumbs. Can you imagine and feel the space inside your forefinger? Imagine and feel the space fills the thumb, the forefinger, and the space between them. Can you imagine and feel the space inside the middle finger and the ring finger? Can you imagine and feel the space inside the pinky, a small finger? Imagine and feel the space between the palm of your hand and the back of your hand. And can you imagine and feel the space of your whole hands? It fills your whole hands, bones, flesh, spaces between the fingers, the aliveness that's happening

in that space, the interior space. Imagine and feel the space between the sides of your chest, the distance between the sides of your chest. Imagine and feel the distance between the front of the chest and your back. Imagine and feel the volume that fills the whole chest area, the space inside your chest. All dimensions filled with space, sensing the aliveness, moving in that space. Can you imagine and feel the space inside your heart? the space that fills your heart, the interior space.

Can you imagine and feel the distance between the sides of your body and the abdominal area? Imagine and feel the distance between the navel and the small of the back. Can you imagine and feel the space that fills the entire belly, the abdominal area, all dimensions, the aliveness of energy and sensation and the space that it's happening in, that it arises from, the interior space. Can you imagine and feel the space that fills the pelvic region, space and aliveness, of the legs, their length, their volume? Can you imagine and feel the space inside your feet, the space that fills the feet?

again imagining and feeling the space inside the hands. And then imagining and feeling the space that fills its whole body, the interior space that all the aliveness arises from, dissolves into. Imagine that space that extends outward and outward in front of you beyond the furthest stars. Can you imagine the space that extends behind you, Outward and outward, beyond the furthest stars. Can you imagine and feel the space that extends to either side outward and outward, beyond the

furthest stars? Imagine and feel the space that extends below you and above you, outward and outward, beyond the furthest stars. Can you imagine and feel that this vast, boundless outer space and this endless interior space are continuous, continuous space? Imagine and sense that everything you experience is floating in and moving in, this continuous space. Can you imagine? Can you imagine, and feel that this continuous space is diffused with the light of awareness, radiant with the light of awareness. Imagine and feel how this continuous light-filled space is experienced in the dimension of

the heart, this human heart. Imagine and feel this continuous awake. awake space suffused with tenderness, including and tender towards everything that arises. Imagine and feel the possibility of getting familiar with this edgeless, tender heart space as home. Can you imagine that each of us all beings everywhere has the potential to access and and wake up to this same vast, tender heart space, resting in your sense of the most awake heart space that's here.

From the wisdom of awake in heart space, I'd sense if there's any message, something that is valuable to remember in this moment. from the radiant sutras, there is a place in the heart where everything meets. Go there if you want to find me. Mind, senses, soul, eternity, all are there. Are you there? Enter the bowl of vastness that is the heart. Give yourself to it with total abandon.

Quiet ecstasy is there in a steady regal sense of resting. in a perfect spot. Once you know the way, the nature of attention will call you to return again and again and be saturated with knowing, I belong here. I am at home here. Once you know the way, the nature of attention will call you to return again and again and be saturated with knowing, I belong here. I am at home here.