We begin by settling into the body — not forcing stillness, but discovering it. Moving through layers of embodied experience, we notice sensation, temperature, tension, and the overall felt sense of how we are right now. We also become aware of our relationship to what we find: whether we like it or resist it, and the subtle ways that resistance shows up as distraction or tension.
From here, we explore three pathways into a deeper allowing — meeting experience with unconditional love, softening into humility and surrender, or resting as the awareness that witnesses everything without being touched by it. The breath supports this practice, not as a way to block experience out, but as something that opens and steadies us as we learn to welcome whatever is present.
Transcripts have been automatically generated and may contain small differences from the audio, or errors.
Begin by finding a way to come to stillness without forcing yourself into stillness. Rather than kind of preventing your body from moving, just find stillness within yourself. Find stillness within your body.
And the stillness of the body provides a container, in which our awareness can rest. So begin to fill this container with awareness, filling your body with presence.
And as you do so, notice what you meet. Notice what awareness finds in your body. Usually the most obvious things are the most intense or uncomfortable sensations in the body. And it can take a minute or two or more to reveal more of the subtlety of what's going on.
So take that time. You can bring your awareness to different layers of embodied experience to help with this. Noticing the temperatures in the body. Noticing the patterns of tension that shift through your body—not static, but moving like clouds.
Notice the tingles, the subtle sensations. If you pick a part of your body and zoom in closely, you'll normally find some kind of vibration, some kind of tingle. Then notice the felt sense of your body.
This is the kind of the feeling of the body that lends itself to adjectives like fizzy, restless, smooth, cloud-like, spiky. What is the general feel of the body? And an adjective may come, and it will never be the final and complete answer.
So just continue to listen a little bit more deeply. Notice whether or not you're—whether or not you like how your body feels this morning. Sometimes when we feel good, we like that. Sometimes when we feel bad, we don't like that.
But we're not always aware of this sort of secondary reaction to how we're feeling. Become aware of that. And then just create some space around all of this.
We can do this by really wholeheartedly committing to allowing our experience this morning to be completely what it already is. You may notice the parts of us that want to fix things, that want to change things, want to improve things.
And this often manifests as distraction—thinking about how we're feeling rather than actually feeling it. Or it manifests as tension, a kind of rejection of the reality of our experience because we want to replace it with something else.
We don't have to fight any of these parts, any of these tendencies. You can just include them and witness them and allow them to. In doing so, we become less caught up in that endless attempt to organise life, to organise experience.
This attitude of allowing things to be just as they are. We can access this in a few different ways. One way is to see it, to feel it, as a kind of love—kind of unconditional love.
Knowing that this is the most sensible way to hold our experience, to offer it a deep, authentic love. Another way is as a kind of surrender, a kind of humility. Like, I know I don't call the shots even in my own life.
I'm not really in charge of what happens. This recognition, this humility, can lead to a softening, a laying down of our weapons. Another approach is to just notice that everything that's present in your body is an experience that you can witness.
That you—the subject, you—the consciousness can witness. Even the sensations, emotions, thoughts that feel like, "this is me doing this, this is my emotion, my discomfort, my restlessness," whatever it might be.
Notice that you can watch this happening. And it's possible to situate yourself in the watching rather than in the experience itself. So you can see which of these three routes feels most resonant with you this morning.
So in many ways the essence of meditation is just this allowing of all experience. And it can be very helpful to base ourselves on the breath or somewhere else as we do this.
So if it does feel helpful for you, just begin to draw the breath into the foreground of your experience. And spend a minute or two deepening your sense of what the breath is uncovering—more sensations connected to the breath.
The movement of the belly, the air in the nostrils, the quiet sound of the breath, and most importantly, the rise and fall in your whole body—the brightening and releasing that the breath invites from every cell in your body.
And you can allow the breath to help you in this resting into your experience, this witnessing of experience, and this deep allowing and welcoming of all that is present with you this morning. We're never using the breath as a way to block everything else out.
And so we keep this presence in the whole body sensitive and attuned to the whole field of embodied experience. And the breath just opens this out, creates space, brings a sense of harmony and steadiness.
So resting awareness in the body and finding your way in to really, truly allowing everything. Through this love, tuning into this quiet, spacious love, compassion, goodwill, that meets all experience with open arms - this humility, this acknowledgment that we're not in charge. Or through this capacity to rest as awareness, as consciousness just holds everything, witnesses everything, and just as the bowl is not affected by what's put in it, just so this consciousness, this awareness, is unaffected by its contents, forever free. And this is how we'll practise in silence for the last few minutes.
Body
Breath
Open awareness