Bringing awareness into the body, with a sensitivity to our whole physical, emotional and mental experience, we settle on the breath and begin to infuse the breath with a sense of spacious love. The breath becomes a place from which to allow and care for our embodied experience.
Having settled ourselves on the breath in this way, we then begin to send the breath to different parts of the body, using the breath as a vehicle for this spacious sense of compassion and love.
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Let the shape that your body makes be as supportive as possible in this process. Sometimes just a very subtle change in the shape of the body has quite significant effects on the mind, the heart, the overall atmosphere. Many people, including me, have a habit of holding the body a little bit rigidly. Some people have a habit of letting the body collapse. Try and find a quality in the body that isn’t a collapsed sort of flop, and isn’t rigidly held either. Trust the body to hold itself up, but encourage it to actually hold itself up, rather than slump. Then drop your awareness into this shape that your body has made.
This means we become much more conscious of the moment-to-moment play of experience in the body. Start with the most obvious ways the body is felt: the connection with the ground, the sense of touch, pressure, gravity; feeling your clothes where they meet your skin; the air meeting your skin where it is exposed; the sensations in your fingers and toes. These subtle sensations normally fly under the radar.
Then become aware of the overall atmosphere or felt sense of your body. Notice how qualities like tension or relaxation, tiredness or alertness, happiness or sadness colour and shape what it feels like to be here in your body this morning. Become as conscious as you can of the state of your heart, your mind, your body—not needing to find words to sum it up, but simply unwrapping deeper layers of this experience.
The way we unwrap these layers is by fully allowing what we find. We don’t need to dig through the layers or get the scissors out. Instead, we meet the reality of our experience with openness: yes, this is how it is, and I will allow it to be that way. I won’t manage or fix or try to push this away. This attitude—possibly the fundamental attitude of meditation—is what allows deeper layers of experience to become seen.
Then begin to include the breath in your awareness, if it’s not already there. Not as a way to absorb into something and ignore everything else, but as a way to breathe with your whole experience of body, heart and mind. Base yourself in the breath, this rhythm that lifts the body and then releases, providing a very helpful place to nest awareness. Resting on the breath like this, we breathe with our whole experience, whatever is present.
This breathing with our experience isn’t neutral in the sense of being indifferent. It has a warmth, a spacious love. See if you can notice this quality, rather than trying to make it happen. Perhaps there’s a sliver of it somewhere already; if you stay with it, it may grow. There is heart, compassion and warmth in the way we sit and breathe with the body.
If it feels useful to have some imaginal support for finding this quality of spacious love or compassion, you may imagine another being or source of love: a human figure, a deity, an animal, a tree. There may be a sense of it coming from the depths of the earth, or from the sun or the moon. Your psyche will let you know if and what is appropriate here.
We’ll now begin to move through the body, consciously introducing this compassion and love to different parts of the body, carried by the breath. Each breath draws love and compassion in, and your role is to receive this rather than to generate it.
Sense the breath at the base of your spine and pelvis, allowing a soothing breath to enter and bring compassion, presence, light, radiance, warmth—whatever words resonate. Really be present in your pelvis and lower back, drawing the breath and this quality in, bathing and soaking in it.
Then bring the breath up to your belly and lower back, around the navel. Establish yourself here, feeling the breath and the qualities we’re cultivating—riding on the breath, dissolved into it, infused through it. Notice how your belly responds to this compassion-flavoured breath. It may release tension, reveal emotion, or open into spaciousness or wellbeing.
Let the breath slide up to the heart, gently making contact with this part of your physical, emotional and energetic body. Feel the chest and upper back, allowing this love-infused breath to work here. Situate yourself in your heart with presence and compassion, letting more subtle sensations and emotions be revealed.
Then let the breath continue to the throat. Breathe presence, love and kindness into the throat, noticing how it responds.
Finally, bring the breath up into your head, so your whole skull receives this bright, loving presence. Then let the breath fill your whole body, the energy of the breath brightening the body everywhere. Let compassion fill your breath, your breath fill your body, and your body fill your awareness.
Just rest here for another minute or so in silence.
Compassion
Breath
Body