Cultivating loving awareness

We’ll begin to become much, much more sensitive to the body, to the breath. And instead of doing this in a kind of specific way where we notice this and then that, just allow an intention for care and kindness and sensitivity and deep listening. Allow that intention to guide you into your body, noticing how available or not that intention feels right now. When it doesn’t feel available, it’s often that there are things that feel more important — things to think about, things to worry about, things to judge myself for, things to feel ashamed about, things to feel uncomfortable about. You can be aware of all of this and just ask it to give compassion the floor, just for a little while — just for this 35 minutes. And so we invite compassionate awareness, friendly awareness, light-hearted awareness, loving awareness, to meet the body exactly as it is — which is exactly as it is experienced. You might imagine pouring loving awareness into your body, letting it soak into every nook and cranny — and just notice the flavour that this has. It feels different to when we’re just witnessing the body, when we’re just bringing a kind of more neutral awareness to the body. You might sense there’s more warmth, more brightness. We can begin to tune into the breath as a centre of the body — as a centre of this experience of bringing loving awareness to your moment-to-moment experience of body. And as you tune into the breath, you can sense that on the inhale you’re infusing the body with this friendliness, this care, this compassion — you pick the word — and on the exhale you’re receiving this infusion of care. It’s quite easy for us to get too entrenched in the position of the one sending kindness, the one creating kindness. We forget to be the one receiving it. So as the breath comes in, we fill the body with awareness mixed with love — whatever flavour of love feels like it works for you. On the exhale, we just appreciate that, enjoy it, receive it, bathe in it. You can allow this love, this care, this compassion to soothe anything that it meets — to soothe what feels uncomfortable or tense or agitated, to soothe what feels pleasant in the body, regions of the body that feel relaxed and spacious. Allow this kindness to deepen that sense, to open it out more. We can allow it to soothe what feels neutral — maybe quite a lot of the body doesn’t feel pleasant or unpleasant right now. You can hold this sense of ‘not much going on’ with this kindness as well, flooding the body with love on the inhale, receiving that soaking of love into your bones on the exhale. And notice that we’re not sending love, metta, compassion to ourselves as a person. We’re sending it to every sensation, every emotion, every experience in the body. We’re not creating an imagined ‘me’ with all its stories and problems and flaws and sending love there. We could do that, and that would be valuable too. But instead, we’re trying to bring this atmosphere of loving awareness into the reality of our experience — which doesn’t have a well-defined ‘me’ at its centre that can be a target for kindness. And shortly we’ll prepare to widen the practice to include more of the world. But first, before we do this, just see if there’s any imaginative, imaginal ally that you want to invite into the practice to support your compassion — your kindness — to widen. There may be some figure who is known to you in your personal life, or some deity from a spiritual tradition, some fictional character, some animal, some landscape that just opens the heart. Not everyone benefits from this kind of imaginal aid, but many people do — so just see if you’re one of those people. Coming into relationship with some ‘other’ that embodies love for you. Continuing to fill your body with love on the inhale, receive it, enjoy it, relax into it on the exhale. And then we’re going to invite someone else into the practice. And it can be anyone. It can be somebody that you deeply love, it can be somebody that you don’t know very well, it can be somebody that you find challenging — any of the categories of traditional metta practice, or anybody else entirely. Just seeing who bubbles up, letting them arrive rather than going fishing for someone. Getting the sense of their presence, their image — feeling what it’s like to be in relationship with them right now. Might feel beautiful, might feel challenging. Seeing how your heart responds to them here. And then we’re going to begin to include them in this inhaling of love and care, and this exhaling into receiving it. Just sense that they’re here in this same atmosphere of metta, compassion, kindness, love — and you’re both being filled with it on the inhale, deepening into receiving on the exhale. And then as we settle into this rhythm, we can just begin to acknowledge that this other is also a collection of experiences. They experience a body composed of many, many shimmering sensations. They are visited by a shifting weather pattern of emotions. Thoughts arise in their mind completely out of nowhere. Just like when we invite compassion into our embodied experience, we’re not constructing an identity with all of that complexity. See if it’s possible to do the same for this other — letting go of the sense of them being a well-defined individual, and offering love and care to the mysterious arising of experience that they are. If this feels like it gets you too in your head, don’t worry about it. It can be a powerful way to unlock more love, more compassion, a sense of wonder and reverence. For the next few minutes, we can stay with this person. We can invite somebody else in if we feel like we’re complete with this person. We can go back to just receiving this love for ourselves — seeing what feels right in the moment, and staying with this breath. It helps us to fill our whole experience, our whole consciousness, with love — and on the exhale, allows us to more deeply absorb all of that. So, just to review: We invite loving awareness into the whole space of the body to meet every sensation, every emotion — everything that is our embodied experience. We perhaps have an imaginal figure in the wings to support us — as a conduit, a channel to help us more easily access this loving awareness. Then, according to our intuition, we invite others into this atmosphere. And possibly, if it feels like it makes sense to you, allow this atmosphere to dissolve the sense of them as people who are like this, and have this story and these issues. Just let them be what they actually are — a stream of sensation, emotion, and thought, with no malicious or benevolent or neutral kind of organising identity at the centre of all of that. We use the breath to ensure this balance — of tuning into kindness, filling our experience with kindness, and receiving it, absorbing it, appreciating it. Just carry on like this for the last couple of minutes.