Relaxing awareness, relaxing the breath

So to start with, just check that your posture is amenable to relaxation. Looking for a bright relaxation, not a slumpy, curled-up-in-front-of-the-TV sort of thing, but an easy sort of airy uprightness. So find as much relaxation as you can in the shape of your body and then invite awareness into that shape. If the body takes a relaxed shape, awareness will have a better chance of taking a relaxed shape itself. So, inviting awareness into the body, you can sense where the body meets the ground, where the body meets clothes and space and air. You can sense tension and relaxation in different parts of the body, different temperatures, a sense of balance in the body— all these different senses that make up our embodied awareness. Sometimes it’s useful to just go through them and sort of switch them on, building up this vivid picture, sensing the subtler sensations that inhabit much of your body much of the time. The tingles in the toes and the fingers, the gentle vibrations. If you look in any body part, even your cheek or your elbow, maybe you can find some subtle sensation there. Tuning in to the movement of the breath. Just noticing what the breath is telling you about your physical and emotional state right now. Is there tension, numbness, ease, pleasure? Does the breath feel laboured or smooth? And for now, we just want to let it be however it is and just witness, allow, welcome. And let’s just spend a minute or two really affirming this intention to welcome, to allow, even to enjoy whatever we are able to in our embodied experience. Seeing how much you can tune into a really genuine desire for that. Like, I want to do this, I want to meet my experience well, to know it, to allow it, to let it unfold. This intention is really heartfelt. Meditation just flows much more naturally. Perhaps we can add to this universal intention for meditation the specific intention for today: to relax deeply without collapsing. A relaxation that doesn’t need a sort of switching off. Where we can encourage this relaxation is to invite a longer, smoother breath. And it’s like we want to find the length of breath that feels most soothing. It’s probably quite a bit longer than the default breath. And as we do this, we want to really become intimate with this longer breath. You might sense that your awareness is like a feather, and the breath just sort of passes over this feather on its way in and its way out. Really delicate awareness, sensitive awareness that can pick up the nuance, the texture, the quality of the breath. And there will be subtle tension even in a longer, smoother breath. Parts of the inhale, parts of the exhale won’t feel so smooth. For now, we’re just going to notice this fact. We might notice how, when there are parts of the breath that feel less smooth, actually that’s when we get distracted. It’s at that stage in the cycle of breathing that we check out. So what happens if we really choose not to do that? Choose to stay with the breath through the bumpy patches, showing it the kindness of being with it all the time, not just when it feels smooth. So it’s like each micro-moment of breathing gets welcomed, gets allowed fully, and we’re just aware of the shifting pattern of tension in the breathing. Stay with the breath for just a couple more minutes. And instead of relaxing the breath in a sort of interventionist way, where we maybe try and feel the movement of the diaphragm, somehow make that movement a bit smoother or something like that— instead of that, can we relax the awareness that knows the breath? Just drop that in, and then we’ll unpack that in a moment. If that’s too abstract: relax the awareness that knows the breath, that meets the breath. A way to make this more tangible is to notice that with those parts of the breath that don’t feel so smooth, in the way that we’re aware of them, there’s a kind of… there’s a kind of tension in the very witnessing of the breath that mirrors the tension in the breathing. It’s like a sense of, this isn’t right, or something needs to be done, maybe I need to sort this out. See if you can find that sort of attitude in the way that you’re aware of your breath and relax it. Let it go. This is really just another way of saying: welcome the breath fully. To make that more… to give us a job to do towards that, we’re rooting out these subtle attitudes— the way that we witness the breath, the sense of no, I need to sort this out, something’s wrong here, if there’s tension, it means something’s wrong. Just noticing that reaction and dropping it, just relaxing it. You can notice the effect this has on the breath, seeing if it does actually soften things. So the awareness we’re looking for is just really laid-back. It’s a way of receiving experience that just isn’t fussed. If there’s tension, discomfort, we can just tune into the whole body with this kind of awareness, letting the breath still be noticed as a part of the whole region of sensation of your body. Trying to establish this super relaxed awareness. We’re just noticing when we feel like we need to get involved, and then awareness kind of contracts into entangled attention, unhelpfully invested attention. It’s like, from the point of view of awareness, we care, and we’re interested, and we’re welcoming in this compassionate way— but we’re not really invested in the sense of this or that happening. This is the demeanour that we’re looking for. We know that it’s not our job, it’s not our responsibility, to go in and arrange experience so that it’s more pleasurable. Whatever we recognise, that’s not our job. Our job is to welcome, to receive, to enjoy where we can. To the extent that we can find this caring but unentangled mode of awareness, to that extent we will notice: experience softens, the body sense becomes a bit more diffuse, a bit more floaty— even just a little bit. The edges of things not so sharp. It’s important to look for these subtle changes. More of a sense of space. So we tune in to the whole body, sensitive to the movements of sensation, patterns of tension, the breath, everything. And we witness or receive or inhabit all of this with an awareness that is just happy to be there for any of it— which doesn’t feel that it needs to go in and fix this or change that. And then perhaps we see how intimately entwined our experience of the body and the way that we choose to perceive the body— how intimately entwined those two are. How I feel, how my body feels, depends to some extent— not entirely, but to some extent— on the kind of awareness that I bring. Let's carry on like this for the last couple of minutes in silence.