Resting in compassion

Is it possible to, from the very start of this practise, bring gentleness into the way we’re sitting? What would it be to adopt a posture of gentleness and kindness? We can begin to open more and more to our embodied experience. Right now, I think it can be more helpful to have this idea that we’re opening and allowing more of our experience to reveal itself — in more depth, more detail — rather than focusing so much on the idea of noticing or bringing attention. Just allow your body and your heart to reveal more: sensation, vibration, tension, emotion. The way that we allow our embodied experience to unfold like this is not through effort, but by adopting the right kind of attitude. A deep listening: I want to know. I want to meet my experience. I want to feel it fully. This requires a certain amount of humility — a kind of not knowing. Not assuming I already know. It’s so easy for us to think we know how we feel: I feel tired, I feel tense, I feel okay. But what if we drop any sense that we really know how we feel, and just feel — and listen — and make space for the lived reality, not the boxed-in label? In our lived reality, things are rarely straightforward. There’s a myriad of sensations, emotions, micro-emotions, moods — sometimes they may feel contradictory. This lived experience defies simple categorisation. So we can spend a moment just listening even more deeply, and encouraging an awareness in the whole body. It might be helpful to pay special attention to the breath for a moment too — just to check in with our breathing, with this same quality of deep listening. I don’t know what it is to breathe this breath. I need to look. I need to receive. Very close to this quality of deep listening is the attitude of welcoming — really welcoming our embodied experience: the breath, the body, the heart. We can begin to really emphasise this quality of welcoming. We can notice that implied in this welcoming attitude — and this deep listening — is care, kindness, compassion. We can only really be interested if we care. And if we care, we will be interested to know our experience. Spend a moment just connecting with this care. It’s easy for other motivations to hijack our practise — but somewhere, always, there is kindness in the mix of reasons why we’re practising. It’s very helpful to acknowledge this — and spend a while connecting more deeply with the kindness that motivates us to sit and watch our experience. This kindness can be felt in many ways. It can be a kind of intention that we may be able to feel in an embodied way — in our hearts, or elsewhere. It can be a kind of atmosphere — something that pervades our experience, the way a drop of food colouring pervades a glass of water. It can be something felt in relation to each and every sensation that arises in our bodies. We can practise a couple of these ways, to flesh out this mood — this atmosphere — of kindness. With a sensitivity to the whole body and the whole dance of sensation that’s arising, changing, passing in your body — the tingles in your feet, the movement of the breath, the patterns of tension and relaxation — we can begin to allow each sensation to be met with compassion, with kindness. Like it’s dipped in honey or lit up with some kind of light. So the breath, as it moves the belly, is lit with kindness. Any discomfort in the body — sensations of pain or pressure, heat — these too can be lit with kindness. Dipped in kindness. This might feel obvious how to do, or it may not feel so obvious. If it feels more challenging, come back to the intention — re-establishing this intention of kindness, feeling that wholehearted desire for more compassion. Then go back to just discovering that your body sensations are being met by — lit up by — dipped in compassion. If a sense of effort is felt in relation to this — bringing compassion to sensations — feel this effort as an experience, as something in the body, some kind of tension. And let this too be dipped in compassion. Something in us feels that we need to create tension — to try hard to find compassion. But actually, it’s more a relaxing down into something — something quite natural. The more we practise this meeting of each and every sensation with kindness, the more we may be able to tune into a kind of background field of kindness. We might feel this as the fabric of our body — or even the fabric of awareness. This fabric becomes tinged with kindness, infused with metta. The more we become aware of this background of compassion, the easier it can be to rest back into kindness — into metta — rather than needing to generate anything. So the kind of order that we can practise — the movement towards more subtlety, towards this atmosphere of kindness — begins with affirming this intention, making it authentic. I want compassion. I want to meet myself, others, the world — everything — with more kindness, more metta. And I’m willing to experience my body, my heart, as it is, fully. This intention is our foundation. Then we introduce this intention to our body — to the sensations, emotions, tension, discomfort, pleasure. Everything that arises in our body we meet with this intention. We can imagine our body lit up with this kindness, dipped in this kindness, shining with this kindness — whatever makes sense to you. Gradually, we may become more and more tuned in to a background sense of compassion that holds everything. And then we just rest here and allow our bodies, our hearts, our minds to unfold within this wider field of compassion. And so we’ll practise for the last couple of minutes like this — in silence.