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Introduction

Good morning here in California, and greetings to the rest of the world. It's a fortunate thing to be able to meditate in any circumstance. For people here in California, we're living with greatly difficult circumstances up and down the West Coast^[1], and around the world, there's no shortage of challenges that everyone is facing these days.

It is a great fortune to be able to sit and meditate, to allow ourselves to refresh, and to shed some of the ways in which stress has built up in the mind and the body. It allows us to release some of the grip of preoccupations and concerns, and the momentum of difficult emotions that go on. We can sit quietly to see clearly what's going on for us, to be honest, and to admit our challenges. Just like we would take a shower to become clean, we take a meditation shower to begin to shed some of the excessive tensions, stresses, and preoccupations we have.

It's such a good thing to do. It's such a fortunate thing to do, and it allows us to return to the world in a way that—just like from a shower we emerge clean—gives us a kind of cleanliness and clarity.

Guided Meditation: Relaxation as Foundational

So here we are. One of the wonderful life skills to learn from meditation is the skill of relaxation. There are times in life when one of the primary ways of meditating is to relax deeply. When I am sick, this is primarily what I do in my meditation: I do breath meditation, relax my body with every exhale, find out even the subtlest places where there's holding and tension, and just let go and relax.

So I'd like to propose, if it seems appropriate for you today, to see what happens if you make this the theme of your practice. Somehow you use this time to really tune in deeply into your body, with a heightened sensitivity to your body, to see where it is that you can relax. Where can you soften and release the tensions, the holdings of the body? As practice deepens and gets stronger, we develop a high sensitivity to even the subtlest little micro-tensions, and it becomes a wonderful thing to just soften and let go.

It helps to take an alert posture—a posture that's aligned, open, and has a little bit of intentionality to it. If you're sitting upright, it's kind of like your spine is a strong, firm pole that holds you up, around which everything else can relax, while keeping those vertebrae balanced on each other.

Closing your eyes, you might take a few moments to feel from the bottom of your spine, letting your attention travel up vertebra by vertebra, making small adjustments—or big adjustments. In whatever way you can feel it, you're kind of lining up your vertebrae one on top of the other, so they fit snugly and nicely. Maybe between the shoulder blades, you can pull it a teeny bit. Maybe as you get to the top of the spine, tip your head ever so slightly forward and your chin back, to make a little space between the last vertebra and the skull.

And then take a few gentle, tender, deeper breaths, and as you exhale, relax and let go. As you exhale, soften the belly. Maybe when you inhale, allow the belly to stay soft and not pulled in as you breathe, so that as you breathe in, the belly expands more, and something in the belly settles as you exhale.

Then, as you exhale, soften in the chest, releasing the whole chest cavity. Let it settle and rest on the diaphragm and the lower torso. Softening the shoulders, maybe feeling a gentle pull of gravity. The weight of your shoulders allows the shoulders to release a little bit, feeling the downward pull.

Then let your attention travel down the arms to the hands, slowly relaxing the upper arm, the elbow, the forearms, the hands, and the fingers.

Then letting go, relaxing the muscles of your face, letting the muscles release from the skull. Feel any way in which the muscles are pulled in or pulled tight in the jaw, cheeks, the nose, the eyes, the forehead, and the temples. If you do feel any pressure or tension in the upper skull, the crown of the head, or seemingly inside your skull, as you exhale, relax what might be called the mental tension or pressure, letting the mind become released, soft, and open.

As you exhale, relax and let go of your thoughts. And as you let go of them, see if you can use the attentional space that's created to tune in more to your body. See if you can have a rhythm: as you inhale, feel your body—maybe different parts of the body at different times—where you find tension, holding, or contraction, and as you exhale, relax. This meditation becomes kind of a massage, where with every exhale some part of your body relaxes. Even in parts of the body where you don't feel tension, let it all soften. Relaxing into the space that's around you, the space around the tension, let all things relax deeply, just here.

Sometimes tension builds up in the very way in which we're practicing meditation—the effort we're making. Even the effort to relax can have tension in it. See if everything can be done with ease. Quietly, no hurry, no expectation, no need to be successful, just relaxing the best you can.

As you exhale, relaxing your body, relaxing into your body. Maybe in a similar way that you'd relax into a deeply satisfying pool of water, a deep soak, where you would say ah as you settle in. Relax into your body with that kind of ah throughout the body.

Reflections

And then, to end the sitting, perhaps you could reflect, or wish that it may be so, that any way in which you're more relaxed, more at ease, more settled, more understanding of yourself—may it be that you build on that to return or enter into the world in a way that brings benefit to others. That you do things, however small, that make the life of someone else better.

Maybe it's someone close by, maybe someone far away that you communicate to in some way or other, or someone you don't know, but you have the means somehow to do something to improve their life. May it be that your meditation practice is a basis from which you can live to benefit this world.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be at ease. May all beings breathe peacefully. May all beings be free.