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Guided Meditation: Recognition Leading to Relaxation

Welcome. Welcome to our meditation time together, and to your meditation time to sit here. One of the important principles of this practice is that it's difficult to become free, difficult to let go of what should be let go of, unless we understand it well. Developing a full, deep understanding of things is an important part of mindfulness practice. What that involves in meditation practice is not analytical thinking or analysis; it's not abstract conceptual ideas to understand. Rather, it's what can be called a penetration, a deep insight, a deep observation of our experience. At times, it means to really experience deeply and fully our lived life as we live it. This is the vehicle in Vipassanā^[1] practice for understanding, seeing, and connecting deeply to this life of ours, so that the movements of spiritual growth, liberation, and letting go become appropriate, well-understood, healthy parts of us.

To let go too quickly of things is most likely to have them come back quickly again. One form of letting go is relaxing. We can certainly relax parts of ourselves and relax the surface tension of our lives, but we can also relax really deeply in the core of who we are. The deeper the relaxation is going to be, the more important it is to first really experience what's there. When the first signs of tension in the body exist as the practice goes deeper, we don't want to be in a hurry to relax them. We want to really feel them, sense them, and get to know them well first. Then, sometimes letting go and relaxing happens on its own, which is quite a wonderful and inspiring process. There's something here in our system that does the work of letting go that's appropriate. We don't have to be so much the agent for letting go, or even for relaxing.

Part of this depth of experience is to really feel and get to know the particularity of the sensations that we're experiencing. So the sense experience we have—what are the particular sensations that are operating? We don't just follow our breath in some kind of distant way. I want to use the word "savor"—I don't know if that's the right word—to really sense deeply the experiences of breathing. The pulling and the pushing, the expanding and the contracting, the lightening and the release of lightening, the temperature, the jaggedness, the smoothness, the pleasure, the discomfort—it's a whole array of very particular sensations that ripple through, like a kaleidoscope perhaps, that keeps shifting and changing. The idea is to really begin to recognize those sensations. There's being present for following, versus being present for being here with our experience. Then there's feeling it physically as a sensory experience, and then there's the recognition of what it is that's there. It's not analysis, but it's more like recognizing what's obvious.

Guided Meditation

With that introduction, place your body in a meditation posture and enter into your posture. Enter into your body, so you inhabit your body from the inside out. Then you can take some long, slow, deep breaths. This is the ritual of arriving here, the ritual of reminding oneself of one's purpose for this half hour: to sit here with our experience.

Then let your breathing return to normal. In the beginning of a sitting, it's often good to relax the obvious surface tensions in our body. The holding patterns of our body often represent, express, or are manifestations of ways in which we are not settled here. We're pulling away from something, or we're getting pulled away. So as you exhale, relax your face. Maybe let your teeth fall a little bit apart from each other; maybe they still touch, but just with a little bit more light touch. A light touch of the lips. Relaxing around the eyes, letting there be a light touch with your eyelids, so that your eyes rest lightly in their sockets. As you exhale, relax your shoulders. Exhaling and softening around the chest, and softening the belly, and then breathing normally.

Enter into the world of your body breathing, the experience of your body breathing. First, become attuned to the rhythm of breathing in and breathing out. Attending to the breathing is not so much attention to the breath as a caring attending, accompanying the breathing in the body.

Slowly feel more fully the sensations of breathing. In particular, notice how those sensations will appear, briefly be there, and then they change and pass away, and return later in the next cycle. In a few moments that particular sensation is there; receive it fully. Allow to come into awareness in a full way the ripple from one sensation to another as you breathe in and as you breathe out.

Some of the things you might feel are the movements of the body as you breathe, and how that movement is felt differently in different parts of your body. You might feel experiences of expansion as you breathe in—lifting in the chest as you breathe in—and falling and contraction as you breathe out.

As you experience the movements of your breathing, you might notice if there's some holding back, places where the breathing is held or kept in check, where you don't breathe in fully or you breathe doubtfully. And if that's the case, be completely okay with that. The job is not to make it different right now, but to feel and experience that fully. Maybe the rhythm of how it's there and then not there in the cycle of breathing.

Are there any sensations which are pleasant or unpleasant as you breathe in? For now, be content to just know that they are there. Feel them and sense them as if you have permission for them to be just the way they are. There's no problem; just feel the pleasant and unpleasant. Get to know them better without analysis or trying to figure anything out. Can you register or feel more fully the various sensations that come into play as you're breathing, and follow the ripple, the current of breathing in and breathing out, and all the little waves and ripples of different sensations that appear and disappear with each in-breath and each out-breath. Relaxing the mind, softening the thinking mind, quieting your thoughts so you can better feel and recognize.

Then feel more widely, globally in your body the sensations that are there, that appear and disappear, that are the wider context in which you're breathing—the wider context of your body than just the part of the body that's breathing. Take some time to breathe with this wider context. Breathe through it, feeling more fully what's happening in your body, all the different pleasant and unpleasant sensations, recognizing more deeply what's here. Keeping it very simple, just being with, just recognizing.

As you continue to breathe now, on the exhale, relax deeply. Soften, let go, let there be more and more release in your body with each exhale. Very gently as you relax, be gentle. Don't have high expectations to do too much relaxation. It might be enough just to have a wave of softening. A wave of softening attention goes around and through the places of holding in your body. Relaxing your mind, letting go of thinking as you exhale, calming the heart to just be here for a few more moments, breathing with a calm heart. In calming the body as you exhale, let there be a calm that spreads through your body.

For just a few final moments, see if you can let yourself be still. Recognize an inner stillness, maybe in a place that's deeper than any place of agitation, movement, or thinking. Can you feel a place of inner stillness and quiet, and allow yourself to rest in that stillness? Be still, and from this stillness, look upon all things kindly.

May this be the instruction for today: Let yourself be still. Stillness is easy to do. And look upon all things kindly, look upon all people kindly, so that whatever degree of calm, subtleness, or self-awareness that you've had from this meditation might be carried into your day. So you're a little calmer, you remember to come back to calm and stillness, and you're prepared to look upon others and the world with kind eyes, and perhaps because of that, to have kind speech and kind actions for others.

May it be that this meditation we've done today be a support for us to go into the world, into our activities of the day, to be kind to ourselves and to be kind to others, to have a kind regard for the whole world.

May all beings be happy.
May all beings be safe.
May all beings be free.