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Guided Meditation: Seeing Freshly

Okay, so why don't we go ahead and get started. Welcome to the Monday evening sit and dharma^[1] talk with the Insight Meditation Center. I'm Kim Allen, and I'm delighted to be here with you this evening.

So why don't we go ahead and get started with the sit. Finding a posture that's upright, also relaxed. Sitting in position, sitting posture, so you can feel your seat against the chair, or the cushion, or the bench, and your legs or your feet against the floor. So there's a sense of the stable foundation on which you're resting. Really feeling the stability of where you're sitting. And if you're comfortable doing so, you can close your eyes, just gently allowing the eyes to close so that the attention comes inward. You're feeling the body from the inside.

Perhaps on the next out-breath, softening any obvious areas of tension. You can also shift your body back and forth a little bit, or forward and back, to find a central point where you feel like you're balanced on the place where you're sitting, so there's not very much effort to hold yourself vertical if you're sitting vertically.

And then it can be helpful at the beginning of a sit to just consciously go through the body, inviting ease and softening what can be softened, especially at the end of the day when we may be carrying some tensions from our activities of the day, from what we needed to do to get here to the sit. So softening the muscles of the face: the forehead, around the eyes, the jaw. Just letting the expression on the face be soft and easeful. Softening the eyes and the eye sockets; they tend to get a little tight when we've been looking at the computer screen. Even releasing any tension from inside the head, maybe right behind the eyes from focusing the mind, thinking. Just allowing that to release if it will.

Just inviting that down the neck, into the shoulder area. Softening the shoulder joints, letting the shoulders naturally drop so the shoulder blades slide down the back. Relaxing down the arms and hands, and down into the chest area: the heart, lungs, front, back, and sides of the ribcage. Releasing the diaphragm, and all down through the belly area, just letting go of any obvious tension there. And I like to simultaneously invite some ease in the muscles of the low back, so that it's as if what's on both sides of the spine is falling away to the front and to the back. Down into the hip joints, softening a little further into the seat. And down into the legs, releasing any bracing, softening the knee joints, ankle joints, all the way to the feet.

So we've invited ease throughout the whole body. I'm just returning attention to the sense of sitting, the whole body sitting. And orienting our mind toward meditation, intending to stay present. Not with the idea that it will be 100% mindfulness, but just carrying the interest, the intention of being with our experience. Allowing the mind to gently rest on the sensations of breathing. It may be that we've done breath meditation a lot, or feel like we must by now know everything about our breath. But I'd like to encourage a sense of freshness, newness. Every breath is unique. What would it be like to sit with the breath and not know already what the breath is like? Bringing some curiosity and openness.

As we settle in further, it can be helpful to notice something about how the mind is now. Is it generally a little dull, tired at the end of the day, or is it a bit restless and agitated? Is there a dominant mood or emotion going on in the mind or the heart right now? Just to know what that is. And bringing that same sense of freshness to our mind and heart. We may have felt tired many times, or we may have felt sadness or even joy many times, but what about this time? Noticing afresh how the mind is.^[2] Curious if it might be slightly different than we felt before now.

As you keep sitting, if you begin to feel any sense of ease or peace, stillness, even just a little bit, it's fine to turn toward that with even some curiosity. What is this stillness like? This ease? Opening to it gently so as not to disturb it. But that too can be seen with fresh eyes, as if we haven't felt it before.

When we sit with the body and mind in this way, with a sense of seeing what is new or treating it as something open and fresh, there's a remarkable feeling of friendliness that can come. A sense that we are making friends with the body and the mind, more so than if we just treated it as the same old thing that we've sat and meditated with for a long time. Somehow that freshness and openness creates a kind of intimacy. It feels like having a good friend. In the Zen tradition, it is said, "Not knowing is most intimate."^[3] So if it feels right, you can smile a bit at your friend, body and mind, as they are at this moment. Just resting for a few more minutes.

And as we come into the last minutes of this sit, perhaps reflecting if there's anything new that you saw that you hadn't really been aware of before. Just by having this idea of freshness or newness, did you see anything that you hadn't seen before? It doesn't have to be major, just any little thing.