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Guided Meditation: Meditating with Trust

I wish you a good morning from California, a good day for the world, and a good week. Here we start this week of our morning sittings. This week we will meet for four days; I'm going to take Friday off, and then we'll start again for five days next week.

So, we're going to meditate. One of the reference points for meditation, both as a destination and also as an experiential reference for the meditation, is a deep place of trust within. Trust can be hard to come by, and there are many things in life that can undermine it, take it away, or cause us to never learn it. But we can begin to discover trust in meditation, maybe in small steps.

When we take a meditation posture, perhaps in a room or a place where there's very little danger, for these minutes maybe the doors are closed or no dangers are likely to visit. Some people will even look around the room to see and recognize that for these few minutes in this place, it's relatively safe. Then, feeling somewhat reassured that the place is good, you can gently close your eyes.

Perhaps take a posture that allows for a deeper trust, a kind of trust that lends itself to a feeling of safety. Trusting this body, this posture, enough for these moments, these minutes, that in this body for now there are places where we can trust, where we feel safe. You might scan through your body to see: where does trust live in you? Where is the feeling or a sense that you can take in a sense of safety here and now? Not necessarily there and then, but here and now. That for these minutes it's okay just to be here, to be alive, to breathe.

Appreciate the degree to which you can trust putting down your anxieties and your fears for a few minutes. You can trust putting down the past and the future, and you can trust your lived experience of the moment. Even if some of it feels difficult, and there is in fact anxiety or fear coursing through our system, can there be enough trust to have some ease with that? Not to react with it, or believe it in a certain way so that we feel like we have to think about it or fix it.

Deep inside, or anywhere at all in your body, is there some place of trust or safety that can support your mind to also find in itself a place it can soften or relax? Because the mind also can know what it feels like to trust, to feel safe, in spite of the dangers that exist in life. For you, is there a place inside the mind where the mind can, for these minutes here, just trust being alive for now? Just being here, with nothing to solve and nothing to fix, the mind can rest or be at ease. And even if it's not at ease in many ways, can you find the corner of the mind where there is ease, or trust, or safety?

Then, within the body, within the body's experience of itself, become aware of your breathing. Our breathing expresses or holds many of our emotions, many of the ways in which we feel. Take a few moments familiarizing yourself with your breathing. Not making anything a problem with your breathing, just noticing how you are breathing now. Allow the breath to be as it is. Allow your breath to be safe from your interference, your judgments, or your ideas of what it should be. It's all okay.

Within the breathing, is there also a feeling you can trust? Some feeling of trust, or safety, or ease? Perhaps a particular part of the body that's activated as you breathe, or a particular part of the cycle of breathing, is a place of trust, ease, or even safety.

Perhaps every time you exhale, that can be an opening into a greater feeling of trust, a settling into a broader feeling of safety. Perhaps as you exhale, the mind can broaden and open to a greater degree of trust and safety so it doesn't have to be involved in so much thinking. It's okay for the thinking mind to rest. Nothing to solve, or fix, or figure out. It's okay just to be here, at ease with your breathing. Perhaps breathing at the center, and everything else that's happening can be allowed to just flow by, like a river flowing by.

Trusting yourself with your breathing, notice within the place where things are most quiet and peaceful, or most calm and settled. Even if around you is a sea of unsettledness, where is it most settled, most peaceful, or most quiet within? As you exhale, trust that quiet. As you exhale, open up and settle into the place that's most quiet within.

And then, as we come to the end of this meditation, I'll suggest that you engage your imagination. Imagine yourself sitting in a place that feels delightfully safe, delightfully secure, and peaceful. A place where maybe you've been in your life, where you could really relax deeply and fully because you felt so safe and contented. Imagine yourself sitting in such a place.

The sense of safety and trust is also found in your eyes, in how you look upon the world. There's a sense of ease, relaxation, and the eyes are settled in their sockets. Imagine that you look upon the world with eyes that feel safe, eyes that trust that it's okay to be at ease for now. With these eyes, look out upon the suffering of the world. Look out upon the challenges that exist on our planet, but stay with that ease. Stay with a sense of safety. Gaze across the lands; be aware of all the suffering there is.

Imagine that for all the suffering beings, there is the potential for them also to feel safe, to have ease, to be able to trust being alive. Trust breathing, trust being. May it be our heart's wish that all beings be safe, that all beings be free of their suffering, that all beings be happy. May all beings be able to have enough trust that they allow their goodness, their happiness, and their love to come to the foreground.

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