--- ai_generation_date: '2026-09-19' ai_model: gemini-3-pro-preview audiodharma: talks: - date: '2021-01-17' mp3_url: https://audiodharma.us-east-1.linodeobjects.com/talks/12745/20210117-Gil_Fronsdal-IMC-guided_meditation_deepening_with_sensations.mp3 speakers: - speaker_name: Gil Fronsdal speaker_url: https://www.audiodharma.org/speakers/1 talk_start_time_seconds: 0 title: 'Guided Meditation: Deepening with Sensations' url: https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/12745 video_unavailable: false location_city: Redwood City, CA video_unavailable: false youtube: id: YJZpaol1Yug imprecise_upload_date: '2021-05-04' title: 'Guided Meditation: Deepening with Sensations' upload_date: null uploader_str: Insight Meditation Center uploader_url: https://www.youtube.com/@InsightMeditationCenter youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJZpaol1Yug --- # Guided Meditation: Deepening with Sensations - [Gil Fronsdal](https://www.audiodharma.org/speakers/1) _This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video above. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers._ ## [Guided Meditation: Deepening with Sensations](https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/12745) Good morning everyone, and welcome to our Sunday morning sitting here in Redwood City, California, and warm greetings to people in other time zones. We'll start now with a meditation. As an introduction to the meditation, I want to say that sometimes it's possible to skip along the surface of life, and it's also possible to dive deeply into life. We could go by some building, maybe a museum or something, and look through the window for many, many years without going in. And then we go in, and it's a whole different thing to go in and to actually see what's in the museum. In the same way, we could skip over and pass by much of our direct experience of life. We're busy with life, busy with everything we're thinking about and planning and trying to accomplish, that we don't really stop and enter in more deeply into our living experience. Part of meditation practice, mindfulness practice, is in fact to enter deeply. To no longer skip along the surface just with thinking about things, or imagining, or planning, or remembering. These are all fine things to do, and there's a certain depth of life with those things, so I don't want to dismiss them. But there's a very different form of depth that comes when we can put all those thoughts and concepts aside, and really delve deeply into the felt sense, the sensory experience of being alive. It's a different dimension, that depth that is kind of the specialty of Vipassanā[^1], to really be in the present moment, but not be on the surface of the present. To not be content just with that, but be in the present moment so that you can feel and sense and experience things more deeply, more fully. So, to enter into a meditation posture, place your body in a posture for your meditation. Maybe wiggle around, sway a little bit. See if you can really kind of fine-tune your posture so it feels like this is a posture to settle into, to be present for. And then to come to stillness with the body, gently close your eyes. Enter into your body. Allow yourself to inhabit your body from the inside out. If you're thinking about the body from the control tower, looking at it, it's different than if we're inhabiting the body, having embodied awareness. Within this body, take a few long, slow, deep breaths to make a fuller contact with your body, a fuller awareness and recognition: Here is a body. Here is my body. In this body I am. As you exhale, release, relax, and settle in. Take a deep breath in; as you exhale, the chest will release and fall back. Follow the falling back, the releasing, to go inside to your torso, your body. Let your breathing return to normal. Scan through your body to see where you can relax. Maybe on the exhale, soften your face around the eyes, around the mouth, the jaws. Soften around the shoulders, letting the weight of the shoulders yield to the pull of gravity. Soften the belly, not holding on so tightly that the belly's always tight and held in. Relax so the belly can be soft, safe, and comfortable. Become aware of yourself breathing. Become aware of the body breathing. As your body breathes, there are different kinds of sensations that you might experience, sensations that represent different functions of your body as you're breathing. As you breathe in, there are sensations of expansion, especially in the chest, belly, diaphragm, and lungs. That sense of expansion can also be sensations of lifting and moving. Part of the function of the lifting and expansion is to create more space around the lungs so they can pull in the oxygen, the air. You might feel the sensations of the air being pulled in through the nostrils. As you get to the top of the in-breath, the expansion can also be experienced as a stretching of the rib cage, of the skin on the chest—a stretching that gets stronger the longer you inhale. It might be stretching in the chest, or stretching of the belly if the belly is soft and extended. The diaphragm is a muscle that keeps working. Muscles that keep working get warm. Might there be some warmth associated with some of the sensations as you breathe? As you exhale, there's a falling and releasing. Air is pushed out of your nostrils, air which is now warmer than the cool air being pulled in. There's a releasing of the diaphragm that lets the diaphragm return to its default place, which has the function of making less space in the chest and around the lungs. There might even be an ever so slight—maybe not uncomfortable, but a compression, collapsing, coming together. As you exhale towards the end of the exhale, you might feel sensations of support in the parts of your body that support your torso and your weight. Maybe a sense of solidity, hardness, or firmness. Maybe even sensations of strength or settledness. As you inhale, at the top of the inhale, the stretching and expansion can also feel like how we're held together. Something holds the movement of stretching, of opening, and expanding from expanding forever. There's a holding ourselves in place, holding ourselves together here. That happens at the top of the inhale. Perhaps if you really let go and release with the exhale, relaxing fully with the end of the exhale, you'll feel some support, a foundation that in a sense holds you, supports you, supports the weight of the torso. Feel that support. With both inhaling and exhaling, there is movement. The movement is different between inhaling and exhaling. Feel that difference. Feel what happens in your body that's different in the movement of inhaling and the movements of exhaling. Part of the function of that movement is to help us not to hold our breathing, not to hold anything fixed or hard, or for the muscles to lock in, but a movement that is a massage that keeps the muscles both working and softening, engaging and releasing. Finally, there may be sensations or a sense of feeling for space and spaciousness around the sensations of breathing. Some of it might be the sense of space or the sense of absence when sensations of the inhale disappear as you exhale, or sensations of exhaling disappear as you inhale. It is a kind of absence, an emptiness, a spaciousness that holds it all, that's interspersed with all the sensations, the space in which they occur. We'll do the rest of the meditation in silence. As you do so, entrust yourself to this depth of breathing. Trust it. Relax the thinking mind. There's nothing you have to think about, but in terms of breathing, there's much that you can feel, feel around, sense, and go deeper and deeper into in a way that supports the mind getting quieter, stiller, and softer. Soft, quiet, still awareness of the fullness and depth of this body breathing. If you find yourself thinking, switch your thinking to dropping into the body breathing. It's as if you're entering into the room, entering into the house, the home of your body, and looking around, silently feeling, and staying home. Staying with your body, breathing. Feeling the texture of the body breathing. As you inhale and feel the torso expand, imagine that everything is opening inside of you. Your heart's opening, your chest is opening. Expanding. Making more room in your heart for everything. And as you exhale, you're releasing your air into the world. You're releasing your care into the world. Opening to the world, and sending your care into the world. Rather than thinking that turning your attention now to the world around you means there's a loss of depth, there's also a deep way of feeling into the world and the world of our communities that we're part of, directly or indirectly. Trust the opening that happens as you breathe in. Trust opening to the world. Trust caring for the world as you exhale. Feel the freedom, the ease, or the relaxation that might come with this opening and releasing. Opening and giving. ## Dedication The deepening, the freeing, and the calming that comes from meditation can also be found in our relationship to the worlds of others. It's invaluable to realize the interconnectedness between our meditation and our relationship to the world, our relationship to ourselves and our relationship to the world. The two are interconnected and mutual and support each other. In some ways, it is the same kind of relationship of freedom, of ease, of calm, and openness. As we end this sitting, perhaps you can dedicate whatever benefit that's come from this sitting to helping, supporting, and making this a better world for others. May our practice, directly and indirectly, be for the welfare and happiness of all beings. May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. And may all beings everywhere be free. --- [^1]: **Vipassanā:** A Pali word often translated as "insight" or "clear-seeing," referring to the Buddhist meditation practice of cultivating a deep understanding of the true nature of reality.