Step One - Finding the Breath and Body - Meditation Instruction
Before you begin
Meditation on the breath is not the purpose of meditation, but an essential foundational practice. Further sessions will build upon it.
Remember to be gentle with yourself. A quiet time, even for just a moment, is a gift you are giving yourself. The time you allow to let your consciousness expand is well worth the effort. Capacities of mind uncovered in the stillness automatically begin to carry over into daily life whether you are consciously aware of it or not.
Find an accessible and relatively quiet location, probably in your home, though office and car are other spaces people have reported using. Without going to a lot of trouble, create an environment for yourself, a space that is pleasant for you to inhabit. Arrange a location and circumstances so that you can have this time free of distractions such as sounds of the telephone or television and freedom from meeting the needs of others - pets or people.
Finding a comfortable sitting posture
You do not have to sit on the floor to meditate. Ideally you will become able to be intimate with your own experience in any position or situation. And chairs are in more common usage in contemporary society. But it is helpful for formal practice to create a situation that will support your developing skill.
So your sitting posture should be comfortable and alert. Sit straight without being rigid. It is helpful to think of the skeleton doing the work. Set the skeleton in such a way that it can support itself. Let the tissues hang on the bone.
In a chair, your feet should be flat on the floor. Sitting on a cushion or on the floor, create a tripod stance with weight evenly distributed on legs and buttocks. In either case, tipping the pelvis slightly forward brings the body naturally to an upright posture that can also be relaxed and comfortable for some time.
You can see some descriptions of sitting posture and different kinds of meditation cushions and benches at Carolina Morning, but keep in mind the special seating is not required, but may be helpful as you get started. (Carolina Morning also sells meditation cushions and benches. You can find many other resources online.)
Coming into intimate contact with the breath and body
Follow these steps to come fully into the experience of being a body.
- Find a comfortable alert posture.
- Close your eyes. Let go of anything you have been thinking about. Whatever it is, no matter how important, it can wait.
- Turn attention inward, to the experience of the body from the inside, being aware of the whole body.
- Notice that though you can sense the whole body, it is not rock solid; there are points of sensation and sound.
- Begin to be aware of the breathing in the body as well as having a sense of the whole body. Sit with this breathing, animal body, simply appreciating living and breathing.
- Be aware of the whole experience of breath, from the beginning of the breath, to the end, and to the whole range between.
- Thoughts, visions, sound and sensations will arise, but neither push away nor cling to any of them.
- Be sure that you are staying with the experience of body and breath as opposed to imagining it or visualizing the experience.
- When you find yourself captured by any of these objects or experiences, gently return to the breath. This gentleness is very important. The skill here is not in shutting out experience, but in returning again and again to the primary object of attention, breath.
Guided Meditation
An audio version of these instructions is available by clicking here.
The guided meditation is about 18 minutes long.
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