Try This At Home
For those of you who were at the Sangha I led on Sunday (and maybe especially for those of you who weren’t!), here are the guided meditation instructions I used, taken from The Wise Heart, by Jack Kornfield:
“Sit comfortably and at ease. Close your eyes. Let your body be at rest and your breathing be natural. Begin to listen to the play of sounds around you. Notice those that are loud or soft, far and near. Notice how sounds arise and vanish, leaving no trace.
“Now let yourself sense, feel or imagine that your mind is not limited to your head. Sense that your mind is expanding to be like the sky—open, clear, vast like space. Feel that your mind extends beyond the most distant sounds. Imagine there are no boundaries to your mind, no inside or outside. Let the awareness of your mind extend in every direction like the open sky. Relax in this openness and just listen. Let the sounds that come and go, whether loud or soft, far or near, be clouds in the vast sky of your own awareness, appearing and disappearing without resistance.
“Notice how thoughts and feelings also arise and vanish like sounds. Let the thoughts and feelings come and go without struggle or resistance. Pleasant and unpleasant thoughts, pictures, words, joys and sorrows, let them all come and go like clouds in the clear sky of mind.
“From this spacious awareness also notice the body. The mind is not in the body. The body sensations float and change in the open sky of mind. The breath breathes itself, it moves like a breeze. If you observe carefully, the body is not solid. It reveals itself as areas of hardness and softness, pressure and tingling, warm and cool sensation, all floating in the space of awareness.
“Relax. Rest in this openness. Let sensations float and change. Allow thoughts and images, feelings and sounds to come and go like clouds in the clear, open space of awareness. As you do, pay attention to the consciousness itself. Notice how the open space of awareness is naturally clear, transparent, timeless and without conflict—allowing all things, but not limited by them. This is your own true nature. Rest in it. Trust it. It is home.”
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Try it!