The essential teaching of most meditation practices is the art of beginning again. This is perhaps the ability that we need most in our lives because nothing is static, immovable, and unchanging.

"When we come back to ourselves—even in the midst of a crazy, busy situation—we come back to our values, our priorities."

Meditation 1: Returning to the Breath with Kindness

In order to deepen the quality of concentration, the ability to center our attention, to have more stability in our attention, to gather our scattered energies we often choose an object of awareness and we rest our attention on that object. We recognize when attention drifts away and we gently let go of the distraction and bring our attention back to our primary object with kindness toward ourselves. The letting go and coming back is the training. That's the transformative moment.

We could use many things as the primary object of our attention but for this meditation we'll use the feeling of the breath.

You are invited to work with this practice over the next few days. You're welcome to share experiences and what you learn with fellow students in the Unit 1 discussion forum.