Meditation 1: Relaxing into Non-Conceptual Awareness
Meditation 1: Relaxing into Non-Conceptual Awareness
The posture
Take your seat. And in doing so, set up your meditation practice. Let yourself sit in a way that's steady, grounded, stable; in a way that's upright, bright, awake. It's also helpful to sit in a way that's open: rolling your shoulders back a little, opening your chest: receptive, available to experience; and also in a way that's relaxed, at ease. Let the muscles in your face soften and drop. Let your hands and arms really be at rest in your lap or on your knees. Let your belly be round and relaxed.
Noticing attention
Notice where your attention is right now, how your attention is. If we're honest, our attention is usually a little scattered. So see if you can just really come into contact with your attention, not trying to force it. Rather, having the sense of letting your attention just settle into the feel of being here. The naturalness of body being alive, the dance of sensation, the flow of breathing. See if you can really just allow your attention to come in and down. Down into the gentle rise and fall of belly breathing. Down into the lowest place that you can feel the expansion of the in-breath and the relaxation of the out-breath. Down inside experience.
When the attention moves
Even if you're quite familiar with meditation practice, it's common for our attention to keep bouncing up and out, being seduced by the flicker of various ideas and images and abstractions. Don't fight with that but get familiar with the process: the way attention moves into some mental seduction. Then also become familiar with how we can gently allow attention to rest back in and down, landing again and again in your breathing belly, feeling experience.
The body's way into non-conceptual awareness
Let your meditation really be centered down in your belly, feeling your experience from the inside. Your belly is the center of embodied presence. Feeling the in-breath. Feeling the out-breath. Feeling the dance of whatever other sensations are going on. Resting into an embodied presence, a non-conceptual awareness.
Returning, resting, relaxing
Again and again, habit takes our attention up and out; and again and again, practice can bring our attention in and down: resting into your belly's knowing, an embodied knowing. Present inside this breathing body.
Body's way into a non-conceptual awareness is through relaxing, resting into awareness, allowing our attention to drop and settle and rest.
The heart's way into non-conceptual awareness
If body's way into non-conceptual awareness is through resting, relaxing into awareness, then the heart's expression of non-conceptual awareness is through allowing, opening up: really making room for whatever flickers, whatever passes through awareness, moment by moment. Opening to sensations, making room for changing sounds, embracing the thoughts, the ideas and images that flicker away in the background.
So letting yourself find out in your meditation: how can you make room for this moment? How can your awareness have that quality of allowing, embracing? We'll continue to explore the spaciousness of awareness, the heart's allowing, as we progress through the course.
Wisdom's way into non-conceptual awareness
Wisdom's way of non-conceptual awareness is through clear seeing: seeing thought arise and pass without investing in its content. There's an inherent clarity, an inherent brilliance to awareness. The light of your awareness is on right now. So if you can just notice the inherent clarity in which sensations can be felt, sounds can be heard: the inherent brilliance of mind which recognizes each passing moment. How can you be here as this innate clarity, luminous and naturally awake?
§
We'll continue to use these meditative skills—feeling experience, allowing experience, seeing into the nature of experience—as we continue on with the course.