26. Meditation 13

Notice how thoughts, sensations, and sounds appear all on their own.

Again, sit however is comfortable and become aware of the feeling of your body resting in space, your back against the chair, your hands on your knees.
And you might begin by following each breath as it comes and goes with a mental note.
You can think in on the inhalation and out on the exhalation, or you can count them.
One on the way in, one on the way out, two on the way in, two on the way out.
You might find that adding a mental note like that very softly in the mind can make you more connected to the sensations of breathing.
You can make the sound of the word last as long as that part of the breath.
So the word one or the word in lasts as long as the inhalation.
And again, it’s very soft with the voice of your mind.
And rather than try to approach the breath as though from a point outside it, just let it appear in the space of awareness.
You don’t need to lean into it or attempt to get closer to it. Just receive it.
And as with the breath, so too with other sensations and sounds. Just let them appear on their own.
Notice that they do in fact appear all on their own.
And by appearing, they articulate this space of consciousness.
The moment you notice you’ve become distracted, just observe the thought itself without judgment.
Judgment is just another thought.
And come back to the sensations of breathing, or to sounds, or to feelings in the body.

In the last minute of this session, open your eyes if you’ve been sitting with them closed and notice that the space you see, the space of your visual field, is in the same place where everything else is happening.
All of this is an appearance in consciousness.
So this field of color and light is not outside of consciousness.
Okay. Once again, thank you for your practice.

I hope you are discovering that the efforts you’re making here are changing the character of the rest of your day. As I’ve said several times before, the difference between practicing even for a few minutes and not practicing at all can be quite extraordinary. And this is especially true if you punctuate the rest of your day with short moments of practice. Again, even a minute, a minute can be a revolutionary change over the course of an hour. And as you know, in the app version of this course, there’s a self-timer. And so you can do self-timed sessions throughout the day. And you can make these as long or as short as you want. And there you won’t have my voice, but they can be very useful. So I’d encourage you to do that. The art of this is really to find ways to bring the clarity of meditation into your waking life and even ultimately into your dreaming life. You can do this in dreams and they become quite different when you do. Meditation is not really separate from the rest of your life. It really is just paying attention. It’s just noticing what you’re noticing anyway, and the more you can do that outside of these formal sessions, the more the best parts of meditation will begin to bleed into everything else you do and into your relationships and into those moments when you wake up at four in the morning and can’t get back to sleep. You only have your mind in each moment, and it will be as well-ordered or as chaotic as it is, and meditation is the best technique I know to get some purchase on order and balance and ultimately actual peace no matter what is happening in your life.