50. Meditation 25

Learn how to change the feeling tone of experience with a simple exercise.

Once again take your seat. And close your eyes. And feel your body resting in space. There’s still a feeling of gravity. Feel the solidity. Or apparent solidity of your body against the chair. Or on the cushion. And then let. The body resolve itself into a cloud of fleeting sensation. And allow your awareness to begin to focus on the breath in the midst of that cloud of sensation. And take a moment to notice whatever mood you feel now. Are you restless? Happy. Depressed. Is there a feeling tone? Coloring your awareness in this moment. And while this practice is not generally about. Manipulate experience. It’s simply noticing experience and that begins to change experience on its own. I want you to notice that you can actually change your experience. Quite suddenly. For instance. You know what it’s like to be happy? You know what it’s like to smile. And to have a smile in your mind. So in this moment. Just put a smile in your mind. This may be a matter of subtly engaging the muscles in your face. But just on the inside. In consciousness. Smile. And see if that changes the way you feel in this moment. You actually know what it’s like. To be without a care in the world. To have nowhere to go. To have no regret. I have nothing but attention happily placed in the present. See if you can suddenly in a flash. Access to that state of mind. And embrace this moment. You have the rest of your day to be worried. You have the rest of your day to feel the urgency of all that you need to get done. In this moment. Completely surrender all of that. And the moment you notice, you’re lost in thought. Notice the thought itself. Without judgment. Judgment is just another thought. And then return to the breath. For the last minute of the session. Open your eyes. And with a very wide gaze. Simply stare into the space in front of you. And whatever you see. Whether it’s objects on your desk or a shelf of books. Or trees outside your window. Whatever you say. Simply let your visual field. Resolve into a pattern of color and shadow. Relinquish your concepts. About the objects you see. And gaze upon the raw data of visual perception. Might help to think that you’re seeing everything in a mirror. A mirror has no depth. There’s just light on the surface of the glass. See if you can notice that about your visual field. There’s just like. OK. Well, I introduced a new practice today, not so much a practice, but a kind of insight, and it’s the recognition that we only tend to feel the way we feel moment by moment and that it’s possible to suddenly feel differently. The shift can be subtle, but it can be quite revolutionary. The moment you notice that you’re feeling cranky or bored or angry or in some way dissatisfied. It’s possible to be mindful of that. And to notice the half life of that emotion. And that is mostly the practice I recommend here, but it’s also possible to, in a flash, feel another way. To access a different attitude. And once you have some degree of mindfulness, it really is just a matter of deciding to do that, remembering that you can do that. You can suddenly be content. You can suddenly be grateful to have this moment of life. You can suddenly remember that you love people. It doesn’t take a lot of preamble or momentum to access these states. So as you go about your day and you feel the mediocrity of ordinary life begin to intrude. You might experiment with this. Just remember how much you love your children. Or your parents. Or the beauty of the natural world? Or just put a smile in your mind. If only for a moment.