Taking Refuge in Your Own Awareness || Jon Kabat-Zinn Meditation

[Music] so once again is it for the first time and it always is the first time establishing yourself in a posture that for you embodies weakfulness and dignity at this particular juncture of things unfolding in your life in the world taking up residency in your own awareness as if your life depended on it and you wouldn't of course be joining us today if you didn't know in some profound way far beyond mere thinking that it really does depend on it so we're suppressing nothing but we're actually inviting stillness and calmness and a sense of settling into a silence even underneath and in between our thoughts and our emotions to simply come into the foreground and bathe the body in a kind of invitational embryo embrace of total presence so for now there's no place to go nothing to do no special something that's missing that you have to complete or acquire no special something you have to get rid of or deny or push away and so that even in the midst of tremendous turbulence and storms in this world we live in and the christie's that are in our faces moment by moment we still have some degree of equanimity clarity calm balance of mind refuge not as not in the sense of escaping from anything but in the sense of just wisely taking kind of shelter from the most the ferocity of the strongest blasts so really knowing in your bones not in your head that as long as you're breathing there is more right with you than wrong with you no matter what you think is wrong or no matter how much stress you're under no matter how much pain you may be carrying in your heart and settling into this awareness it's a radical act of sanity and of love not of escaping from anything but a radical act of tending to what most needs tending at this particular moment and to in sense in some sense allowing your instrument to tune itself i speak of often of tuning the instrument but in a certain way there's no you tuning the instrument the instrument stealth tunes in response to settling into this timeless present moment in the body in the heart in the mind in the world and although we are whole ourselves we are at this particular moment part of much larger circles of wholeness including this gathering on youtube and zoom every weekday and it's kind of really palpable evident evidence that we need each other and we're not really isolating at all we're discovering profound interconnectedness and connection even as we are in our own bubbles so to speak for the sake of this mitigating of the virus as it spreads around the world and so really on the retreat that none of us asked for but that it's good to know how to be on retreat in a way that's not running away from anything but able to embrace and respond rather than react to whatever is coming at us moment by moment by moment throughout the day um how is it in the body right in this moment and if you don't know feel it what would it take to actually allow awareness to suffuse the entirety of your body right now and in this moment just remind ourselves that we could let it be exactly as it is whether it's pleasant whether it's unpleasant whether it's neither pleasant or unpleasant how is it in the heart right in this moment even towards yourself is there a way to see and honor your own your own beauty the the landscape and the unique texture of you in a way that's not inflationary or deflationary but simply recognizing the the flowering of life and its unique manifestation in the form of you with your name and your age and your everything all the identifiers or none of the identifiers however you care to hold it all but just a general sense of appreciation kindness for the body for the breath for the ways in which life is nurturing for you and meaningful for you even in this time of enormous challenge and how is it in the mind in this moment and how do you even know that so the invitation and the challenge is to see if we can take up residency in our own awareness in the space of awareness itself which sounds kind of weird or strange until you teach yourself how to enter and inhabit the full dimensionality of this remarkable capacity that we have as human beings profound form of intelligence at least as profound as thinking or any other of our multiple intelligences and capable of holding all of those and even for have an in-breath or or a hole in breath to really rest in awareness and then maybe a seamless continuity into half of uh an out breath or even a whole out breath but all of this unfolding in a very real way outside of time in this only moment we're ever alive no matter what's going on in the world and that so profoundly can transform and heal our relationship to everything inner experience outer experience everything and it's all right here beyond pursuing and rejecting and of course while this sounds uh totally simple and it is it's not easy and it requires a certain kind of efforting that might be best described as effortless effort we're not trying to get anywhere but actually maybe a little bit getting out of our own way from time to time by not generating more emotional reactivity thoughts but just letting life itself uh presented itself to us moment by moment by moment as we sit here or lie here or stand here and if you're brand new and first time you're joining us or new to meditation in one way or another and all this sounds hugely amorphous and hard to get a handle on you're right you need handles in the early stages of this practice and we all do actually all the time and the most convenient one is the body and of course within the body the fact that the breath is moving in and out of the body so if you feel that at a certain point you're just kind of lost in this huge space of awareness and not quite sure how to inhabit it well luckily there's this moment in this breath so you can feel the sensations of the breath coming into the body feel the sensations of the breath leaving the body and guess what it's not about the breath that's kind of second order very interesting hugely important but it's about the awareness of breathing and the breath is just or the breath sensation is just one object of attention and there are an infinite number of objects of attention but with mindfulness then we can invite them to actually become part of our ability to recognize relationality to recognize how deeply connected we are to this moment to this thought to this emotion to this twinge in the body to the heart break of what we're hearing about or facing ourselves or no others who are you know really being overwhelmed by the enormity of the pain and suffering and delusion and greed and everything else that's in our faces these days and at the same time simply riding on the waves of the breath and here you are in awareness and therefore for now at least a particular kind of capacity to simply be aware without falling into reactivity to all the stress even though it's here we're not trying to get rid of anyone but awareness gives us a whole other angle a whole other dimension which to hold what's really hard to hold and to not delude ourselves and to not lose our minds when we most need the full repertoire of our minds our multiple intelligences right at our fingertips right at the tip of our noses right in this boundless spaciousness that your own awareness always has been and is at this moment and so underneath my words and this guidance and this pointing to what is here right now for you when you drop underneath thinking and simply hearing what's here to be heard sensing what's here to be sensed feeling what's here to be felt knowing what's here to be known including the knowing of not knowing so maybe having no clue or maybe just a clue or two and for now just here falling awake being awake a luminosity that is always here and becomes much more apparent and actually available and useful to us when we manage to remember how helpful it is to get it out of our own way to not be continually lost in thought and then start believing our thoughts and our emotions rather than befriending them and seeing that they're not who we are not even close and what the world re really what the world really needs right now is for us to be 100 who we are we really really really really really are and you know who that is already or maybe i should say you are who that is already and this dropping in like this in a formal meditation is kind of a signature reminder as if we were this is this is now harking back to the lake meditation of some time ago as if we were still water as if our very nature was stillness and you can see through still water there's a certain clarity to it once the mud settles ehw yates one once said we can make our minds so like still water that animals will come and sit around and lap at the water itself he didn't say it quite that way but and it wasn't a poem it was prose but still the power of stillness and it's your birthright my birthright our birthright and when it's wakeful stillness profound form of intelligence of which we are at great need at the moment and in which right now we're all sharing in that one stillness that even if you're feeling agitated is right here underneath and inside the agitation so welcome home and maybe welcoming your cell phone oh [Music]

Channel: Wisdom 2.0

Views: 113,023

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Id: VKpeqbIiXEs

Length: 30min 40sec (1840 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 02 2021