Chapter 1: What does it mean to seek peace in meditation?
Welcome back. Many people come to the practice of meditation seeking peace, perhaps peace of mind or peace of heart, or even just a peaceful space, a break from the activities of the day.
Chapter 2: How can we cultivate gratitude for life during meditation?
But we can do more than simply seek peace. We can become peace.
The meditative traditions of the world, and particularly the Christian monastic meditative tradition, seeks this as a goal of practice, to become peace, to allow ourselves to become a conduit for a deeper peace, the peace that passes all understanding, a peace that is equanimity, stability, groundedness, no matter what else is going on around us.
Chapter 3: What is the significance of the great web of life in our practice?
In our meditation today, we will begin to look at this. It's an ongoing practice and it takes a lot of time and a lot of effort. But today, at least, we will begin to enter into the way of peace together. So let's begin.
Chapter 4: How can we nourish an attitude of peace towards ourselves and others?
gently taking our position once again. We sit into this time of meditation. We do so openly and generously, allowing the other activities of the day to recede.
Chapter 5: What techniques can help us breathe peace into our daily lives?
We make our ritual gesture, whatever that may be for us, that indicates that we are entering consciously into this time and space. We sit gently, with stability.
Chapter 6: How do we integrate peace into our relationships and interactions?
We allow the chair or cushion to support our weight completely, trusting that it will hold us and that the earth itself holds the chair or the cushion. Feeling this rooted stability now, we allow ourselves to enter into this time
using once again the anchor of the breath and the anchor of the body, lengthening the spine, opening the solar plexus, allowing the breath to be stable, gentle, peaceful. If any distraction or outside stimulus comes, we know that we will simply just notice them, smile at them, and return to the practice. There is nothing that can disturb us unless we allow ourselves to be disturbed.
Bringing ourselves now consciously to the breath, for a moment we just dwell in gratitude for the breath for the life we have, for this moment of touching the experience of the biological rhythm of life itself. Independent of the circumstances of our being, we simply notice we are alive in this moment. And so this moment is filled with infinite possibility.
This moment has a capacity to change the rest of our life if we dwell deeply within the moment. Allowing all of the other circumstances of our life today to recede into the background. Our job, the tasks of the day, even our relationships, let them all recede just for these moments. and sit simply with the gratitude of life itself.
All of the great traditions teach that human life is a privilege, a gift. And so when we come to the awareness of our simple biological life, we can begin to move ourselves into an attitude of thankfulness and of awareness of the gift that is at hand.
Resting now in the rhythm of the breath, we breathe in and out, not changing the rhythm in any way, but simply noticing the breath, noticing the rhythm. If our mind or our heart become distracted in any way, we smile at the distraction and return to the breath. allowing the breath to be a gateway into the depth of the present moment.
Breathing in, I know that I am breathing in. Breathing out, I know that I am breathing out.
And gently moving our awareness now from just the simple openness to our biological life we expand our awareness to take into account our relationality. As a human being, we exist as a center point in the great web of relationality. Even if we live alone, we are still part of that great web of life. We came into being through countless generations behind us,
Every day we interact with many others, even if it's only through technology. But we can also think perhaps of colleagues, family members, friends, those we have known in the past, those that we will perhaps meet in the future but who are unknown to us as yet. In the present moment, in the stability of our breath,
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