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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello there.
Chapter 2: What does it mean to enter the inner room in meditation?
Today we're going to move into an explicit teaching of the Christian meditative form. A good way of looking at this is to begin by asking ourselves, well, what does Christ teach about meditation?
Chapter 3: How can setting intention enhance meditation practice?
We know through the Gospels that in his life he prayed and taught his disciples how to pray. But when we want to look particularly for his teaching on meditation, we find that in the Gospel of Matthew. If you want to look at it yourself later, you'll find it in chapter 6.
Chapter 4: How do you experience perfect peace and light during meditation?
There, Christ invites his disciples to seek an inner room.
Chapter 5: What does it mean to be held in being by love?
Now, he was speaking to first century Palestinian peasants, most of whom lived as an entire family in one-room dwellings. So what did he mean?
Chapter 6: What is the significance of breath in meditation?
He wasn't asking them to build an extension.
Chapter 7: How can you return to your inner room frequently?
He was asking them to recognize that there is an inner room of the heart that every human being can withdraw to when they need to. That inner room is the place of our inner awareness. And in the Christian meditative tradition, we believe that we are met there by the divine presence. A presence of unconditional, eternal, and infinite love.
So in our practice today, we're going to begin to establish the journey to this inner room. How we get there and how we can stabilize our awareness to be present there. So as we move towards practice, I invite you just to sit comfortably once again. To make your ritual gesture of beginning. And then just to carry the intention with you. The intention of entering your own inner room.
The intention of being met by love. As we always do, we begin now by simply becoming aware of the body. Checking in and asking, how am I in this moment? allowing the body, the mind, the heart to bring forward anything that it sees as necessary for us to know in this moment. It may do that through sensation or thought or memory.
But as this is our meditation time, we are simply going to notice those things and let them go. You can always come back to them later. For now, we are moving fully into the present. We place our feet firmly upon the ground, allow the spine to lengthen and relax, opening up the breath and gently beginning to be aware of the breath circulating within us as we breathe in and breathe out.
As always, we're not changing the breath in any way, though the breath may change itself as we become more relaxed. And that's okay. But no conscious changes of the breath for the moment. Simply noticing the breath as we breathe in and breathe out. Breathing out, we breathe out all tension, stress and worry. Breathing in, we breathe in peace, warmth and light.
Breathing out, we breathe out all anxiety and any distraction that would pull us from the present moment. Breathing in, we breathe in awareness, stability, and peace. As we breathe, we breathe with every pore of our skin, breathing from the crown of our head to the soles of our feet. And if it helps, you may once again like to imagine your breath.
as it dissolves into the air and disappears, taking with it all anxiety, all stress, all worry. And if it helps you, you can imagine your in-breath as clear golden light, breathing out all stress, breathing in peace.
As we rest in the present moment through awareness of the breath, we follow the cycle of our breath, following until we find that little moment where the in-breath becomes the out-breath and the out-breath becomes the in-breath. Breathing in peace. Breathing out stress. resting our awareness at the balance point between in-breath and out-breath.
And as you breathe in, follow your in-breath to the very center of your being, to that place of perfect peace, perfect light, perfect rest. the place beneath all activity, the place from which you as an internal observer rest and notice everything else that is going on. Over it and around it, your breath flows, but you are centered now at the very center point of your being.
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