Chapter 1: What is deep rest and how can meditation help achieve it?
Welcome back. Often people enter into meditation, precisely because they feel that they need space in their lives, or they're finding it difficult to rest.
Chapter 2: How can we gather our scattered minds during meditation?
And there is a restful element within meditation.
Chapter 3: What role does breath play in restful meditation?
We don't meditate necessarily to sleep as such, but there is a restorative gift that meditative space gives to the human being. And all of the great wisdom traditions, Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, all of the traditions would see this as an element that is present within the meditative practice. When we rest with awareness,
Chapter 4: How can we practice observing thoughts like a river?
there is a great restoration that takes place. We can leave our meditation feeling more energized, more aware, more open to the day at hand. So let's practice today, entering into a little time of deep meditative rest so that we might enter the day more fully alive, more fully aware. Let's begin.
Chapter 5: What is the significance of gratitude in meditation?
Sitting into our time of meditation, we begin with gratitude. Gratitude that we are able to take this space, these few minutes in the day to simply be.
Chapter 6: How can we integrate restful awareness into daily life?
As we enter into this space of meditation now, recognizing that all that we have to do is simply be. We can allow the burdens and the pressures of the rest of the day to stand aside just for these few moments. We can collect ourselves back from the various places that our mind and our heart have gone to as we deal with the list of daily activities, past, present, and future.
For now, we are granting ourselves this time of stable awareness. We are granting ourselves the gift of resting, truly resting in the present moment. As always, we use breath as the gateway, the doorway into the present moment. We can also be aware of breath as a key to rest.
We know that as we begin to sleep, for example, our breathing slows and deepens, and that during the night, depending on the way in which we are sleeping, our breath patterns change, whether we're dreaming or not, whether we're in deep restorative sleep or not. For now, though, we are choosing the third way of being,
a way that is not full act of wakefulness or full deep sleep, but a way of restful awareness, a way of meditation. So moving once again, greeting our breath, receiving it as that old friend that has been with us all the way through our life, Begin to encounter the rhythm of the breath as it rises and falls, as it ebbs and flows.
Begin to listen to the breath as the background music now of your life. And with each in breath, consciously breathe in peace. even perhaps repeating the word peace with each in breath. And as we breathe out, we can breathe out rest, consciously repeating the word rest as we breathe out.
Breathing in, I breathe in peace. Breathing out, I breathe out rest.
slowly drawing our awareness from the soles of our feet to the crown of our head, giving permission to our whole body now to rest deeply and restoratively during this time of meditation. Wherever there is tension or stress, wherever there is compression or constriction of the body, of the breath.
We breathe out, especially through those areas, and we feel the whole body begin to relax, feeling the body becoming heavy, still, grounded,
aware breathing in. I breathe in peace breathing out. I breathe out rest.
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