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Chapter 1: What does it mean to rest in loving presence?
Welcome back.
Chapter 2: How can we find a gentle way into rest?
In our meditation today, we're going to speak about rest.
Chapter 3: What techniques help us notice our breath during meditation?
Nowadays, we move at such a fast pace. Often, even if we are getting sleep, we're not feeling very rested. Because meditation allows us to sit in relaxed awareness, there is a quality of rest about it, a quality of restoration, even perhaps we could say a quality of healing.
Chapter 4: How do we enter a state of relaxed awareness?
To rest in stillness allows the body and the mind to recalibrate, to gain perspective, to be able to take a wider or deeper view of life. In the Christian monastic tradition, because we see ourselves in meditation as resting in loving divine presence, we accept that this time of rest is also a time of communion, a time of deep inner stillness a time of blessing.
So however you view meditation, it's important that as we will in this session, we find a way into rest, a way into peace.
Chapter 5: What is the significance of patience in learning to rest?
So let's practice together. Once again, I invite you now to simply choose this time of meditation for yourself, to enter it with your ritual gesture, and perhaps to include in your intention for this particular session of meditation, an intention to touch deep rest, deep stillness, deep peace.
Chapter 6: How can we incorporate moments of calm into our daily lives?
Allow yourself to sit secure and solid on your cushion or chair. To place your feet flat upon the ground, allowing the spine once again to lengthen and open in a relaxed and unstrained way. Notice how the breath almost immediately opens and becomes a little more expansive, a little deeper. Don't force the breath into doing anything.
Simply notice how it responds to this stillness, to this entering the present moment with awareness. As you allow the body to settle, let the shoulders drop, the jaw loosen and unclench, the facial muscles to smooth. If there's any particular points of tension that you tend to hold in your body, you might like to just focus on them for a moment or two and to consciously relax them if you can.
Sometimes it can help to draw your awareness from the soles of your feet slowly up to the crown of your head, noting any point of particular tension or pain and seeing that point dissolve. If you need an image for this, one good image is to imagine something like a disperin or a panadol dissolving in a glass of water.
At the start, we can see the fizziness or the reaction as our awareness lands upon a point of tension, but slowly it dissipates, dissolves, disappears. There is just clear, cool water. In you, there is just clear, calm stillness. As you settle a little further now into this moment of rest, become even more aware of your breath. Allow the gentle rhythm of the breath to lead you into deep rest.
What I'd like you to do for a moment now is to take three long inhales and exhales without forcing the breath, but just lengthening the inhale and the exhale slightly. Drawing in, we expand our breath, our lungs a little further than normal. Breathing out, we let the breath go just a little more than normal. Try that with yourself for three cycles of in-breath and out-breath.
As you come to the end of the cycle, simply return to ordinary breathing and take a moment to notice how the body is feeling. As we draw our attention to ourself in a non-judgmental and curious, open way, we enter more fully a relaxed, aware state. A state where the body, the mind, the heart, and the soul or living spirit are all in simple, balanced unity with each other. There is nowhere to go
There is nothing to do at this moment other than simply be and breathe, be and breathe, resting in the breath, resting in the awareness of the present moment, resting in the awareness of the present moment arising from divine love, resting in peace, gentleness, calmness, and even healing. See this time of meditation as a time of recalibration, a time of renewal.
It is an activity towards attention. It is an activity towards peace. If you feel any kind of draw towards what's coming later in the day or any draw mentally to what happened earlier in the day, simply notice the attraction of your mind to these things. Smile at that attraction and then gently come back to the breath.
Breathing in and breathing out.
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