How to Use Fear and Not Let It Use You: Meditation with Rick Hanson on 11/1/23

I offer these every week, along with a short teaching. Just click the subscribe link below to be notified through YouTube when I post the recording of the latest one. Or if you'd like to join me live, which I'd really welcome, go down into the description section below and follow the link along to be able to sign up for free. In this meditation, I'm going to focus on three kinds of calm abiding, so that increasingly we can rest in the present, feeling already full and already at ease, to the extent that's authentic. So there'll be a progression here that will move from what we might call lovingness to contentment to peace. So to begin with, find a posture, a physical position that's comfortable for you and also helps you stay alert, committing to meditation, determining to remain present, to treat this time with respect as a way of treating yourself with respect. With your eyes open or closed, establishing a sense of place, perhaps looking around your room for a moment, noting that things are okay where you are, establishing yourself and your body, including sensations in your awareness. Attention can move throughout your body, gradually getting a sense of your body as a whole. The sensations of breathing can be increasingly apparent, air flowing in and flowing out. And you can be aware of sensations around the area of your heart, the center of your chest, while staying in touch with your body, gently open to warmhearted feelings, whatever feelings are easy for you to find, could be a smile, watching a silly cat video, caring for someone, really just staying with the feelings, including the sensations perhaps around the area of your heart. In other words, as you remain aware of your body and breathing, including a growing sense of feelings of warmheartedness, you might have a sense of compassion and kindness radiating outward from you, flowing outward in all directions, wishing others well. If you can, you could also open to a simple sense of being with others who care about you and focusing on the simple feelings and sensations of being liked, appreciated, or even loved, simple, a kind of flowing, warmheartedness flowing out, receiving the warmheartedness of others flowing in, resting in that flowingness, heart opening, lovingness, finding whatever is accessible for you and resting in it, warmheartedness flowing in and flowing out. And as you find this simple sense of the heart, see if there can also be a related calming in your body, a sense of letting go, feeling reassured in the present as you rest in the heart, and then staying in touch with your body, gently opening to, as it is real for you, a growing sense of feeling content. You might begin by gently including in your meditation feelings of thankfulness, gratitude, finding a sense of enoughness in the present, perhaps saying to yourself, I am content, as an opening into experiencing that and meditating in it, noticing the mind's tendency to continually grasp for more, to seek an endless becoming rather than resting in being, and see if you can disengage from that, at least for a moment, and a moment, finding your way into feeling content. You can know that you can still have goals and dreams while approaching them, feeling already full, already having received so much, letting go of craving and drivenness and pressure. We can recognize problems in the world while still finding that space inside our own minds in which we can feel content. You might have a sense of a kind of blending of warmheartedness and contentment as an experience, as a way of being in which you can abide, loving and content. And then in the last invitation here, building on the sense of warmheartedness and contentment, whatever you've found, opening more and more, as it is real for you, into a sense of peace, letting go of needless anxiety, noticing the fact of being basically all right, right now and now, letting a growing tranquility move through your body and mind, letting your mind become increasingly quiet and opening to a growing sense of being at peace in the present, whatever the future may hold in the present, at peace. It could be that around the edges of your mind, there is perhaps worry, understandably, maybe agitation, uneasiness, while it's possible to have a sense of stillness and peacefulness in the core of yourself, or it might be that surface levels of the mind are understandably disturbed, rattled, but deep down, it's quiet and peaceful and you can rest there.