20-Minute Guided Meditation with a Mental Health Expert for Mindfulness

Welcome everyone. Please take a moment to just sit comfortably. You can sit with your back relatively straight and just sit in a way that generally feels naturally for you but also helps to keep you alert. We're going to combine a bit of body awareness as well as what's called metta, which is from the buddhist tradition for loving kindness meditation. So we're going to combine a little bit of both. We'll close our eyes. Take some nice deep breaths to get started. A couple nice deep breaths. Try to really feel each breath very deeply. Feel the air moving in and out of your nostrils as you breathe in and out. Feel your belly moving. Feel your rib cage moving. Really try to get in touch with the physicality of your breathing. Also, as you take nice deep breaths, be sure to push your belly out as you inhale, letting it contract as you exhale. Good abdominal breaths are very helpful in terms of creating a sense of relaxation and tranquility. So let's pay attention to our breaths for a few moments. And remember that as your mind wanders off to other things, just take notice of this and gently and kindly bring yourself back to your breathing. Nice deep breaths. Feel your breath. Feel all the physical sensations of your breath. Push your belly out on the inhalation, letting it naturally contract on its own during the exhalation. As you're breathing, you can do a quick scan of your body, noticing points of tension. And if you notice areas that are uncomfortable, just allow them to be. Hold them in a space of acceptance, of awareness, and just allow the tensions to be as they are, refraining from the tendency to wish them away. We're going to bring our attention here to the lower body. I want you to bring all your attention to your lower legs, from your knees to the tip of your toes. Really feel those parts of your body right now. You might notice that when you pay close attention, it seems to be maybe a little bit more tingly, or sensations that you're a bit more aware of, of those particular parts of your body. Let's do that now for a few moments. And now I'd like you to bring all your attention to just the left lower leg, from your knee to your toes, just the left side. Now switch to the right side, and now back to the left. Notice how the sensations change a little as you move your awareness, the focus of your awareness from one area to another. Now let's bring your attention to our upper leg areas, from the waist to the knees, our upper thighs. Let's really bring our attention to both thighs for a few moments, from the waist to the knees. And now I'd like you to focus on just the right upper leg, from the right thigh, right hip to the right knee. Really focus on that part of your body, and just feel it as fully as you can. And remember that when your mind wanders off, it's totally okay. Everybody does this. Just kindly, gently bring your attention back to our point of focus that we're working on here. Now bring your attention to the left upper leg, from the left hip to the left knee, back to the right side. And now let's be feeling both again. Continuing to move up the body, we'll bring our attention to our entire upper trunk, from the waist to the neck. Feel your whole trunk area, back, stomach, chest. Feel that entire section of your body with as much detail as you can. Remember that if there are tensions, points of discomfort, let's hold those in a space of acceptance. We'll move our attention now to our upper limbs, from the shoulders to the tip of the fingers. Deeply feel both of them. Notice all the minute sensations. Now bring your attention to just the meditation. Let's feel from the neck all the way up to the top of the head. Feel that entire part of your body in great detail. Notice the feeling of your face, your nose and lips. Notice the back of your head. How does the back of your head feel? And now let's try for a few moments to feel our entire body all at once. One big field of awareness of our entire body. Focusing on the energetic feeling of our body can be a great way to anchor us in the present moment and help quiet the mind a little. And as we move from this awareness of our body exercise, we're going to supplement this for a few moments with nurturing loving-kindness, which also is incredibly helpful to our well-being. Now we'll bring our attention to the area of our chest, the mid-sternum area. The area that's often represented as where we hold the feeling of loving-kindness energy. And I'd like you to bring to mind for a few moments something, an image, a thought, that helps elicit a feeling of loving-kindness. It can be someone you care about smiling and laughing. It can be seeing puppies wrestling and biting each other's little ears. Thought of a beautiful sunset. A baby laughing. Whatever seems to resonate with you of a thought that elicits a feeling in your chest of loving-kindness, even if it's just a little bit. Let's do that for a few moments. And now, taking that feeling of loving-kindness in your chest, I want you to see yourself offering that energy to your entire being, your body, mind, and spirit. Send that loving-kindness energy to yourself. You are a beautiful expression of life and completely deserving of loving-kindness energy. So let's first start by being grateful to ourselves and our own existence. Send this loving-kindness energy to your entire being. And now, we'll take it one step further and see ourselves sending this loving-kindness energy to all the people we care about. Feel yourself sending this loving-kindness energy to those in your life that you care about. Bathing them, enveloping them in this energy of loving-kindness. Do that for a few moments. The next step will be a bit more challenging, but ultimately perhaps the most important. We will send our feeling of energy of loving-kindness emanating from our chest to all the people that challenge us, the people we don't like, that annoy us and we find difficult. Let's envelop them, bathe them in the energy, the feeling of loving-kindness emanating from your chest area. They too are expressions of life and deserving of loving-kindness energy. And ultimately, learning to send this feeling of loving-kindness to those we dislike is a gift to ourselves. With the most intention and earnestness that we can, let's take a few moments to send this feeling of loving-kindness to the difficult people in our lives. And now, we'll take another step forward and send this feeling of loving-kindness energy to the entire globe, to all the people and creatures and plants of the earth, all the human beings, our entire civilization. Let's envelop and bathe this entire group of people, our massive community, with a feeling of loving-kindness. The kind and the mean, the healthy and the sick, the old, the young, the rich and the poor. Envelop everyone with your feeling of loving-kindness. And we'll return to focusing on our breathing. A couple nice abdominal breaths here, pushing your belly out on the inhalation, gently contracting naturally on the exhalation. Nice deep breaths. And we'll conclude the meditation. Recall that focused body awareness, fostering loving-kindness can be a great way to support our well-being.