Relaxing the Body, Releasing the Mind: A Meditation with Dr. Rick Hanson

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. So let yourself settle in. Meditating is homecoming, helping yourself and letting yourself come home to yourself. Allowing yourself to be however you are right now. Taking some moments to let attention, let awareness wander through your body. Perhaps moving it a little bit, eyes open or closed. You are establishing a stability of presence, of being here. You remain present as experiences pass through awareness. As awareness moves through your body, you can have a sense of easing and calming, releasing tension in your body, letting go in your face, in your throat, letting go in your diaphragm, beneath your ribcage, being aware of what could be enjoyable in letting go, finding what you like in becoming present through experiencing what you like about letting go and being present. This will ground these ways of being more and more into your own body. It's skillful to find what we like in what's good for us, to find what is simply wholesome or enjoyable in beneficial states of being. Letting go between your shoulder blades and throughout your back, letting go in your belly and hips, letting go in your shoulders and elbows and hands, letting go in the insides of your thighs, your knees and calves, letting go in your ankles and your feet, being aware of your body as a whole, one whole field of sensation as you breathe, letting yourself be, staying present, letting awareness be open, spacious, wide, inclusive. Keep letting awareness open wide, edges softening, no edges at all, not making anything in your mind, unmaking, undoing, unfabricating, letting thoughts disperse into vastness like clouds dispersing into the sky, being the sky, being the field in which experiences occur, seeing if you can find a peacefulness in unattached presence, open, allowing like the sky, peaceful, undisturbed. You might have a sense or be able to find that the inherent peacefulness in awareness with qualities of vastness and stillness might be experienced as extending somehow in some ways into mystery that is infinitely vast, timelessly still with some quality of awareness that our personal awareness is part of, not making anything up here. If this is not real for you, no worries at all, just kind of exploring ways in which the deep quiet in your awareness extends somehow into a profound vastness and stillness that is ultimately our deep identity. This is not about thinking about peacefulness, vastness, and stillness. It's not about thinking about these. It is taking these qualities as you can find them as objects of absorption, objects of meditation, sinking in, opening into, coming home to peacefulness, vastness, and stillness. ♪♪♪