Guided Meditation: Resting as Everything and Nothing at Once

It is this balance, this capacity to be everything and nothing at the same time, this willingness to completely let go of control, partially because you have such great trust in your own intuitive self and the wholeness of your being, but also because from a wisdom perspective, you see that control was always an illusion. How do you let go of something that was never there in the first place? So just notice where your attention is. Before you try to control or change your attention or your awareness, just notice where it is.

It could be outside of your body. It could be in your head or maybe in your chest or your abdomen. And when we're thinking about meditation and the process of spiritual awakening, we want to be very aware and cautious with any sort of sense or attempt to control our internal experience or our external world. So often with a guided meditation, I will be guiding you to certain areas in the body, moving, helping you move your awareness from one area to another area.

And I want to make the distinction that when we move our awareness, we are not moving the energy. We want to leave the energy where it is and simply move our attention or our awareness. And it's an important distinction. If we go the route of moving our energy, what will happen is when we stop exerting pressure or control, our energy will just go right back to where it was like a rubber band.

Instead, if we move our attention and our awareness and we rest our awareness in a specific part of our body, then naturally the energy will move to that spot. It just so happens that if you learn this more gentle way of working with your own inner world, at first it will be very slow and somewhat tedious. But after years of practice, it can be quite efficient and fast. Right.

Right. Don't try to stop the water in the stream. Simply allow the water to move past you and guide it on its path a little left, a little right. You're sitting under a waterfall and the waterfall is pouring down onto the top of your head.

And there's a large window, an opening in the top of your head. And the waterfall is pouring through the top of your head and into your body. Right. And down into your lower abdomen.

And you're simply the whole space. Your awareness is the whole space. You're the waterfall. You're your body.

You're the ground, the ground of being in your lower abdomen. And you're just guiding that falling water, right? Just a little bit this way, that way. You're creating the container for the water to move in.

Right. The safer and sturdier and more grounded the edges and the boundaries of your awareness is. The more freely the water moves through the waterfall, through your body. It's as if when the waterfall begins and you feel that initial anticipatory anxiety and the increased heart rate and this almost this holding of the breath a little bit.

Right. There's this bracing for the movement of the energy, which we know we can't control. If we, that bracing, it just, all those little pieces of water, they kind of rub up against that tension, that tightness and those little knots and then it just swirls and it turns into these little eddies, all these little spirals going through the body and it makes the flow of that waterfall or that river so much more turbulent and then that increases the somatic anxiety and then we get into this kind of negative feedback loop where we're a little scared, we're a little hesitant and we brace because we don't have control.

And then the water reacts to the bracing and it spins and then that is like, oh, that's more intense, feels more out of control. And then we brace again and all of a sudden we've transported ourselves into this adversarial relationship with the energy as if we are in one spot and the energy in the water moving through the body is another. And they're separate. And they're separate.

Right? And we have just taken the wholeness of our being and separated it into two things. Instead, this water is pouring down over our head, into our head, and there's no distinction, no separation. We are both the edges of our body, which allows the water to flow without grasping.

Right? And we're also the water itself. Right? We're also the energy itself flowing through the center of the body, down into the body.

We are both this strong structural frame. And also this fluid moving liquid. In the holding of the paradox of the structural rigid protective frame. Right?

And also that infinitely creative potential movement of the water through the body. It's like there's this, in between the two, there's this sweetness, this relaxation, a softening, and a feeling of being seen. As if I am allowed to be both this very soft, flowing, unpredictable, out of control movement of energy. And also this stable, grounded, and also this stable, grounded, structural holding of the container at the same time.

There's a completeness that almost arises out of the polarity of the two opposites. And if you enter into the space between the two, right, between the soft and the hard, you find that you've been transported or returned to the wholeness of your being. And you begin to taste and feel into all of the centuries of tradition of koans and Buddhists and Zen Buddhists. All these ancient traditions speaking in paradoxical terms that never quite made sense to the mind, but always made sense to the soul.

So letting go of the imagery or any visualization and allowing our awareness to settle down through the head, down the neck and the shoulders and the chest, down into the abdomen. And then down to the ground of being somewhere above the pelvic floor, below the belly button. We extend our pelvic, our pelvic, our pelvic bowl, on the ground. We extend our awareness both behind us and beneath us.

And then, back into the sacrum and down into the ground of being, connecting with all of the pieces of our self and the density and the pieces of our spirit and transmission that make up the ground of being. At first, when you sense it, it could feel almost like it's all one thing, like dense or maybe even painful or rigid. But then when you really open to it and look, you see it's actually many, many things all compacted together. Lots of little atoms or molecules.

Lots of little atoms or molecules. All the little pieces of our self. And so it is both very grounding and deep and solid as if it's almost one thing. And at the same time, it is many, many little pieces, all densely packed and tightly connected.

So it's all things. So it's all things. And so we can intuit from this sensing that we are both one and we are both everything at the same time. So every aspect of our experience of awareness points us home, points us back to the underlying truths of existence.

We cannot be lost as long as we are willing to see. Knowing that the ground you stand on is both one thing and everything. Allowing it to bolster and support you from your feet to your legs, knees, upper legs, butt, lower back, upper back, shoulders roll back, neck straightens. And then you look up towards the heart, towards the head, and also out of the body towards the room and towards the ceiling.

As if you're looking up at a 45 degree angle. Maybe you open your arms out wide. Your chest is pushed forward and exposed. And then you sense out, out into the abdomen, out into the heart center, connecting with the heart, up into the head, connecting with the diamond-like quality of the mind.

The clear light and space. And then out into the room you're in, in front of you and above you. And you have this, once again, paradoxical experience where the back of you and beneath you is this rooted, deep, grounded, solid, dense. Force.

And in front of you is this warm, exciting, higher vibration, light, loving, intimate and vulnerable presence. And you're standing in between the two worlds. The world of groundedness and stability and your root and the world of your heart and the warmth and your mind and the light. The light.

The lightness of the mind. The light. The lightness of the mind. And once again, we find ourselves in another paradox.

And once again, the paradox is the same pattern that all the patterns are that we, that we experience and see the world from. We are both spirit and human at the same time. And we are neither spirit or human. Right?

We are both the ground of being and the loving heart of awakening and the wisdom of the mind. And we are not any of those things also. It is this balance, this capacity to be everything and nothing at the same time. This willingness to completely let go of control.

Partially because you have such great trust in your own intuitive self and the wholeness of your being. But also because from a wisdom perspective, you see that control was always an illusion. How do you have. How do you have.

How do you let go of something that was never there in the first place? Okay, so we will just take a little bit of time and connect and rest with whatever you are experiencing right now. And then I will ring the bell. And then I will ring the bell.

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And then I will ring the bell. Thank you.