We had our Sunday Introduction to Meditation Class at Yoga Bliss yesterday. We’ve been working with the four foundations of mindfulness: awareness of the body, feeling tone, thoughts, emotions and then all phenomena. We drew our practice inspiration from B. Alan Wallace’s Minding Closely: The Four Applications of Mindfulness.
We included two practice periods and a walking meditation.
We continued to practice with the second application: mindfulness of feelings. We focused on the elemental sensations of the earth, water, fire and air in our bodies. You can feel them as solidity, firmness, wetness, fluidity, heat, warmth, expansion and lightness. Then we observed the reflexive way sensations evoke feelings: pleasant, unpleasant and neutral tones. We explored how feelings evoke thoughts and the nature of thoughts. We “self-identify” experience as “I, me or mine.” If we stay with experience long enough, inevitably we observe the whole process arise, persist and then dissolve. We see that there is no “there – there.” This is a direct experience of the truth of being: impermanence.