We had the second meeting of our Introduction to Meditation and Mindfulness series at Yoga Bliss today.  The course content is adapted from the wonderful work of Insight Meditation teacher, Gil Fronsdal.  Last week we focused on mindfulness of breathing. We use the breath to stabilize and center ourselves.  We pay attention to how we pay attention. We learn to distinguish fully experiencing breathing from thinking about breathing or anything else.  This week we open the lens of our attention to include the present moment experience of embodiment.  Many of the best qualities of human being come through the experience of being embodied:  intelligence, understanding, love, and compassion.

Embodiment & Meaning Making Stories

We use the breath to stabilize and center ourselves. We aim to feel our body breathing, naturally without technique.  Only feeling breathing and our body’s experience expressed as sensation.  Awareness of the body.  Beyond awareness of the body, we experience emotions; beyond emotions we experience thought; beyond thought we experience mind.  At the center of this constellation of aliveness is our breathing.  When the center is full, it provides us stability.  We can move outward, experience sensations, emotions and thoughts, while remaining grounded.  We begin, again and again, by using the breath to stabilize and center ourselves.

Today we focus on the body and the experience of physical embodiment.  The body is always present.  If we are connected to the body we are in the present moment.  In mindfulness meditation, the very simple practice of noticing, we bring our attention to our living experience. If we are present with our breathing we are taking in the sensations of that experience in a deeper, fuller way.  Like being on the beach on a nice sunny day.  Imagine you’re on the edge of the ocean, standing there and taking in the breeze, the smell of the ocean, the sight. You really register the experience; you take it in.  In the same way, you sit with your breath and take in the fullness of the experience of breathing in.

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We had our first meeting of our Introduction to Meditation and Mindfulness series at Yoga Bliss today.  Over the next few weeks we will be developing mindfulness on the meditation cushion and in our daily lives.  As we live with more awareness other qualities begin to arise – caring, intimacy, patience, tolerance – even freedom. We free ourselves from the causes and conditions that lead to suffering.  We begin to recognize and appreciate the conditions for our happiness. Inner resources of insight and understanding start to affect the way we live.

Course Outline

The course content is adapted from the wonderful work of Insight Meditation teacher, Gil Fronsdal.  We began by summarizing the focus of each week’s focus:

Week 1:  Creating our meditation posture.  Mindful attention to your breathing.  We use the breath to develop concentration and to pay attention to how we pay attention.

Week 2:   Mindfulness of the body. Being connected to the body is essential to developing awareness.   Tuning into present moment sensations keeps us in present moment awareness.

Week 3:  Mindfulness of emotions.  Emotions are a big part of our life. We aim to learn how to include them in the field of attention in a wise way. 

Week 4:  Mindfulness of thinking.  Many people think you’re not supposed to think while you meditate.  We’ll learn a wise way to pay attention to thinking, so that thinking doesn’t carry us away.  We can allow our thoughts to be in our present moment awareness.

Along the way, we’ll explore how we can practice mindfulness in daily life.  And as with anything we want to learn, we begin to truly embody the subject of study with practice, with repetition.

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