Awareness & the Body
June 10, 2015

Try to gather your thoughts around the breath.

And as for any other thoughts, you can just let them go. Think of them being washed out, each time you breathe in, each time you breathe out.

A large part of the meditation is learning how to clear your head. Otherwise you bring the affairs of the world, bring the affairs of the past several days, past several weeks or whatever here into the present moment. And it’s a mess. You can’t really see clearly what’s going on right now because all this other stuff is crowding in.

So any other thought comes up, just breathe right through it. As I said, think of the breath washing it out, sweeping it away. And what will you have left? You’ll have your awareness and you’ll have the sensation of being here in the body. You want those two things to get along in good terms. They can’t get to know each other very well if a lot of other things are cluttering things up.

So go through the body pretty systematically as you breathe in, breathe out. See where are any areas of tension or tightness might be. And don’t be surprised that when you release a pattern of tension a thought will appear in the mind. Just wash it out. Let it go. It’s like a detox.

When the breath and the awareness can get on good terms, then they can help each other. The breath can be good for the body, be good for the mind. Your awareness can fill the body and you have a sense of being grounded right here. With this sense of being grounded, you’re coming from a position of strength.

A lot of the evil that’s done in the world is from people who are feeling threatened and afraid. They feel in a position of weakness so they just lash out at everybody else. Anything that disturbs them, anything that threatens them, they’ve got to lash out at it.

But you realize as you occupy this part of your awareness that nobody else can have it. This is yours. This can be your grounding.

And as you develop more mindfulness, the fact that you’re here will make it easier to remember what you should and shouldn’t be doing.

So it’s a good place to be. But it requires a little cleaning out first because otherwise all your other preoccupations of past and future just get in the way. You may learn something from them but you don’t learn anything nearly as valuable as what you learn from getting the awareness of the present moment here together with the breath.

So clean things out, wash them away., and what remains will be something of value.