Acceptance As A Form Of Love – A Guided Mindfulness Meditation

Speaker 1 · 0:50All right, welcome everyone. We'll be talking about different mindfulness practices, different mindfulness meditations, how they contextualize with other types of meditation. And ultimately, we're here to support you with your own quality of presence, with your healing, with your growth, your happiness, and to answer any questions that you have around mindfulness, your practice, how it relates to your life, how to teach mindfulness, how to lead meditation. So we're really here to support you with your practice. We will start with a brief guided practice that we can do to kind of settle in, get a sense of our experience right now, to meet our moment with honesty and acceptance and groundedness. So let's get started with a brief guided practice to just help us land and settle in. This will be a simple mindfulness practice where we'll start with grounding into the body, sense into um breathing, expand and to get a sense of our um emotional landscape a little bit. And probably sense into a little bit of peace, tranquility, maybe a little bit more perspective. So taking a moment just to kind of get a sense of the room around us, the space in front of

Speaker 1 · 2:36us and to our sides and behind us. Feeling our body on the ground or the seat. The head, the face, and we'll get to the same thing. To the rest of our lives listening to our bodies to let us know how to take care of ourselves. And our heart in the middle. And our belly in the middle. And slowly opening the eyes whenever you're ready.

Speaker 1 · 22:08Without trying to push them away or hold on to them. And allowing them to be here, accepting their presence. Doesn't mean that we have to like them, but we're just accepting that they're here right now. And that usually creates for us to not be trapped by them or weighed down by them so much. And so for everyone that's a little different, depending on what it is that they feel. And then we segue into intention bringing this gentle embodied awareness to the rest of our lives. Why not? Why not have that intention?

Speaker 2 · 23:29And listen to the body. What can I do to take care of myself? How can I bring this forward?

Speaker 1 · 23:54For the benefit of ourselves and hopefully other people too. Hopefully animals and the universe. Spirits, etc. So that's a an example of a guided mindfulness meditation in which we're really bringing mindfulness, this you know, gentle awareness to our moment-to-moment experience, staying with this moment, continually sensing, continually opening to the unfolding energy of this experience without holding on to or trying to make it a certain way per se. So it's this mental awareness of different parts of our experience. Now we can bring this mindfulness to right now with our eyes open. We're listening to you know, guy on the internet right now. We can bring mindfulness to the space around us, to our day, outside of meditation. So mindfulness can be cultivated in meditation or out of meditation, you know, in daily life. And when we talk about meditation, we're really referring to these moments where we're kind of closing our eyes and really focusing on say our internal experience. Kind of in a quiet, uh secluded place, usually. So this is a mindfulness meditation, bringing this gentle awareness to our actual experience. But other kinds of meditations include visualizations or trying to imagine ourselves

Speaker 1 · 25:40in a certain place, which is a little different from mindfulness or concentration meditation, in which we could either be counting our breath or concentrating on each breath as a sequence of numbers. We can repeat phrases as a way to concentrate, or we can focus on one specific aspect of our experience and not like just the sensations of breathing at the nostrils, but only focusing on those sensations. That's a form of concentrating the mind on the one thing and one thing only, and we're concentrating on sounds or repeating sounds or incessant sounds. So there's different kinds of meditation practices out there, including mindfulness. So the practice we just did kind of helps us to come back to what's actually happening, what's actually here, so we can notice when we're remembering or ruminating. Let's say, oh, that's ruminating. We don't have to judge it as being good or bad, right or wrong. My friend remembering, my dear friend, the past. Can I come back to right now by sensing into something that feels safe, preferably related to actual physical sensations like

Speaker 1 · 27:10breathing or feeling our feet on the ground as we walk, as we stand, as we sit. We can put our hand on our belly or over our heart to feel that contact. Feel the flesh, feel the connection of what's actually felt right now. Can put one of our hands over a cheek. I usually put my left hand left hand over my right cheek, and I there's a sense of tender connection. Oh yeah, it feels quite warm. Some people come back to the present by say indulging in food or you know, alcohol or things, by getting wrapped up in pleasurable sensations and over consuming something which can usually deaden our awareness or numb our awareness or bring us back to the present in a way that's a way to escape the emotions of the past or fears of the future. So kind of waking up to that, it's like, oh, yes, that rumination doesn't feel very good, it's usually unpleasant, or that fear of the future feels unpleasant. Doesn't mean it's bad or right or wrong, it's just unpleasant, and I get lost in it. But what happens when I come back to right now, to breathing this air right now, and exhaling and breathing? What happens when I really allow myself to connect with the fullness of breathing in this body right now? Feeling the fullness of this body, the sensations in the hands and the feet, receiving the sights all around me, the eyes, the textures, and the colors, and the lights, the energies. What happens when I connect with what I'm smelling right now? What can I smell? Right now I have this tea of our tea, hibiscus and green tea together, really smelling the fullness of that, maybe even smelling the cup, waking up to our senses, connecting to our senses, coming back to our senses, literally, feeling the points of contact with my body on the seat. Do I feel balanced? Do I feel upright? Sometimes we're struggling with depression, and there might be a lack of sensation, a lack of energy, stagnation. What does that feel like? It doesn't mean it's bad or wrong or good or right. It's just kind of a lack of energy right now. Very common. And so what happens when we kind of wake up to our senses and really allow ourselves to fully sense into our human senses, capacity to feel? Like what are the layers of feeling and energy? What happens if we wiggle a little bit? Noticing stuckness, flow, all these things. It's kind of listening to the body. Like, okay, what we're and usually what can I accept? Because oftentimes we get stuck when even just two percent of our experience doesn't feel acceptable. When we don't want to acknowledge something, we don't want to feel something. Maybe we were scared. Maybe we're

Speaker 1 · 30:40sad. Can we accept fear? Can we accept sadness? Can we accept that something just isn't going the way we want to or the way we hope?

30:49Okay.

Speaker 1 · 30:50Can we accept this reality in some way by opening to it and saying, yes, this is here right now? May not be what I wanted, but it's here. And sometimes tears come and that's great. We can allow those tears to come. Sometimes a sense of spaciousness comes, or sometimes a new paradigm arises. It's like, oh, okay, this is the reality. How can I show up for this reality with a sense of soul or spirit or resilience or just love? So this training of mindfulness is a training in learning how to be with life, which is not easy all the time. And that's why it cultivates strength. When we cultivate mindfulness on purpose, especially in meditation, we're cultivating a resiliency, an ability to be with more ourselves, cultivating an ability to be with more of each other. We're cultivating an ability to be with more of life. And we're cultivating an ability to accept, which is really a form of love. And through that strength and that perspective, being able to be with things, we also have more spaciousness to know how to proceed with strength and vulnerability and wisdom.