Listen now
What does care feel like? When we care for something, we offer it our attention. We tend to it with gentleness. To remain present with something or someone, to listen and observe, to let be, allow for and accept. These are all caring acts. These descriptors are also characteristics of mindfulness.
In this guided meditation with Sean Fargo, we’re invited to open to this moment, just as it is, with caring awareness. Calm and contentment arise as we turn to sensations in our body and heart with increasingly deeper layers of care.
Listen in a safe, quiet place where you can be relatively free from distraction. Practice with eyes opened or closed, in a posture that balances comfort with alertness. May this meditation be of benefit to you in your mindfulness journey.
Find hundreds more guided audio meditations or download 200 meditation scripts to expand your personal practice, or to share with others.
To care for something or someone is to look after it, to tend to it with gentleness and kindness, to accept it as is. It is a caring act to offer a person, an animal, or even this moment, our full presence, our undivided attention. Caring and mindfulness go hand in hand.
The awareness we cultivate with mindfulness practice is necessarily a caring, non-judgmental awareness. Try not to judge, however, and you’ll find yourself facing a great challenge. What’s more, it’s not neutrality or indifference we seek to cultivate. Instead, the awareness we seek to develop with mindfulness is actively caring, loving, and kind.
It is this quality of care that allows us to be present with the whole of our experience. The fullness of each moment - the pleasant and unpleasant, the joy and sorrow - can only be held simultaneously when held in the spaciousness of care. For most of us, however, caring awareness is a perspective that needs to be practiced.
We have a habit of relating to this moment in an uncaring manner. We’re either too busy to be present, or we’d prefer that this moment be different. We quite literally use the phrase, ‘I don’t care for this’ to signal our discontentment. There is nothing wrong with recognizing something as unpleasant. Suffering arises, however, when we fail to accept reality as it is.
With mindfulness meditation, we cultivate an awareness of such habits. By replacing attachment, aversion and indifference with the practice of caring awareness, we learn to let each moment be just as it is. Each emotion is allowed to be here, we can feel what we feel, and we allow energies to move. As we surrender control and open to presence, we can respond to our experience with calm, clarity, and perhaps most importantly, care.
Learn more about caring awareness, including how to practice and teach it, with the following free mindfulness resources:
About Sean Fargo:
Sean Fargo is a former Buddhist monk and the founder of Mindfulness Exercises. The online platform, which has shared free and premium mindfulness resources with over 3 million people worldwide, has now certified over 500 Mindfulness Teachers.
Sean is the lead instructor for the teacher training program, a unique self-paced approach which invites world-renowned mindfulness teachers to share their insights and experiences. Sean has taught mindfulness and meditation for corporations including Facebook, Google and Tesla and for health and government organizations, prisons and hospitals around the world.
