Listen now
What happens when someone tells you to relax? Often, the directive to relax or let go results in further tightening. When we attempt to relax on demand, we just can’t make it happen. Stress can then increase as we wrestle with what we might perceive as failure. Things change when we view letting go as a process versus a goal.
In this mindfulness meditation, guided by Sean Fargo, we’re invited to soften our attachment to doing, to soften our need for control. In the process, we experience degrees of opening into the spaciousness of our experience. No longer wrestling with right or wrong, relaxed or not, we get closer to the calm we long for.
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 mindfulness with others.
Many of us have an attachment to doing. Caught up in our heads, we’re constantly in motion, trying to fix our present moment experience by changing this or that. We busy ourselves with trying to rid our experience of that which is uncomfortable, chasing that which is pleasurable, and generally efforting around proving who we are and why we’re worthy.
Mindfulness meditation invites us to turn from this habitual ‘doing’ mode toward the practice of simply ‘being.’ To rest in being mode is to rest in the open, spacious and gentle awareness at the very core of our being. It’s where we have the opportunity to feel content, at peace and at ease, and free from the need to keep doing.
And yet, our habits around doing are so strong, we often take a doing approach to our being. We exert ourselves in ‘getting there,’ focused on the goal and not the process. Perhaps we know from experience that when we ‘try’ to relax or let go, our effort falls flat.
What if, instead of trying to stop the habit of doing, we simply softened a bit around this tendency? Using a word like ‘soften’ brings our attention to the process, not the goal. What we sense in the body then, is not a failure to relax, but perhaps the beginnings of the process of relaxing.
As we experience degrees of softening, we may simultaneously experience degrees of opening. In this guided meditation, as we soften around the need to do, the need for control, the need to know, and the need to be, we open to the spaciousness and gentle awareness that already is.
Learn more about letting go and simply being, 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.
