When someone tells us to relax, the directive to relax or let go often leads to more tightening. When we try to relax on demand, it does not always work, and stress can increase as we wrestle with what we perceive as failure. This meditation treats letting go as a process instead of a goal.
In this mindfulness meditation, guided by Sean Fargo, we are invited to soften our attachment to doing and our need for control. As we do, we may notice degrees of opening into the spaciousness of our experience. The invitation is to stop wrestling with right or wrong, relaxed or not.
Listen in a safe, quiet place where you can be relatively free from distraction. Practice with eyes open or closed, in a posture that balances comfort with alertness. May this meditation be of benefit to your practice.
Sponsored by the Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification MindfulnessExercises.com/Certification
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 may have the opportunity to feel content and at ease, 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 may be 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:
- Podcast: Caring Awareness Of This Moment, A Meditation with Sean Fargo
- Podcast: Contentment with Simply Being, A Meditation with Sean Fargo
- Blog: Powerful Letting Go Quotes for Renewal and Growth
- Video: Surrender Meditation (Letting Go of Control)
- Mindfulness Worksheet: Letting Go Meditation
- Meditation Script: Let Yourself Simply Be With This Stillness Meditation
- Meditation Script: Softening Anxiety by Grounding in the Present Moment
About Sean Fargo:
Sean Fargo is a former Buddhist monk who founded Mindfulness Exercises and leads the Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification.
