Listen now
The body is our home. It carries us through our days and nights, collecting information along the way. Our bodies tell the story of past pleasure and pain, and hold the energy of our thoughts and emotions. Offering our bodies our tender, caring presence can help make this home a more comfortable place.
In this guided meditation with Sean Fargo, we’re invited to stand, sit or lie down with the body, to explore the sensation that is present and offer it our supportive, loving attention. We do so not to reach a specific end goal, but simply to practice accepting and being with what is here.
Please listen in a safe, quiet place where you can be relatively free from distraction. Find 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.
It is the body and its senses which make possible our experience of this world. The body is not only home to our heart and mind but also carries its own intelligence. It’s no wonder that practicing presence with the body is the first of the four foundations of mindfulness. To be present at all necessitates being embodied.
The body, however, may not always feel like a safe place. Our bodies can hold painful information, such as past injury, pain or the energy of uncomfortable emotions. In an effort to ease our suffering, many of us have become disconnected from the body. With mindfulness, we learn that this disconnection, while perhaps the best we could do at the moment, is not actually the most skillful means of releasing discomfort and pain. To reconnect to the body and welcome reality as it is, is the fundamental task of mindfulness.
Practicing mindfulness of the body, however, is not always easy. It is vital that we bring a sense of gentleness, ease and care to our meditation. By tending to the body in a kind and loving manner, opening to what is, and learning to be with sensation without needing to change it, we nurture both the body and ourselves.
Approaching the body with an open heart allows us to maintain an open mind. We become more accepting of what is arising in the body, whether pleasant or unpleasant. We meditate not to arrive at any particular pleasant sensation, or no sensation, but to increase our capacity to remain present with how the body feels now.
When we become free from needing the body to feel any particular way, we create more room for ease and a more friendly relationship to the body. We offer space for sensation to transform and change as it is ready to.
To practice bringing awareness to the body with more tenderness, less judgment and less of an agenda is the means of integrating this same non-judgmental, caring awareness into the entirety of our daily experience.
Explore a gentle awareness of the body with these additional 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.
