Guiding meditation

My fried Lily basking deeply in the experience of summer flowers.

Do not go to the garden of flowers, oh friend, go not there.
In your body is the garden of flowers. Take your seat
on the thousand petals of the lotus, and there gaze on the
Infinite Beauty.

- Kabir

I've been guiding meditations in one context or another for many years.  I enjoy doing this, and hopefully, the meditators who join me from time to time are assisted by the prompts and images that flow from my imagination into the sound space of the moment.
 
I felt like writing a blog post this evening, noticing that I haven't done it for awhile.  When I go back and read my posts, I always enjoy remembering what I wrote and re-experiencing what I was thinking at the time. Tonight when I touched in to ask myself what I would write about, I just felt and thought,  "I love you."  Or maybe it's more just "I love," without any particular object.  This feeling reminded me of meditating.  I've cultivated the feeling of love by focusing on it in meditation for years, in various formats.  Writing and meditating are in some ways similar activities, and guiding a meditation is particularly like writing, because it is using the imagination to come up with a flow of words.

When I guide a meditation, I don't have a plan in mind, but the process will generally begin with focusing in on the sensations of being present in the moment.  Shifting awareness into the sensations of the moment has an immediate calming and filtering effect.  The moment of sitting down to meditation is one in which there is not much going on, there is quiet, and any problems of the immediate past and future can be put aside in favor of the reality of now.  Now consists of sitting, breathing, and being aware.  There's nothing else going on, at least on the surface.  So the first level of experience is letting go of the busy thinking mind that takes care of the trappings of daily life.  This results, often, in an immediate relaxation.  

(By the way, as I reread that last bit about the busy thinking mind, I thought, "I love the busy thinking mind!"  And that feels good and right.  Meditation teachers who teach that the mind is some kind of enemy to be vanquished are not doing anybody any favors.  The mind is miraculous, just like everything else.  The analytical thinker doesn't need to always run the show, though.  I find that there's going to be a much better chance of getting it to be quiet with a gentle loving shift to something else, than trying willfully to get it shut up.)

That relaxation is followed by an opening.  As soon as the outer awareness settles down, the inner awareness is eager to bloom!  For me, it often feels like I rapidly sense my own energy body.  That's a phrase that may not have a precise meaning in regular 3D terms, but it seems like a good description of what it feels like.  It feels like awareness of warmth and life that is simultaneous with the physical body but not part of it.  It has its own life.  It has qualities of emotion, and can be directed and orchestrated with intention.  That's where the fun is - holding an intention, and directing the experience to generate positive feelings.  

I do this by using four basic tools.  One tool is grounding.  This literally means putting attention downward, into the body, and into the ground.  For some reason, grounding has the effect of making the experience stay in the present and not go off into too much abstract mental activity.  Sometimes it also creates a sensation of stretching - it feels like there is lengthening of the space between my head and the ground below me.  Perhaps that is just the effect of placing focused awareness into the physical experience of being a vertical physical entity sitting above a massive orbital earth - but I am skipping forward to the end here!

The second tool is cultivating mindfulness, which just means paying attention to the sensations and experiences that flow through the moments of the now.  Lots of things can and do flow through the moments of the now.  Some of them will call for special attention.  That's a large topic for another blog.  But ultimately, regular attention or special attention is all attention.  It occurs to me that the experiences of the moments in meditation (or any other time) may be like little children who feel so completed by basking in the adoring attention of an appreciative adult.  (Yum! That is a really delicious way of looking at being mindful!  My heart tells me it's spot on!)

Which leads directly into the third tool in my made-up meditation toolbox!  This one is creating positive feelings of gratitude, acceptance, compassion and love.  I do this not only because it feels wonderful, but because I believe that it is a force for good. If love and appreciation are like, say, sunlight, then they have the power to cause many processes of life and growth to unfold.  It may not be apparent from just looking at sunlight that it fuels our ecosystem, but deeper understanding shows that to be true. 

And right here I am going to put it out there why I would want to exert a "force for good" into the world. I have a deep sense that there is a better world, right here inside of this beautiful but sad-scarred, battered, and broken one.  I sense that this world as we experience it with our five senses and our thinking minds, is, well, not exactly a mistake, but something like that. I'm pretty sure that there is way more going on here than is readily apparent, like the proverbial iceberg, and that by gravitating toward those inner experiences that feel more like it ought to feel, that I can be part of giving birth to the rest of the experience that life is supposed to be.  (OH YES!)

So, nicely leading us to: the fourth tool.  Expansion.  (Which was right there at the beginning with that stretching sensation.)  Once the experiences of grounding, mindfulness, and creating good energy feel like they are underway, then it is natural to take that wonderfulness and expand it outward or upward, deep into the earth or stretching across the surface, up into space, or across the globe.  It can also stretch back and forward in time - there's no limit to where we can put our attention to direct energy.  The energies of gratitude, love, joy, appreciation; these are change agents.  They heal, they nurture, they strengthen.  The eyes of love see the invisible, perfect world that we all sense should have been here all along.  Heaven is not some mythical other place with limited access only achieved by dying.  It is here, hidden, waiting to be loved into focus. 

In my vision to dream a new world into being, the states of being in light act as a force of change on the environment, the way sunlight does.  So, I am always delighted to have the opportunity to share a pathway to deep appreciation and peace with others, and to have my own experience reinforced and validated by the presence of other's hearts and souls journeying into the field of possible together.  I am deeply grateful for the presence of others with me (visible and invisible) as we journey into the wonderment and evolution of ourselves. Namaste.