Posts tagged: Meditation

In this guided meditation, you are invited to connect with a soothing quality or state, to breathe in a way that feels soothing (or calm), and to also connect with kind, wise qualities inside of you.

We are always in relationship. We are in relationship with the world around us, with other people, and with what we experience inside ourselves. One relationship we can be curious about is the relationship we have with our own emotions.

Some emotions may be easier for us to experience than others. For one person, anger might feel harder to acknowledge or be with than sadness. For someone else, the reverse might be true. Even joy, contentment, or a feeling of relaxation can sometimes be difficult to experience. What feels easier or harder is specific to each person, and it is something that can change over time.

In this meditation, you are invited to practise offering loving-kindness toward a sensation or emotion that feels easier for you to experience, and then toward one that feels more difficult. You don’t have to choose a sensation or emotion that feels like the hardest one.

This meditation also gives you an opportunity to practise offering kind wishes toward yourself.

Wanting to be outside yesterday as part of the day and also desiring to make something, I recorded this meditation while sitting by a lake. Listening later, I heard the words but also found myself getting lost in the soothing sounds of the crickets and the movement of water.

Movement.

Movement is something I often seem to have conversations about. Moving between this and that. Between pain and beauty. Between activity and rest. Between effort, courage, and taking a break. Movement as essential.

From the meditation:

In this post, you will find an impressively non-exhaustive, small, fluid compilation of links to guided loving kindness meditation practices generously recorded and offered by various individuals for personal use. Some of the meditations are focused primarily on the practice of offering loving kindness to oneself, while others include the practice of offering loving kindness to oneself and others.

Life includes (or can include) really hard things and awful things, in various places and at various times. Life also includes (or can include) things that are beautiful, often profoundly. One of the things I like about the photographs below is how they include a mix of both shadows, stormy tones, and also vibrancy and light—each apparently juxtaposed with the other.

In the free Insight Timer app (available for ios and adroid), you can find short, 6-minute and 10-minute guided loving kindness meditations offered and led by Sharon Salzberg.

In the sweet little book written by Thich Nhat Hanh, A Handful of Quiet: Happiness in Four Pebbles (2012), Thich teaches a meditation in which we imagine ourselves being something such as a flower, and we imagine feeling a quality of that thing within ourselves. (For example, in the case of the flower, he invites us to image feeling freshness.) Read more ›

When people express feeling unsure how to proceed with working on something they are desiring to work on in their lives, and when my input about this conundrum is solicited, one of the responses I sometimes give is akin to this: to proceed, begin where you are and go from there.  Read more ›

The short film, Just Breathe, features the craft from yesterday’s post along with children speaking about the experience of anger and of how breathing helps “the glitter to settle”. Read more ›

When the glitter settles, there is sparkle.

Let’s take a few moments to make a craft. You’ll need a clear jar with a tight fitting lid that won’t leak, loose glitter, water. To make the craft, fill the jar to nearly full with water and some glitter. Put the lid on tightly. Voila! You are done. Read more ›