AFFECTIONATE BREATHING
- Please find a friendly, comfortable posture in which your body is supported, and you don’t need any effort to remain in that position for the entire meditation.
- Take a few slow, easy breaths to release unnecessary tension, letting the eyes close partially or fully. Placing a hand over the heart (or anywhere it is soothing) as a reminder to bring affectionate awareness to our experience and to ourselves.
- Now, find your breath wherever you can feel it most easily. Perhaps at the tip of the nose or the belly. Or, perhaps as a gentle movement of your whole body. Let yourself notice the simple sensation of breathing. Just feeling your breath for awhile.
- Let yourself incline inwardly toward your breathing as you might incline toward a child or a beloved pet; with curiosity and tenderness.
- Don’t worry about how often your mind wanders. When your mind wanders, gently escort it back to the sensation of breathing like redirecting a puppy or a child who has wandered off.
- Notice how your breath nourishes your body even when you’re not paying any attention to it. Let your body breathe you. There is nothing you need to do.
- Feel your whole body breathe, gently moving with the rising and falling of the breath; like the movement of the sea.
- Allow your body to be rocked and caressed – internally caressed – by the breath.
- Perhaps giving yourself over to the breath, becoming the breath.
- And now, release the breath, and allow everything that comes to awareness to be just as it is, just for now.
- Slowly and gently open your eyes.