Meditation instructions are simple: Rest your awareness with openness and ease in the experience of the present moment.
Simple, of course, doesn’t always mean easy. Often when we sit down to meditate, the mind rebels and we find ourselves spinning off into fantasies of the future or memories of the past. It takes patience and practice to train the mind to settle with steadiness into the here-and-now.
Many people give up when they encounter the restless mind of meditation. There are ways, though, to smooth out the process of learning to meditate - ways of sweet-talking the mind out of chaos and in the direction of peace. It’s well worth learning how.
Sometimes it can be helpful to begin with a little movement, and then - as we settle - inject small gaps of attentive stillness into the movement flow. In the beginning, we may move for several moments and then “meditate” for two breaths. And then three breaths, and then five, ten, 30 or more, until eventually the mind has softened enough to truly stay, stay, stay.
This 20-minute guided practice shares a taste of this form of movement guiding us toward stillness. We begin with gentle movement, with quiet gaps of stillness here and there. And then we slip toward gentle breath work, punctuated for longer stretches of quiet. And finally, we rest in stillness for an even longer stretch.
It’s all meditation, really. We start out with meditation in movement, and we end up with meditation in stillness.
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