The Spacious Awareness Meditation

FULL TRANSCRIPT

[The following is the full transcript of this episode of “Dare to Awaken Podcast.”]

Welcome to the Spacious Awareness Meditation. Find a comfortable seat. Close your eyes and rest your hands wherever it feels right. Sit upright but not uptight. Take a deep inhale through the nose and out the mouth. Exhale. Let it go. Two more like that. Big inhale through the nose and out the mouth. Exhale. Let it all go. Once more, deep inhale and exhale. Empty the lungs out. Feel a wave of relaxation moving throughout the body as you allow yourself to become quiet and still. Allow your breath to move on its own, letting it come and go like a gentle breeze. Feel the spacious awareness holding the coming and going of your breath.

And now begin to attune yourself to your physical body. Notice as you quietly observe how the body is far from being solid. It is almost like a sea of vibration. You might notice areas more alive and tingling, areas more open or contracted, hard or soft, or perhaps even warm or cool in temperature. Feel all of these physical sensations arising and passing in the open field of spacious awareness.

Now, shift your attention to any sounds you might hear. The music in the background of this meditation or the sounds in your environment. Loud or soft. Close or far off in the distance. Notice how all sounds are fleeting. They, too, like your breath and physical sensations have a beginning, a middle and an end. Allow the sounds to arise and pass away in the open sky of your awareness.

As you continue to rest in this spacious awareness, observe how thoughts and images appear and disappear. Let them come and go without any struggle or resistance at all. Thoughts, images, visions, words, feelings, moving like clouds across the sky of your mind. Joys and sorrows, possibilities and problems floating in an endless dance, shifting and changing in the unlimited dimension of awareness. And continue to feel the impermanence of all experience, of all phenomena, as you rest in the changeless state of consciousness, of awareness.

And now lastly, see if you can pay attention to the awareness itself. The witness. The one who knows. Spacious awareness that is clear, translucent, serene, timeless, eternal. Allowing all things to exist, but never to be limited by them. This is your true, deepest nature. Spacious awareness. Spacious awareness. Spacious awareness.

Good. Take a deep and how through the nose and release a big exhale out the mouth as you return back to your body, feeling the floor or the seat beneath you, holding you. As you prepare to transition, see if you can stay connected to this dimension of awareness, and return to this practice as often as you wish. When you’re ready, slowly open the eyes.

Thank you for your practice.