Sitting Still and Cleaning Up: A Call To Visit the Places We Hide From

By Thomas McConkie, adapted from an episode of the Mindfulness+ podcast

***

Once or twice a year, I find a place where I can stay alone for around seven days or so and spend long hours in meditation. 

At some level the experience is similar to fasting. Now, I haven't gotten way into fasting, but I know people who fast for 5, 10, or 20 days — to the point they’re drinking concoctions of water, vinegar, lemon, and maple syrup to clean out their organs and detoxify their blood. Then they come out of the fast beaming, their eyes are shimmering, and they tell you they have never been so alive.

In a solitary retreat, we fast from sensory experience. We fasting from all of the drama we get tangled up in day to day as human beings. 

Just like fasting, it can be difficult to sit still and encounter the content of our emotions and our psyches. It takes discipline to be still and really give our body-mind time to process these experiences. 

A little more than a year ago, I did a silent retreat at the same time as a house repair. You see, I’d bought a home with my wife and it was one of those mega-fixer-uppers, and everywhere we looked in the house, we seemed to find something new that would cause a major headache to undo and redo properly.

For example, the air intake that led to the central heating air conditioning happened to be carpeted. So it was kind of a green shag carpet that had been there a long time. When we moved in, the thing was covered in dust and felt, and you could almost hear the microbes teaming through that shag rug in our air ducts. It ran deep enough and it was disgusting enough that I saw it and was immediately repulsed by it. And I remember the inspector said something to the effect that the very first thing we should do when we moved into this house was clean that air duct out. So naturally, two years later, when I'm at my retreat, I schedule about an hour of physical labor every day because I know it's good to get the body moving instead of just sitting on a meditation cushion for 12 hours straight every day. I figure I finally have no excuse but to open that hatch and strip that rug out of the ducts. 

It took me a long time to get there, so the task was somewhat horrific. It felt like I was exposing myself to an entire universe of diseases and illnesses and infections. 

It took me a long time. I certainly wasn't able to do it in one one-hour work periods. It took me much of the week to get the job done and after I did, I felt highly satisfied. 

But the metaphor wasn't totally wasted on me.

Until then, I hadn't even allowed myself to consciously recognize that it wasn't just the carpet that was teeming with bacteria. It was the filthy air that was going into the furnace and being blown and distributed throughout the entire house.

Maybe you see where I'm going with this. I had put off this awful task and it only got worse. It only got worse and more disgusting and more threatening to my health and my wife's health and my brother's health and my puppy's health, who all live together in this house. 

I have learned over the course of my life that a similar kind of purging is also deeply necessary on a psycho-spiritual level. 

Fortunately, due to the help of great teachers and mentors and favorable life circumstances, I've trained myself to really turn towards a lot of the intensity of my life through meditation. And when I'm in need of a good scouring or a detoxification, I have a practice of sitting still and encountering it and processing it and letting it go. So, I just puzzled at how I was unconscious enough that I was willing to ignore the filthy bacteria in my house for almost two years before I finally dedicated the needed hours to scrubbing it out and cleaning it up.

Maybe you have something like that in your life. I could tell you stories about my refrigerator, which are metaphorically, similar to the run-in I had with my air ducts. I recently found some sour cream that expired in 2017, but that's a dark road, and we won’t go there now. :) 

What I want to say is that we all have places where we hide. And what's so beautiful about a practice of still sitting (or a practice of paying attention to how we pay attention, or a practice of being aware) is that we actually turn towards these challenges. We turn towards the infestations that colonize our emotional world and our world of thought. And by colonizing our emotions and our thoughts, they negatively impact everything we do in the world. And if we can bring ourselves to stillness — if we can acknowledge that we're in pain, if we can acknowledge that we're actually suffering and that we need to take better care of ourselves and do an about face and really process what's happening — that's when we strip the air ducts clean. That's when we empty the fridge out of rotten food. That's when we fast from the dramas of our lives and we allow spirit to really burn this stuff clean.

So that's what I learned at that retreat. The practice we're about to do is inspired by that and in service of pointing you towards whatever the psycho-spiritual messages in your life. There are areas that need more attention, more care, and if we can sit still with them and really fully feel them, something alchemical happens. We are cleaned out by something beyond us.

Let's do it. Find a place to settle in. Note that you can read this meditation out loud here, or listen from the 10:30 mark here.

***

Take a moment to just gather awareness in the physical body. Take a moment to settle in and notice in your experience in this moment, if there's anything whatsoever that you would rather not feel. This could be very subtle, very subtle discomfort in the body, or very subtle discomfort emotionally and mentally. Or it could be very obvious and very overt.

As we do this practice, as we scan and awareness through our body, mind, spirit, we notice that there's a very deep seated pattern of seeking pleasure and avoiding pain.

If our meditation is feeling pleasant, blissful, we'll tend to cling. We’ll tend to want it to be even more blissful and last even longer. 

And if there's something uncomfortable about our practice, we'll tend to want it to be less intense and to pass more quickly. And so we push against a pain and pull more pleasure close to us.

And this is how we create suffering in our lives.

[Silence]

Notice any aspect of your experience in this moment, physically, emotionally, or mentally that you would rather not be feeling, rather not be experiencing in this moment. And instead of avoiding it, instead of choreographing your entire life around it, practice just for a moment doing the opposite practice and acknowledging it, noting it — as much as you can fully open up to it. 

A step I like to add to this process to reinforce the cleansing is ask ourselves the question, will it do me objective harm to experience this in this moment, to feel this way in the body? Most of the time when we asked this question to ourselves, the answer is no, it won't harm us. We don't like to feel anxious. We don't like to feel jealous. We don't like to feel worthless or aimless or any other number of challenging experiences. But the sensations in and of themselves are more than bearable, if not pleasant. 

So whenever you're able to locate in your body, mind, spirit experience in this moment, something you'd rather avoid, something you'd rather not feel. See if rather than escaping from it, you can escape into it. And what might be surprising about this process is that as we do it again and again and again, suddenly what seemed totally unmanageable — like a bacteria trap in our furnace system — suddenly seems much more manageable. It's not unlike being a child afraid of a monster in a closet. And instead of avoiding the closet your whole life, you gather up the courage to open the door and see if there's actually a boogeyman in there.

Once you finally opened the closet door, you realize the experience is manageable. Once we finally open up to the mess that we feel in our lives at times, we realize that the mess is manageable.

As you practice this way, you’ll gain confidence in yourself. You'll live your entire life on a new level.

No longer do you have to expend energy on avoiding all of the unpleasant experiences we’re subject to as human beings. But rather you start to move through life like a Colossus, each challenging experience an opportunity to strengthen your presence, to renew your commitment to yourself, to fully experience each moment that life serves up.

***

Want to deepen your practice? Download the Mindfulness Essentials course.

Photo by Ryan Booth via Unsplash.

Mindfulness and Adult Development: Or, Where Mindfulness+ Gets Its Name

By Thomas McConkie, adapted from an episode of the Mindfulness+ podcast

***

At Lower Lights, we host a podcast called Mindfulness+.

What's with the plus?

To start, I think it sounds good: Mindfulness+. It's got a ring to it.

But there's also a significant meaning behind the plus. When I say Mindfulness+ I'm talking about bringing mindfulness together with the field of adult development theory, a field I’ve studied for the past ten years.

What I’ve found is that adult development theory has significant implications for how we practice mindfulness and how we derive benefit from a mindfulness practice.

Here’s a crash course on why that is.

For most of human history, we’ve intuitively known that children develop from the moment they're born. They grow physically. They learn to walk, they learn to talk.

The changes that children undergo are dramatic. If you've had a nephew or raised children of your own you'll know that day to day and week to week they're making major breakthroughs developmentally. You don't need a PhD in psychology to see that.

What isn’t as obvious is that development also continues into adulthood. Back around the late 60's and early 70’s, a number of researchers and developmental psychologists started to notice evidence that adults make breakthroughs developmentally well beyond adolescence.

These discoveries also coincided with the development of neuroimaging. For the first time in human history we had the technology to scan the brain, and what we found was that the adult brain physically changes. What we thought was a monolithic stage of adulthood that we all arrive at and then stay at turns out to be nothing of the sort. Adults continue to develop throughout a lifespan.They grow and manifest different kinds of skills and competencies that weren't there before.

This field is revolutionary. It's been a major area of research in psychology for the last fifty years, and we're continuing to learn a lot about what it means that adults continue to develop.

So how does adult development relate to mindfulness?

Mindfulness practice dates back thousands of years, and for those thousands of years people have been practicing mindfulness in a more or less consistent way. What's fascinating now is that through the insights of modern science and western developmental psychology, we know that different kinds of mindfulness will be appropriate for different kinds of adults at different times.

What that amounts to is that if you're interested in starting a mindfulness practice and you want to derive benefit from that practice, we now know a lot about what kinds of mindfulness practice will be most helpful to you as an individual given your unique circumstances and conditions in life.

Let me give you one basic example, just to paint a bit of a picture. There's a lot of talk now amidst the mindfulness revolution about how to get mindfulness into schools. It’s a question I get a lot as a teacher: How do I teach my children mindfulness?

This is a perfect application of our developmental insights. It tends to be much more effective to start children and adolescents with body-based mindfulness techniques as opposed to other kinds of mindfulness approaches. Body-based mindfulness might mean working with the breath, which is a somatic-based mindfulness practice that young children tend to have immediate access to. It's quite intuitive for us to focus on the breath and just feel the pleasure and rhythm of breathing. Body-based mindfulness might also mean mindful movement — something like yoga. Young children and adolescents respond to mindful movement well because, again, it's based in the body, and it's something that's concrete and relatable to them.

An example of an application of mindfulness to an adult would be mindfulness of the thinking mind — bringing mindful awareness to the thought process. Whereas a child can benefit from a body-based mindfulness practice, adults often report to me that one of their biggest frustrations and challenges is that they have a constant inner monologue, an inner commentary going on that’s driving them crazy. So there are techniques that we can bring to the thinking mind that help us clarify the thought process and calm the thinking mind. Those practices would perhaps be less intuitive or accessible or beneficial to young children.

I'm not suggesting that adults can't greatly benefit from a body-based mindfulness practice. All I want to do is to point out that there are many ways to practice mindfulness, and we have different options depending on where we are in our personal development and the circumstances of our lives.

Let’s work with a mindfulness practice that tends to be very beneficial for adults. It involves bringing mindful awareness to the feeling body. We saturate the body with awareness which in turn tends to take a lot of the drivenness out of our thought process. It tends to cool off the activity of the mind and it bring us into a deeper, intuitive feeling sense of wisdom in the body.

I'll invite you to settle in wherever you are and encourage you to come to stillness.

You can start by bringing awareness to the breath. But rather than simply breathing in through the nose, I want you to imagine that every single pore in your body were breathing oxygen in and bringing you vitality and life. Imagine every single square inch of your body breathing in and every single pore in your body breathing out — expelling any waste, letting go of anything you don't need.

And you can already start to taste the stillness. Notice the settled quality in the body, in your awareness. You can allow your awareness to flow with the sensations of the body in this moment, as though the sensations in your body were like a river, flowing, twisting, turning, moment to moment, and you are in the stream of the sensation along for the ride.

Notice where in your body in this moment sensation feels more bright, more obvious. You can just notice.

Likewise you can notice where in your body sensation feels more dim and more quiet. And just as a river is never the same moment to moment as it flows, notice that the sensation flowing through your body is never the same moment to moment.

Where sensation was bright a moment ago, it may be dim now. Where sensation was more dim, it might be coming to life and growing brighter.

Just stay with this another moment.

See if you can do this with even more ease. Have fun with it. Let your awareness flow with the sensations of the body, like a river winding its way back to the sea.

And you can start to let that go, just relaxing your attention, not making any special effort now — just taking a final moment before you leap back in to action.

You can just notice the afterglow. Take in the way you feel in this moment after a few minutes of settling in and bringing awareness to physical sensation, developing feeling awareness just by paying attention to it.

As you do this exercise over time, you'll notice that you feel more awake and more aware through the body. You'll notice that your thought process pesters you less and serves you more. Like anything, it's a matter of practice — of exercise.

If you keep it up it will change your life.

***

Want to deepen your practice? Download the Mindfulness Essentials course.

Subscribe to Mindfulness+.

Set Up the Right Conditions and Let Nature Do the Rest

Shinzen Young, an incredibly gifted mindfulness teacher of mine, tells the story of visiting the laboratory of a biologist stem cell researcher. Shinzen walks into this lab and sees that they’re washing a pig heart, that they taken a pig heart and washed it in a chemical detergent that strips the cellular matrix off of the scaffolding of the heart.

Imagine this. Before washing, the heart is fleshy. It's got heart tissue made of heart cells on it and the scaffolding beneath is like a kind of cartilaginous structure. After the scientists have given this pig heart a bath, it basically has no cells left on it. It’s just scaffolding — a translucent shape of a heart.

Why do the scientists do this? Well, they want to see if they can regenerate heart cells. They coat the scaffolding with stem cells and sit and wait.

What happened in this particular laboratory is that after going through this process of stripping a pig heart of its heart cells and then essentially “re-coding it” with stem cells, it once again became a functioning beating pig heart.

This would be an interesting story in and of itself, but what Shinzen pointed out to me is how the scientist humbly described the process. He said, “Well, it's really a matter of just setting up the right conditions and letting nature do the rest.”

This is a bomb of a teaching. It has served me deeply over the years. And it reminds me that when I think I have to micromanage every last aspect of life and prevent the sky from falling, I can just set up proper conditions.

Nature will meditate us. That’s the take-home. And that's hard to remember a lot of times because the first thing we do when we're getting in trouble in our meditation practice, or when we’re getting in trouble in life, is to think that we have to intervene. We think we have to tinker, that we have to do something. So there's incredible wisdom in just learning the basic conditions that we can set up to allow nature to do what nature does so well.

What does nature do so well? There's a concept in Taoism of wu wei, which can literally translate as doing not doing. And it's the spirit of when we really just relax into the flow of nature, the flow of who we are at the deepest level, good things just start to happen. We enter the Tao, we enter the great flow, the great way of things. And even when we’re exerting tremendous effort, we have the experience of effortlessness. And that is very much the intention behind this teaching. It’s the territory that the teaching is disclosing.

You’ve heard the concept and hopefully just hearing the concept, you get a sense of, ‘oh yeah, this territory is alive in me. I know what it means to set up the right conditions and let nature do the rest.’ And oh, by the way, you are nature. Let’s practice.

Use this script as a meditation you might read to yourself or others:

*Begin Practice*

Take a moment to just settle in. Allow yourself to come to stillness. Even if you're in motion in this moment, you can find the stillness in the motion.

Let go of the breath and just allow the breath to breathe you. You don’t have to do anything. Just intend to come to stillness. Nature will do the rest.

Breathing in, oxygen saturates the lung cells and the bloodstream picks up the oxygen and delivers it to every cell in your body, nourishing you, sustaining your life. And you don't do any of this. Nature just does it.

You are awareness, the light of mind and heart. You don't try to be aware, you don't have to learn to be aware, you’re just aware. Awareness and the words of Plotinus, is the fountain ever on, it just flows, it gushes. And through this awareness, this intelligence we experience human life. it just happens. It’s a gift.

You breathe out carbon dioxide, the plant world takes it in as nutrients, breathing out more oxygen. In relationship with us, human world interwoven with the plant world, interwoven with the world of animals and the minerals, the mountains, the streams.

The Earth itself revolves around the sun at the perfect distance. Too close to the sun we would incinerate, too far away from the sun we would freeze solid. But as it is, the Earth revolves at the perfect distance that allows this incredible gift of life to roll-on.

The part of us that feels like we need to manage things and make things happen and if we become too infatuated by that mentality, we forget the stillness, the simplicity from which everything issues. Paradoxically when we enter the stillness, we're invigorated with life force, we have the capacity to spring forward into action when necessary, when appropriate. We do without doing, we exert effort without effort-fullness.

Feel the body breathe, the heart beat. Feel the quickness of the mind, the light of intelligence. Feel the ground beneath you, always supporting you.

Feel the richness, the hyper abundance of life itself, nature itself, in this moment. We participate in nature, we draw our breath from creation and we are never separate from it like waves on the surface of the ocean, we are always wet as the ocean. As expressions of nature just happening we’re never not nature.

Take a final moment to savor the stillness. To be the stillness. And to be all the beauty, all the creativity that springs out from the stillness.

***

Want to deepen your practice? Download the Mindfulness Essentials course.

Interdependent Co-arising: A Perspective That Helps Prevent Arrogance

By Thomas McConkie, based on an episode of Mindfulness+.

***

Interdependent co-arising. It’s got a nice ring to it. But what does it mean? 

Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese monk in the Zen and mindfulness traditions of Buddhism, explains the principle in a simple way in his classic book The Heart of the Buddhist Teachings. 

He writes, “For a table to exist we need wood, a carpenter, time, skillfulness, and many other causes. And each of these causes needs other causes to be. The wood needs the forest, the sunshine, the rain, and so on. The carpenter needs his parents, breakfast, fresh air, and so on. And each of those things in turn has to be brought about by other conditions. If we continue to look in this way we’ll see that nothing has been left out. Everything in the cosmos has come together to bring us this table. Looking deeply at the sunshine, the leaves of the tree, and the clouds, we can see the table. The one can be seen in the all, and the all can be seen in the one.”

So, what is interdependent co-arising? It’s a recognition. It is a view of reality, a perspective that recognizes that everything, all conditions, are coming up at once and happening at once. And though we may live in a moment of human history where we’re encouraged to feel like an independent self, we can learn to take the view of interdependent co-arising. We can recognize clearly that yes, there is an aspect of individuality arising in this moment, and we can feel that and sense into it. 

If I’m sensitive enough I can even notice that I won’t get to do the kind of work I want to do in the world without the love and support of my family and my friends — without clean drinking water, a stable food supply, some education, and a bit of luck.

It’s that simple. It’s just recognizing in our independence how utterly dependent we are on conditions to exist and to be. 

I love that Thich Nhat Hanh talks about a table because he gets right into the elements — that without water and sunshine, we don’t have wood. And without the skills of a carpenter we don’t have the table. In a similar way, we know that infants can’t make it their first few days of life without contact from other human beings.

So this observation of interdependent co-arising, I would say, prevents us from becoming arrogant. We realize we can’t do it all. We need help from all the conditions. It’s how we celebrate interdependence: by simply recognizing all the beautiful conditions that support this precious human birth we’ve been given. 

Interdependence also means we can hold dependence and independence together deeply. We can recognize our independence (our agency and autonomy), and we can recognize our dependence (our relationship to all things and all beings). 

If we simply focus on independence we become arrogant. We become isolated. We forget the cost of our own arising, what it takes to sustain us moment to moment. 

But, on the other hand, if we’re only dependent — if we are only held in relationship and don’t express ourselves, our own will, our own agency, our autonomy — we become grovelers. We can’t stand up and express what feels right in our own being. 

I just want to point out that this polarity of independence and dependence, of agency and communion. It’s so important to hold both of these so deeply. And when we do, we can get a taste of interdependence, a higher order possibility that’s elaborated on really beautifully in the Buddhist tradition. 

Alright. Let’s take a moment to practice. 

Use this script as a meditation you might read to yourself or others:

*start practice*

Start by taking a couple deep breaths, and really just let go on the out-breath. Let go of everything you don’t need: the stale air at the bottom of the lungs, the tension in your body, the emotional baggage, the stale thoughts that roll over and over in your awareness. Just take a minute to let that go. 

Give yourself a moment to just let the dust settle. You don’t have to make anything happen. You don’t have to meditate. Just doing nothing, taking your foot off the gas pedal is enough. Nature will take care of the rest. 

And now you can bring your awareness into the physical body and really just soaking through all of the physical body like water soaking through a sponge. Just enjoying embodiment in this moment, feeling the boundaries of the physical body. Where you stop and the world begins. Notice what your sense of that boundary is. 

Feel your own emotion. Your thoughts in this moment. Feel a sense of your own personal history. The journey of your life, of your soul, if you think in those terms. All the decisions you’ve made, the will that you’ve exercised to arrive in this very moment. And appreciate for a moment, the power of your own agency. Your own autonomy. Your own freedom to choose a life for yourself. To create a life like an artist. Feel what a gift this is. 

Notice that this gift of freedom, agency, autonomy, can’t exist without countless other conditions. Notice that the very air you breathe is a condition of your freedom. Just to have air to breathe is a profound gift that supports your life, your autonomy, your destiny. Take a moment to just appreciate it, to bring your awareness to it fully. 

Feel the ground beneath you, the stability of the ground. In this moment you can trust your weight to the ground. Relax into it. And allow it to hold you, to support you. 

Appreciate in this moment, that if you’re able to just enjoy this moment of awareness that you live in a place in the world that’s safe enough, that allows you to just venture inward for a moment. In this moment you’re able to let go and go inward. This is a gift. This is a luxury that many people on the planet don’t have. Civil unrest in Ethiopia. Immigrants. Syria. Crossing dangerous waters. There’s so many people who don’t have an environment where they can just rest and let go. 

And for a moment you can bring key relationships into your life. Who are the people in this time in your life who deeply support you. Believe in you. Give you their love. Imagine their faces in this moment. Their presence. The gifts they offer so freely to you just by way of who they are, not even anything they do, but just the people that they are to you. Their presence in your life. Feel of that goodness. Feel this condition co-arising with the condition of your own being. Your own individuality. Your own independence. Feel the way this supports you, sustains you, uplifts you. 

Notice the gift of love itself. Not even bound by a person, but this incredible love that permeates absolutely everything. It’s available if we just open our awareness. Open our hearts. If we raise our sails and feel it guiding us home. 

There are too many gifts to name. Too many conditions to name. That co-arise with our being every moment. To just stop and reflect on everything that makes us and supports us. That makes us possible. We celebrate interdependence. We become the activity of creation itself. Infinite conditions. Mutually co-arising. In a great symphony of life. Of love. Of light.

***

Want to deepen your practice? Download the Mindfulness Essentials course.

Photo by Tom Kenar on Unsplash

Thanks-giving: A Meditation on Gratitude

In the spirit of the Thanksgiving holiday, here is a guided meditation that centers on gratitude.

You can listen here and follow the script below. 

***

Whatever your state of being, your state of body and mind, you can take a couple of big breaths, drawing in and letting go.

And do that again.

Breathing out, extending the exhale, letting it all go. And for the next few breaths at your own rhythm, I invite you to continue to extend the exhale. Just breathe out a little bit longer than you normally do on the out-breath, getting rid of any stale air at the bottom of the lungs, triggering your nervous system to open up and relax. 

When we're anxious our breathing tends to be really shallow, engaging the sympathetic nervous system. When our breathing is deep, our exhale long, it triggers the parasympathetic nervous system, the rest and digest network in the body. 

So give yourself a moment to just settle in.

Good. As you do this, you'll notice distractions: thoughts in the mind, sounds activities in the world. That's fine. Just notice them and as you notice yourself noticing distractions, you can just keep coming back to the breath, letting go, letting go.

You can now just come back to normal breathing. Just feel the way the breath breathes, the way life just moves through you. And no matter what's present in the body right now — whether you're really comfortable and relaxed or whether you feel wound up and intense — it doesn't matter because at a more subtle level, you can just hold an attitude of acceptance towards the body exactly as it is. 

Notice the difference between struggling to relax, efforting to come into a mindful place, and accepting right now that the body is as it is. Maybe you like how the body feels, maybe you don't, but at a deeper level notice that you don't have to struggle with the body. And just the act of picking up this attitude of acceptance can help you relax at an even deeper level, deeper than the body for a moment. 

And you can just relax into this deep capacity of your awareness to be accepting, to let this moment fully inform you to not be in denial of things as they are at a more subtle level. You can do this with the emotions in the body and thoughts in the mind. 

Maybe emotionally you're feeling up positive, you never want it to stop, or maybe you're feeling down, dejected, gloomy, and you wish you felt better. But again, notice that you can just make space for what you're feeling and make space for what thoughts are coming and going the same way. 

Weather patterns aren't a problem for the sky. You don't need to make a problem of the weather patterns of emotion and thought. You can just rest as the sky, letting it all come and go. Letting it all pass through, changing somehow. All of the conditions of this moment, all of the conditions of life can easily fit within awareness and because everything fits, everything belongs, and you don't need to struggle. 

You can deeply relax from this place of rest and relaxation. I want you to open up your awareness, open up your senses to just feel into the fullness of this moment, the fullness of sensation in the body, the fullness of emotion and thoughts, the fullness of all of your life's conditions, the favorable conditions, the challenging conditions, everything. Whatever your sense of total fullness is in this moment, I want you to just open up to it. And open yourself to the fullness of the world — over seven billion human hearts and minds, feeling, thinking, yearning, and dreaming. Open up to the fullness of all of humanity, the fullness of the earth itself — this living, breathing organism that sustains life, the rock, the plants, animals, the mountains, the seas, the plains. As you open up your awareness to all of us, to all things, you might sense a quality of abundance, overflowing, everything happening at once. 

Oftentimes when we think of giving thanks, when we think of being grateful, we think of things we're grateful for: Our health, our family, our dreams, our hopes, running water in the tap, sunshine in the sky. All good things. But at the deepest level when we really just relax into a sense of being, just our own beingness, we intuit that we are always and already in deep exchange with everything or part of everything. We're connected to everything, all of life, all of creation pours forth its abundance in this moment, and we are the recipients of all of those gifts. And receiving deeply we can't help but be generous with everything we have. Life itself infuses us in this moment. Life breathes us in and out, sustaining our life, connecting us to all of life everywhere. And a profound and pervasive sense of love sustains us, supports us, gives us our very being and love we and move and have our being. 

Feel at the level of the heart, the way you're connected to everything, so how much you care and this love seems to be an exhaustible. The more we love, the more love there is. 

And the light, a gift of light, the simple fact of being awake and alive and present to have any experience at all. It's a gift and we received this gift every single moment of life. This gift of being, this gift of wakefulness, the gift of experience at the level of our personality. We give thanks for the blessings that we recognize in our lives, the things we love, and sometimes we even managed to give thanks for the things we don't love, but at the deepest level of our being pure intelligence, consciousness, spirit, whatever your language for it.

At this deepest level, we are Thanksgiving. We are pure gratitude, which is to say fully receiving the abundance, the fullness of this moment and fully pouring out from this abundance as generosity and action. So how deeply life gives to you on this moment with an in-breath, a new lease on life and with each out breath, you give yourself back. Offer yourself fully to the bloom of this moment.

***

Take the momentum of this practice into your Thanksgiving week with your loved ones. If you find yourself feeling cramped, small and claustrophobic, caught in your outworn patterns of feeling and thinking number, you can just feel your feet on the ground. Take a relaxing breath and open up as wide as the sky fully receiving these gifts of life, of love, of light, and giving back in your own unique way as mindfulness.

***

Want to deepen your practice? Download the Mindfulness Essentials course.