Sound or Silence for Meditation? Day 4 | The Presence Sessions

Adapting to various environments can enhance your mindfulness practice. From silent indoor spaces to the unpredictability of the great outdoors, explore with me the art of setting up your posture, aligning your body, and relaxing your eyes. 

We also touch on the concept of the 'breathing body,' setting the stage for deeper exploration in our next session. 
       ( This episode was formerly on the the Pure Light Project Podcast) 

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Chapters

• 0:04 Exploring Presence Through Breath and Stillness
• 16:00 Understanding How Breath Supports Your Practice

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:04

Come over to PureLightBookshoppe. com and check out my newest book, the Calm Way. And now let's get into today's presence session. Good morning, welcome to today's presence session, and my name is Andrea Mai and I'm really glad that you've come to spend some time with me today. We are going to be in a quieter background today because I'd like to vary these, between indoors and outdoors, to vary these between indoors and outdoors, between the varying noise levels of life, and this is something I've actually sat with for a very long time.

Speaker 1: 0:57

I used to be part of a meditation group and each time we would start to get comfortable in our physical location. Things happened based on noise that kind of pushed us out. Even as we speak right now, there are sirens going off outdoors in the background that I can hear through the window, background that I can hear through the window. Yeah, we had a juice bar open up right below us and that was fun and quite distracting for people who are new to sitting practice or to being in a meditation group. And then the second location we had it got wildly noisy. There were very thin walls at an art. It was basically a large artist cooperative building, and so there would be events going on, or photo shoots going on, people walking by in the hallways, and we always had to contend with noise to varying degrees. Now, why does it matter? If you want to show up in presence, if you want to experience presence in any situation, it's good to practice. In all of these different scenarios.

Speaker 1: 2:35

I really firmly believe that having a silent space, a quiet space, is very foundational to that journey into presence, into sort of the sanctuary of yourself and all that is. I also find that there's a lot of benefit to being out in the world, especially nature I mean really truly especially nature and being able to find this deep peace within yourself. And I find it very easy. Actually, some people don't, but and that's something we can explore, know as we go along, because I find not everybody enjoys being outside the way that I do. I thoroughly enjoy it in all kinds of weather and elements and types of geography and landscape. You, you know, some people really don't, and that's that is perfectly okay. So, anyways, today what I'd like to play with, if you'd like to play along with me, is being in a quieter background background, and so I will take us through again this foundation of setting up our posture right, our inner and outer posture and we're going to just touch really briefly on each point one more time and then we will begin and we'll sit together for 10 minutes. And then we will begin and we'll sit together for 10 minutes as we get started.

Speaker 1: 4:36

Start by taking a good seat, as we talked about yesterday. Taking a good seat is your inner and outer posture. Rock back and forth if you need to, to kind of find that just right vertical alignment, not too far forward, not too far back. Roll your shoulders up, back and down and through all of this, taking good breaths, notice, as you roll your shoulders up, back and down, how it opens not only the heart space but the abdomen along the diaphragm. Just feel that. Okay, your eyes again, eyes open as we go along.

Speaker 1: 5:38

We will play with other approaches, but I really encourage you to work with your eyes open Again, softly, looking forward, a few feet in front of you. If you're pointed at a wall, imagine the angle and just have your eyes slightly aimed down and imagine, or don't, that you are just simply looking through the wall and you are not looking at any fixed point. So we can soften the eyes and by softening them I mean allow them to literally stop straining. They don't need to strain, you don't need to like really focus on anything, almost a little bit like when you play at going cross-eyed, that soft, almost like you're giving your eyes a rest, and then you just lightly open them again. These are things that you can start to work with in your eyes so that you can see there's a difference. I actually for years meditated, and while I wasn't looking at one fixed object, I was looking quite hard, quite directly, intentionally, until someone pointed out that I can step to the back of the line also with my eyes and let them relax. So, and again, your chin not too pointed upward, noticing where your neck and head are, and then we can relax, now that we've set up this nice posture, and again, hands place them in a way that supports your outer posture, gently on the lap, and and there you have it, a nice, nice position from which to start exploring and noticing. And so I invite you to take a breath. We're going to do again three breaths, in and out, each time a little more forcefully, exhaling, so we can get that stagnancy out of our lungs, out of our abdomen. And so breathe in, exhale, and at the top of each inhale. You might hold it for a moment and then exhale. Second breath in Hold, exhale and third one, and this one do it with all your gusto, breathing in forcefully fresh air, exhale. You may even, on the exhale, let out more of a guttural noise, very open mouthed. Okay, and now we will sit for five minutes and then we'll come back and I will talk a little bit more about about our breath. One last thing I'd like to say is just remember that when you get distracted or swept away in that stream of thoughts, bring yourself back to awareness with the breathing body, placing your awareness on the breath, not on the stream of thoughts. And here we go, thank you. Thank you, no-transcript. I'm so glad that you gave this gift to yourself, and it's really good to know that others are out there sitting with me, standing with me, hanging out in presence. The reality is that our breath is the thing that is with us all the time. You may lose other faculties. You may or may not have a quiet space. You may or may not have a quiet space. You may or may not have an outdoor space. The breath can be our closest companion that we really come into connection with, and the beauty is to not overthink it, to not overconnect to the breath as the object. I spent the first two and a half years that I was in a really active practice with nobody ever telling me how to breathe well, and so I'm gonna dive into that more as we go along here. Now I don't I don't want you to overthink it. I was overthinking it and it really got hung up on my breath. The point is just to use it as a reference to come back to, to recognize. You know, like when you are off daydreaming or maybe you're really sluggish or you're staring super hard at the wall in front of you, that you can be like oh yeah, my breath, let me, let me shift my attention back to my breath and we'll actually get into the breathing body in the next episode. So, beyond that, thank you for for showing up for yourself first and foremost. Keep shining, just keep shining that beautiful light that you are. And, yeah, let's come back again tomorrow. Come over to purelightbookshoppe. com and check out my newest book, t the calm way, 365 day journey out of the weeds and into the wilds of true inner freedom.