Meditation Talk Transcription
Welcome to Release Into Now, Week Three. This week we’ll focus on meditation visualizations and releasing what we carry.
Carrying It All Around
As we go through life, all of the stress, fear, worry, and anxiety that we hold onto begins to build and create a compression within us. Over time, an internal congestion of negative emotion leaves us with a compressed body and mind. This makes the way you interact with the world and your internal self less elastic.
Internal space and flexibility is vital to handling challenging life situations. If you’re bound up and compressed inside you become a reactive being. When you’re confronted with a situation that contemplation and compassion would heal, you instead respond defensively. This is a reflex based on your negative past experience.
We humans inherently pack away our experiences and carry them around with us. The ones that often weigh the heaviest are emotional traumas or learned perspectives that we accumulate over time. The more internally dense with these things you become, the more you experience reality as a non-porous surface. You’re able to absorb new experiences as well as a rock can absorb water. As you experience life, much less is absorbed because you’ve developed a dense surface and interior. Naturally, that means that many positive things in life that give you pleasure or expand your perspective are also missed out on. You can’t absorb them because you’re too armored and internally dense from carrying around the reactions to your negative life experiences. It’s as if you jumped from being startled and forgot to relax. So, a large part of our focus this week will be learning how to unpack, release and let go of the negative weights we carry.
Releasing what we carry is a continuous process. As you release and let go of things, more challenges in life will come which will happily fill the void of something you’ve just let go. Over time, you can develop a skill at releasing attachment to negative emotions. Eventually, you’ll be able to release the new negative feelings that arise much more quickly.
Creating Internal Space
The pursuit of releasing what you carry is to create internal space. This space will allow you to experience life in a more open way. This openness will lessen your suffering and expand your perspective, awareness, and patience. When moving through life with an expanded consciousness, you’re able to learn more about the world in which you live. You’re able to experience things in a richer, deeper, and more sincere way. We can achieve a great deal of letting go and deepening of our reality through meditative practice, contemplation and surrendering of the self to the self.
Simply Sit And Breathe
One of the most basic things you can do in meditation is simply sitting and breathing. At the foundational level, that’s what meditation is. It’s not mysterious. It’s not difficult. It just takes a bit of application. You can achieve the basic results of meditation by setting aside time each day to sit in a comfortable posture and breathe. Nothing else. You don’t have to attempt to control your mind. You don’t have to attempt to do visualizations. All you have to do is set aside 5, 10, 15, 20 minutes; however much time you can allocate per day without distraction and breathe. By just doing that, you’ll begin to release things and open up. The simple practice of sitting and breathing gets you comfortable in your own body. More relaxed in yourself.
Dropping The Weights
Whenever you begin letting go, the things you’re carrying, much of which you probably aren’t even aware of at this point, will begin to simply fall away. It’s as if you have dozens of hands all over your body and they’re all clenching very tightly to strings which are attached to balloons. Through sitting and giving yourself the time to connect with your breath, those hands will begin to open. Those balloons, which are the negative experiences you’re holding onto, will begin to float away.
Many people go through life as a clenched-shut eye. Understandably so. In life, there are constantly challenging things coming at us, and so, we clench the eye of the self for protection. Through the practice of meditation, the eye of the self will begin to feel comfortable again. It will find new trust with the world. When the eye reopens, you see in a new way.
Visualizations
Another effective way at releasing what we carry is through visualizations. Essentially, this is creating and guiding different imaginative scenarios in your mind’s eye. This allows you to put intangible thoughts or feelings into a visual context. For example, you can use this practice to release something you’re holding onto, perhaps some form of stress or emotional injury. When you sit down to meditate, close your eyes and visualize something that represents what you’d like to let go of. Then, visualize that representation releasing and leaving your body. In some sense, practicing visualizations is like dreaming while you’re awake. After a bit of experience, you’ll begin to be able to control what you see during your visualization using the strength of your mind. This practice can become one of the most helpful tools in advancing your internal work. What you can achieve during your visualizations is quite limitless. The only restriction is the scope of your imagination.
Don’t feel discouraged if you have trouble getting started with your visualizations. Try to be patient. Keep trying. In my teaching experience, I find that it generally takes people a bit of time and practice to bring their visualizations to life. This is only natural. You’re developing a completely new skill. The more you practice, the better your visualizations will become.
Guided Meditation Benefits
One of the most beneficial things about guided meditation is that you can be moved through a visualization practice without needing to come up with the narrative. This alleviates creative pressure from the listener. You’re able to relax, listen to someone else describe an image, and simply follow the narrative that the speaker is guiding you through.
Guided Releasing
The visualizations I’ll lead you through in the following guided meditation range across many schools of thought. I’ve taken the structure of what I found to be the most functional aspect of several different visualization techniques and put them in a modern context so they’ll be easy to follow. I also include useful visualizations that have been presented to me during my own meditation practice over the years. It’s my pleasure to share those with you here.
If Your Mind Wanders
I hope you enjoy the following guided meditation which focuses on releasing what we carry. If your mind wanders or you have a hard time bringing to life the visualization that’s being described to you, just keep trying. As I mentioned before, it takes most people a bit of time to develop this new type of seeing and it will get easier. Eventually, it will become second nature.