Everything is Welcome: Embracing the Wholeness of this Moment [Episode 53]

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

I want to invite you into our meditation, so just settle into your meditation posture and take a few deep breaths, releasing any tension in your body, any tension in your heart or mind, just letting it all go out with the breath.

Allow yourself to fully occupy this moment.

Allow yourself to become aware of your own consciousness in this moment. Just notice the quality of your awareness, your presence here and now.

Noticing your awareness isn’t about noticing how you feel. It’s something subtler than feeling. Just notice your consciousness, that which is aware of this moment, that which is having the experience of whatever feelings are present, whatever thoughts are present, my voice, your sensations.

Noticing the Expansive Nature of Awareness

I want to invite you to notice the expansive nature of awareness or consciousness.

Notice that your awareness is expansive. Now, what might be most apparent to you is not that it’s expansive. You might feel narrow or tight right now. It might not seem like there’s much room or space in your consciousness. It might be filled with tumultuous thoughts, chaotic emotions, or a general sense of contraction.

So rather than trying to change any of that, I want to invite you to notice the expansiveness within which that tightness, narrowness, or contractedness is occurring.

Notice the larger, more expansive awareness that’s aware of whatever tightness or narrowness might be there. Gently bring your attention to that more expansive consciousness without trying to change the narrower, smaller place you’re noticing.

Bring your full presence and attention to that part of you that is vast, wide, and deep, big enough to hold everything that arises within it.

As you rest in this vastness, allow yourself to make room for all of your experience to be exactly as it is, without trying to change anything about this moment.

We are wired to not be content with this moment. We are deeply conditioned to always look for a better moment, to try to change this moment into something better than it is. We’re habituated to reject certain parts of our experience and grasp for the parts we like, the parts that feel comfortable, good, and safe.

So this is a radical practice for a human being: welcoming everything equally, making room for everything that arises without preference or judgment, opening fully to this moment as it is, with no attempt to control it or steer it.

Just allowing, allowing everything.

Welcoming everything and letting everything be means not having a preference for one experience over another.

It is an act of radical surrender to the moment.

We are able to have no preference because we are resting in a part of ourself that is deep. It is so deep that it is unaffected by what happens on the surface. It does not care whether it is experiencing a positive emotion or a negative, uncomfortable emotion. It does not care whether the mind is agitated or peaceful and still.

As we rest in this vast, deep place, unperturbed by the ups and downs on the surface, we simply let it all be. We let it all happen. There is no need to react to it, no need to do anything about it. We are just being, simply being as we are.

Allow yourself to take the position that this moment, exactly as it is, is perfectly whole and complete, and that nothing is missing from your experience right now.

Meditating as If Nothing Is Missing

When I say take the position that this is the case, I do not mean that you have to feel like this moment is perfectly whole and full and complete. I do not mean you need to think that it is perfectly full and whole and complete in your judgment. I mean meditate as if this is the case. Assume that this is the case.

Relate to your experience from the position that nothing is wrong and nothing is missing, and that there is nowhere else to get to.

There is no better experience, no better self to become, no better place to get to, which allows you to invest everything in this moment because there is no other moment waiting.

As long as we are invested in a future moment, one we imagine would be a better opportunity to be fully alive, fully awake, fully surrendered, fully free, as long as we have even the slightest belief that this better future moment is coming and that we are striving to get to it, we will not be able to behold the miracle that is here in this moment, always.

Practically speaking, this means that each experience you are resistant to, or rejecting, or find hard to accept, or judge as not enough, you simply include. You say, “Even this is part of the fullness and perfection of this moment. Even this is just as it is, and I can include and welcome it fully and wholeheartedly, without preference, without judgment, without aversion.”

[Meditation Bell]

I now want to invite you to gently ease out of the formal meditation.

You can move your body and look around. Notice the quality of your consciousness after the meditative journey we just took.

End of guided meditation.