Mindfulness of the Body - Guided Meditation

This guided meditation brings awareness to your body and its sensations.

Barbara Newell is a mindfulness and meditation. For over 12 years, she trained and taught as a Buddhist nun in Plum Village in France under Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh. During that time, she not only mastered her skills, but had the opportunity to teach throughout the world as part of ongoing retreats.

Barbara left monastic life and returned to the United States in 2015 with a mission to bring the knowledge and experience she had gained to a wider audience.  Since then, she has worked with numerous other mindfulness experts including Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield.

Barbara brings a unique perspective to mindfulness and meditation, as she was an accomplished lawyer in Washington, DC prior to her monastic life.  She understands the stresses and challenges of modern life and can provide practical advice and guidance on how to successfully integrate techniques of mindfulness into a busy schedule.

Visit barbaranewell.com for more resources.  Also Barbara offers free initial consultations which can be booked here.

Transcript

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so finding a comfortable sitting position, feeling your seat in the chair on the ground if you're sitting on the floor feeling clea posture upright to allow the breath to move freely, and also some sense of relaxation and ease, and allowing the eyes too close coming into a sense of presence to your own being. Taking some moments now, too, allow the awareness to go through the body and release any areas of obvious or significant tension areas that are ready to let go, but not trying to force anything, even if it feels good. Taking a few full breaths, I'm allowing the breath to be natural, coming to your anchor your home base, the place in the body where it's easiest or most pleasant for you to feel the sensations that are unfolding moment by moment in the body. This place is your home base and with the relaxed interest speaking to notice what the sensations of your home base of your anchor place feel like moment to moment when you noticed the mind has wandered off. That's not a problem. That is a moment of mindfulness and gently bringing the attention back to your anchor and to this relaxed, wakeful presence and now, scanning through the body, noticing, if any sensations are strong, calling your attention and, if so, allowing the anchor awareness to recede as you bring a kind awareness to the sensations, what do they feel like? Do they feel like hot or cool? Tied, soft, jumpy, shaky with a soft, open awareness, simply feeling the sensations as they are noticing whether they feel pleasant or unpleasant noticing? If they change while you attend to them, they may intensify or they may dissolve. They may stay the same. And whenever the sensations in that place there are no longer strong returning to your anchor. If you find it difficult to stay with strong sensation, you might try breathing into them. And it can be helpful to name the sensation without hunting for an exact fit, just noticing what arises and softly noting it. With 5% of your attention on it and 95% on the feeling itself, you might be asking yourself simply what is happening inside me right now, noticing any sensations that her predominant and asking, can I be with this directly? Feeling it subtle were strong, letting life be as it is now returning to your home base. If during this last minute or so strong sensations call your attention once again leading the anchor recede and offering full attention to the sensation, perhaps naming it otherwise simply resting in awareness. The home base relaxed and alert, aware of the anchor in the foreground over your attention and the field of sensations in the background centered, balanced and present for the living world of Sensation, aware of this flow of life, okay?