Finding your Anchor - Guided Meditation

A guided meditation to find your anchor - a sensory experience  that helps ground you in the present moment.

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 this is a simple three minute practice that will help you discover where might be the best anchor or home base for you to come back to the present moment when you notice that the mind has perhaps gone quite far off and left the body behind. So to discover your anchor, you might begin by just finding a comfortable sitting position and allowing your posture to be upright so that the breath can move freely but not too stiff for rigid, relaxed and then allowing your eyes too close coming into a sense of presence. Tehran being here. And if the mine produces thoughts as you do this practice, it's not a problem. Just acknowledge it and come back to your focus. And no just allowing your awareness to go through the body, releasing any areas of significant tension that you notice. Taking a few breaths just to do that. And if it feels good, taking a few full breaths and then allowing the breath to be natural and beginning to notice now where it's most easy or pleasant for you to feel the sensations of breathing, this will be your home base to the present moment for some people that breath is not the best home base. They prefer to anchor in sensations, maybe in their hands or their seat. That air give them a feeling of grounding. And so now, with the relaxed interest as you found the place where it's easiest or most pleasant, simply noticing what the sensations of your anchor, I feel like moment to moment. If your banker is the breathing, you may notice cooler air entering the nostrils warmer, leaving the nostrils. You may notice in the chest the expansion and contraction with the end, an out breath And whenever you noticed the mind has wandered off. That is a moment of mindfulness and just gently bringing the attention back to the anchor. Relaxed, wakeful presence. This anchor is available to you at any moment. Even just a breath or two of coming back to this place can bring a sense of relief on refreshment. Okay, Okay,