Welcome to this meditation with me, Henry Shukman. In this little set of meditations so far, we've looked at doing a body scan. We've explored the practice of doing less or even not doing anything at all as a fantastic way to reset the nervous system. We've also explored how to be with stress in a way that we're not kind of opposing it and fighting it, but we're including it, and how helpful that can actually be in bringing us to a more patient and compassionate approach to our own stresses.
In this meditation, we're going to be exploring an old Zen teaching which runs like this: Take the backwards step that shines the light inward. So, what on earth does this really mean? It means finding a way to rest back into the sort of heart of our experience, into the very condition of our own awareness, as it were, into the fabric of awareness that underlies all our experience. That's a bit of a mouthful, but I'm going to be guiding us through the use of this little directive from Zen, and I think showing how useful and helpful it can be in the midst of any ordinary life. Just taking a moment to disengage, to come back into an intrinsic well-being, a kind of unconditional well-being that the great traditions of meditation, such as Zen, know is available to us. Okay, let's get into a comfortable seated position.
Close your eyes or lower your gaze. Have your hands where feels good for you. Could be in the lap, could be on the thighs. Let your arms go completely slack. Let them just kind of dangle like old ropes, and actually let the whole body become floppy. It doesn't matter if you're sitting upright with no support other than the seat. As long as you're somewhat balanced, you can still go floppy. And of course, if you're reclining or your back is supported, it might be easier. Just let everything become like a rag doll. Head, throat, shoulders, arms, hands floppy. Chest, belly, seat, legs floppy. So the whole body is kind of doing nothing, really releasing any need to activate any part of the body. Rest, coming into body-wide rest.
Now, it's a hidden secret of rest, actually, that in rest a different quality of awareness can emerge by itself. It's akin to the deeply creative possibilities of rest. That within rest and restfulness, another flavor of awareness can emerge by itself, where we're simply aware of being here, aware of our surroundings. And we might find that there's a quality of quiet and stillness in the space around us that we might not have noticed.
So Zen says, 'Take the backwards step.' Just give yourself a little window of time right now when you can disengage. So much of our life we're kind of forward-facing, engaging with the world before us. That's just fine. But we can have a break from that that can be profoundly restorative. We just take a little micro step backward, disengage from the world, from activities, from your life just for a moment. Recede just a little bit from the world before you come back into yourself.
And this backwards step can, as it were, illuminate a quality of awareness, a peaceful nature in ourselves that's always here. A wider sense of peace, of calm, ease that almost seems to spread through our life when we give ourselves a chance to notice it. Simply by disengaging, taking this half step backwards, this little bit of a falling back, receding back into ourselves, into some part of us, some part of our nature that's always been here, as if it's really always been present throughout our lives, somehow almost holding our life experience. A broader awareness, a wider lens, wider aperture, wider field of vision.
It's not some special accomplishment to find this. It's simply always been with us, a restful awareness. Just allow yourself to rest with it, to be in it just a moment more. Highly restorative, very refreshing this awareness can be for us. Both a state of rest and a condition of awareness at once. Almost like there's a different perspective on life here, a different vantage, a broader view, somehow a little less bound by time. A little taste of a certain flavor of timelessness might show up, as if we've just stepped back from the stream of time just for a moment, from the stream of clock time. Being with ourselves more intimately.
Yeah. Thank you. So let's gently come out of the meditation, and let yourself move a little bit. Perhaps swaying the upper body, wiggling fingers and toes, opening the eyes, raising the gaze. Have a deeper inhale and exhale. And look around you. And let's, yeah, close this meditation now. I hope you find this or any of the other meditations a really helpful intervention to deploy at any time in the course of your daily life, at the beginning of the day, at the end of the day, or any point in the course of the day. Thank you very, very much indeed for joining me, and I wish you a very fine rest of your day. Thank you.
