Welcome back to another introductory meditation with me, Henry Shukman, founding teacher of the Way app. I'm so happy to get this time with you. Thank you very much for being here. In this meditation, we're going to start working with anxiety and stress. Stress is the disease of our day. Anxiety also is so extraordinarily common, a very painful human experience actually. And meditation has been proven to be remarkably helpful with reducing anxiety, with giving us tools for not trying to get rid of our anxiety, which often will just generate more anxiety, but learning to be with it, to allow it, to come to our own experience in a more wholehearted, warmhearted way, and actually bringing some kindness and compassion to ourselves.
So, okay, let's get ready for this sit by coming into a comfortable seated position. Get yourself set up the way you'd like to be. As I always say, it's fine to be on a normal chair. That's what I'm doing right here. If you want to have a reclining spine, you know, resting back against the support, that's just great. If you want to have a free spine, an unsupported spine, that's okay. But it's good if it's balanced. I'm sitting rather upright here. My ears are over my shoulders and my shoulders are over my hips and there's just a little bit of lumbar arch in the lower spine. Meaning that we haven't got a rounded spine. It's more just a little bit arched.
So the belly is coming forward just a little bit, enough to give the spine its intrinsic structural integrity. Then we can close the eyes or lower the gaze and just be present. Come into presence, recognizing that you're here, that you're being still, that you've taken this time to excerpt from your day, to give yourself this little oasis, this little space of just really being with yourself, with your experience. Coming back, in fact, to your own life. Coming back in some way to who you've always been all through your life.
So we let the body settle. Imagine you're a pebble that's been dropped in a pond and you can watch this pebble slowly sinking down through the waters of the pond and settling on its bed. And we're like that in meditation. We're settling in a kind of home ground somehow, one that's always been here for us. Let your hands be limp, fingers be limp. Let your jaw go. Let it sink and settle. Let the shoulders settle. Let the hips sink and settle into the support. Let the feet settle on the floor or whatever may be beneath them.
Notice the stillness in the whole body. Body being still and mind being just a little bit quieter. Now let's become aware of the area around the heart, the chest area. See if you can let it be somewhat warm and soft in that area. Just a kind of ease and looseness all around the chest and also lower down into the belly. Warmth, softness.
Now the invitation is to see whether we can detect any kind of energies in that internal space of the chest and the diaphragm just below the chest. If you were a meteorologist looking for weather systems, would there be any weather in that area within your torso? What would the weather be like? Would it be open, clear, spacious, expansive? Might there be traces of little fronts and storm systems of clouds, perhaps winds? What's the weather like in that area?
And whatever you're finding, can you welcome it? Can you allow it to be just as it is? Is it possible that there's a kind of intrinsic kindness that you already have, a compassionate awareness that you already have, that's able to be with whatever condition our heart area, our chest area may be in? So, we're not really trying to change anything. We're just bringing a welcoming, warm-hearted kindness to our experience.
Just resting with whatever kinds of internal weather we may be experiencing. Being with the life of our heart, our feeling zone. The part of us that experiences emotion, we're just giving it some space and some kindness.
All of us have challenges in life. And all of us tend to need to kind of press on and not give our emotional lives too much time. But actually, it can be a great blessing to give them some space, to give them some attention, to open our awareness to our emotional lives. And we just do it gently. And we always bring a kind of self-compassion, a compassion for ourselves, to it.
Okay, let's bring some movement into the feet, into the hands. Let's raise the eyes, open the eyes, move any way you'd like, have a stretch, whatever feels good, and please congratulate yourself on doing another meditation. And I want to thank you very much for joining me in this little series of introductory meditations. I hope you found it helpful and I really hope that it might have inspired you to take up a regular meditation practice. As someone who suffered from a lot of anxiety and depression as a young man, actually the key thing that I introduced to my life at the age of 24 was meditation. And it has changed everything. You know, now decades later, I've hardly missed a meditation through the course of those years and it has been just the single most helpful thing in my life. I believe meditation is what they call a cornerstone habit. Meaning that if you can establish the habit of meditation, many other beneficial ways of living and approaching your life will flow and grow from that. And it's also a path of deep, deep discovery. Probably the primary path we humans have discovered for really coming to know who and what we truly are and what this life is in extraordinary, beautiful, profoundly transformative ways. If you're curious about finding out more or continuing this kind of practice, please join us on the Way app. We look forward to seeing you.
