Welcome back to Meditation Monday with me, Henry Shukman. Thank you for joining. So I've already said that meditation can be an extraordinary journey of discovery. I believe that its deepest purpose is to reveal aspects of who we are and what our true relationship to the world really is, which can kind of blow our minds when we taste them. And of course, meditation is not the only way of finding out that kind of stuff, but it's an incredible way of grounding it into our lives and integrating it into the way we actually live.
However, the vast majority of us, myself included, come to meditation not for those reasons, but to handle stress. We may not even realize we've got stress; we're just kind of miserable. I was in that category in my early to mid-20s when I started meditating. I was just really unhappy and had a good friend who meditated, who was much less unhappy than I was, and I decided to try out what he was doing, and it changed my life.
Here's what we're going to do today. The tool we're going to be picking up is around how to handle stress, how to recognize stress, and what to do about it through meditation. And essentially, the main thing we're going to be working on is recognizing the signatures of stress in our bodies, coming into the body, getting to know it in the body, and just that recognition starts to dial it right down.
So let's come into our comfortable seated position. You can close your eyes or you can lower your gaze. And as always, we're going to start by really arriving, so kind of catching up with ourselves. You know, here we are with this little space, this little gap in our day when we get to be still and quiet, and really, it can be a kind of refuge.
So just take stock. You know, how are you doing right now that we've all just jumped in from our busy lives outside this space? What are we carrying? What's in our bodies right now? What kind of momentum from the day? We're not seeking to get rid of anything or change anything. We're just starting to recognize what's going on for us, catching up with ourselves.
Now let's give the body a chance to relax, to come into some kind of rest. So letting your shoulders settle, letting the seat receive the weight of your body, letting the floor beneath you receive the weight of your legs, and letting your whole upper body be at rest, so either balanced or really giving the weight of your upper body to whatever support it has. You get to unwind right now. You get to sort of unbind yourself from the thread of your days, your busy days.
So now we may not particularly want to think about stress right now, but it's really helpful to, in this space, this kind of shelter almost of meditation, we can get to know what happens in our bodies when we feel anxious or stressed. You might just think about some minor stress, or like there's an email you haven't answered yet, or a phone call, or maybe the tire pressure on your car needs to be checked, just some minor thing, and just feel what happens in your chest or your diaphragm, just below the chest, or perhaps in your throat.
Is there some sensation that you can notice in your torso that seems to associate, correlate with stress? Just do a kind of gentle scan of your torso. Is there some kind of energy, some kind of sensation? Could be a tension, tightness, might be a sense of heat or some kind of agitation. Sometimes there's a certain density, or it might be more like weather. There's a little high-pressure system in the torso.
Whatever you're finding, or even if you're not finding much of anything, let it be the way it is. While keeping one part of your attention open to whatever's going on in your torso, at the same time let your shoulders be soft, let the flanks of your body be soft. Let it almost be like the whole of your torso is made of warm wax. There's a warmth surrounding your chest area, your diaphragm area.
Feel that warmth like warm wax, and feel how it can hold any uncomfortable feeling within. If there is a tightness or a heat or a density, any kind of unease, notice that there's a softness of warmth in your body as well that can welcome and hold any discomfort.
We're learning to let things be, not to get rid of them, to let things be, to be with our sometimes anxious, troubled hearts. We don't need to banish them or suppress them or change them. We ourselves can learn to allow them, to bring a kindness towards our discomforts. So just resting a moment with a soft body and a sense of allowing, of kindness and patience toward any stress we might be feeling, that we really can kindly welcome it and sort of tend it, as if we might almost be rediscovering a kind of kind attentiveness that we've always had and can turn it toward ourselves, our own experience.
Okay, so let's, you know, in your own time, come out of the meditation, come back to the space you're in. Sometimes people like to stretch a little bit after coming out of a sit, whatever feels good for you. So another tool as we're proceeding with these sessions, this time probably, or maybe a counterintuitive one: when we're feeling stress, we don't try to get rid of it. Instead, we try to recognize it as sensation in the body and do maybe the last thing we want to do, which is welcome it, allow it, let it be part of what our experience currently actually is. And in doing that, we discover that we ourselves have a greater capacity than we might have remembered to give ourselves loving-kind awareness. Thanks so much for joining me. See you on the next Meditation Monday.
