A guided meditation that walks you through grounding in the present, scanning your body, and meeting difficult emotions with compassion. The practice names specific feelings that resist love: guilt, fear, anxiety, inadequacy, hidden anger, withdrawal. It frames tender awareness as a way to transform these into safety and courage.
So just start by being present to the sounds, hearing concrete sounds and the sounds of silence, just letting yourself be the listener for a few moments and being content, staying simple. Allow your attention to gently sense what your heart feels with your awareness. Just tuning in, how's my heart really doing? And as you turn inwards, let it be an encouragement that you'd like to be returning here forever. This interest in how your heart is actually doing in the moment, sensing it as you breathe with awareness and scanning your whole body just for how it feels as well. And as you're with your heart, let it be how you actually feel, not what you should feel or want to feel. No performance, no effort, just dropping into how it is. Maybe falling in love with no performance, no effort, not even having to perform inside yourself to yourself. Recognizing that no matter what you feel, this capacity to tenderly hold yourself is the only place you really want to reinforce. You don't want to mess with whatever is happening on a feeling level. Recognizing that compassion never in any way demands that you change your emotional state. It's only a judge that's against you. Compassion is always surrounding your emotional state with space, with tenderness, with clear eyes. No performance, no effort. And ask yourself with as much tenderness as possible, what emotions or states give you the greatest challenge to love, to share and acknowledge to yourself and your lover? What are those emotions and states that need your loving attention the most? Allowing yourself to appreciate the sincerity and the integrity, Noticing whether or not the one that's asking you can be a kind questioner. Notice are you kind? And if you haven't been able to support yourself enough, just at least have a kind thought that I want to be kind. This is radical. It's radical to actually have a real authentic relationship to your depths without trying to change yourself. So as we together look at possible places that are yours, that most need love, just say, yes, that's me. I need love. There it may be guilt or fear, anxiety, not being honest, a lack of accountability, withdrawal, feelings of inadequacy, layers of hidden anger that's not really acknowledged. Withholding sexual energy, competition, contraction, insecurity, superiority, being critical. Just keep seeing which are mine, which ones are really the ones that I want to come back to. To find the way to heal, to love, to trust, to be trustworthy. Be as silent as you can to allow space to look and be with yourself tenderly. Have a sense of yourself as being the space around whatever you're looking at. See if you can identify with the spaciousness and not so much just the state itself. And contemplate tender awareness, which will support you to be with these states that are not so easy to be with and transform them into vitality, into love and essential energy, and move you towards your heart and soul. Recognizing that when tender awareness mixes with any human emotion, it's going to help it to move towards healing. Fear is going to learn how to find courage or safety, how to be cared for. Being hurt is going to discover what it needs to feel healed. Let yourself end with a prayer. May you have the courage to see love and trust that your compassion is big enough to bring whatever emotional state is present to your awareness, to your heart, and that you want to be in this profound coexistence to support intimacy, strength and healing for your benefit and for the rest of the world.
