A guided meditation (YouTube) that leads listeners to contact their heart, notice breath and current emotional state, and gently attend to their most difficult feelings without trying to change them. It encourages cultivating inner guidance—short supportive messages (e.g., “be as harmless as possible,” “be gentle”)—as seeds for gradual transformation and deeper self-connection.
So just start off by contacting your heart and asking it how it's doing right now. Take note of your breathing and whether you're breathing in such a way to be comfortable, uncomfortable. And just don't try to change yourself at all. Don't try to improve. Just simply let yourself be exactly as you are and notice what's the one quality that would best describe where you're starting off right now. And from this place, guide yourself to a moment in time, or moments in time where you feel feelings that are the least desirable ones that you have. Or perhaps it's your inability to feel feelings, but whichever it is, let yourself scan and find times in your life where you're in the dreaded zones, where you're in a feeling state that is not where you want to be, but you somehow can't get out of it. Now, it could be frustration or intolerance, impatience, emptiness, anxiety. But no matter what you tell yourself, no matter what you pray for, no matter what kind of inner work you do, you're still in that very difficult state and have the courage to just gently see it for what it is. I'm in this state and it's my most challenging one, and it's probably one I have some embarrassment about or feelings of failure about or shame about. And therefore recognize it takes great courage to zero in on it and to just surround it with your awareness right now. And as you allow yourself to feel it, ask yourself from a quiet place, what's the best thought, what's the best guidance from your wisdom that you would give yourself while you're there? Now, some examples might be if it's being impatient with your kids or angry with your partner. It might be something like, be as harmless as possible. If you're empty and you feel, let's say, worthless or inadequate, it might be be gentle, be as kind as you can be, and notice that your inner guidance doesn't have the power to transform the feelings. And let yourself be satisfied in this dualistic state, this very wholesome dualistic state where your guidance is giving you suggestions that are storages for the future. It's like having nuts that you're putting away for the future, or seeds that you're planting into the ground where they're there to help empower you through time, through gaining more and more awareness that this is my dreaded state and this is my guidance, and I can't change my dreaded state. But I want to put my dedication and my faith and my perseverance into my inner knowing. So allow yourself to keep hearing and seeing and sensing and feeling your most difficult emotional state, appreciating that it takes great courage to nakedly admit it to yourself and keep crystallizing the best message or messages that you can give yourself while you're in that state and see if it's possible to not be too demanding that you have to get out of the state that you have to improve but have the trust that that inner knowing and that naked awareness of where you are is as good as you possibly can do and appreciate that that combination of wisdom and the emotional state that's most challenging is the template for your transformation. It's the guidance to have the most intimate life possible with both yourself and all those closest to you because you know if you have to run away from this state for the rest of your life you're in a futile endeavor. And if you can direct your attention to be with the dreaded state and guide yourself to the awareness that sooner or later your heart and your suffering will melt together.
