Guided Meditation - Finding Stillness: Feeling Your Body and Mind as a Lake - with Shawn Ellis

Welcome to this guided meditation titled Feeling Your Body and Mind as a Lake. As we begin, I want to invite you to make yourself comfortable. You can be seated on a chair, or you can lie down on your bed or on the floor, wherever you can be comfortable. Allow your eyes to close and allow your body to just melt into the seat, into the floor, into the bed. And take a few moments now to just scan your awareness through the sensations of your body. And wherever it's possible, if you notice any signs of tension, see if you can soften and release those areas. Maybe as you're doing this, it's at the end of a long day, or maybe it's in the middle of a day. It can be done at any time, but just allow your attention to gently come into the body, into the flowing of your breath. Experience the sensation of your body as a whole, simply sitting there or lying there, breathing. And when you feel ready, picture in your mind's eye the image of a lake. Maybe it's a lake that you know well and that you go to from time to time, or maybe it's a lake that you've seen in a photograph. Just see if you can bring that image into vivid focus in your mind's eye. Notice how it's an extended body of water held within the Earth's surface. Perhaps it's fed by a spring or a stream. And if you observe the lake carefully, you'll notice that it's always changing, and yet it's also always itself. It changes as the sun and clouds move across the sky. The light is reflected off the water in different ways depending depending on the weather. Sometimes, on very calm days, the surface might be like glass and reflect virtually everything with great precision as it comes by: the clouds, the birds, the trees that surround the lake, the sun as it makes its journey across the sky, and for that matter, the moon and the stars at night. So there are times when the lake is extremely reflective and it contains, in a certain way, everything that comes by or over it. In different periods of time, the surface might be choppy, sometimes quite pronounced in the waves, in which times the light might sparkle off the waves in different ways. Of course, the lake also changes with the seasons. In the winter, depending on its location, it might actually freeze over at times. Through day and night, and through the seasons, and through the years, the lake is constantly changing, but also is its own essential nature. And so now, see if you can invite the lake to exist within your own body, lying here, sitting here, so that your body becomes the lake itself. You can imagine feeling held and embraced as you sit or lie here, aware of the many ways in which your own mind is like the surface of the lake—sometimes highly reflective, sometimes choppy—and getting in touch with the sense of the the entirety of the lake, the full body of water, not only in the surface but also down below. As you lie here or sit here, experience the fullness of your own being so that even in times when your mind is choppy and upset or reactive or dealing with difficult things, you can drop down beneath the surface of your own mind's waves and find a stillness and a calmness that's always here and always available to you with each moment, with each breath, and certainly when you come to rest in this way. So being here now, under the canopy of your vast awareness, experiencing the moment-to-moment changes in your body and sensations, the thoughts, the feelings, the impulses, the sounds. And all the while, just like a lake, simply being here, watching the play of the weather of your mind and body, allowing your awareness to hold it all moment by moment, breath by breath, in your own fullness, in own completeness, moment by moment. Thank you for your kind awareness to this moment, and may you go forward in grace and peace.