Simply Being – The Meditations

Meditation 1: What is meditation?

Simply being, being aware, being here and now and being present. With openness and contentment.

Photo: Above High Bradfield, South Yorkshire, England

Meditation 2: Meditation on breath

The infinite, effortless rhythm of our breathing offers a guiding and stabilising handrail during early exploration and discovery on the meditation journey.

Photo: Spring, Above High Bradfield, South Yorkshire, England

Meditation 3: Savouring thoughts

Thoughts and thinking are intrinsic to being human. They are ripples on the surface of the lake of awareness. Meditation is welcoming rather than rejecting or seeking to control thoughts and thinking.

Photo: Agden, South Yorkshire, England

Meditation 4: Turbulent, angry thoughts

Some thoughts feel more powerful and ‘sticky’ such as thoughts accompanied by anger. They create stormy waters on the lake of awareness. Observing these thoughts and accepting them is part of meditation. Self-compassion and an orientation of curiosity enables us to be open and caring for both ourselves and others while experiencing anger.

Photo: Near Ughill, South Yorkshire, England

Meditation 5: Fear and anxiety

Fear and anxiety during meditation require acceptance, courage, self-compassion, understanding and an intuitive wisdom. Accepting fear is difficult so read the chapter on fear to find more support. Self-compassion can help us create spaces of safety and safeness within which fear and anxiety can play out. We need safe spaces and safe people for when a refuge is needed.

Photo: Towards Bolsterstone, South Yorkshire, England

Meditation 6: Effortless being with what is

Openness and contentment accompany effortless being with what is. Searching and striving for experiences of bliss have an opposite effect. Simply being comes to permeate our daily life as we practise meditation, as we experience being rather than being lost in anxiety or rumination. Subtly we experience the still completeness in all our moments.

Photo: Near Peak Forest, Derbyshire, England

Meditation 7: Compassion and loving kindness

Compassion is connecting with everyone and everything around us. Self-compassion and loving kindness meditation changes us and all our relationships in profound and enduring ways. We can connect with all others, including those we find difficult, in loving and wise ways. This reflects the reality of our interconnectedness.

Photo: Alladale Wilderness Reserve, Scottish Highlands

Meditation 8: The body and bodily sensations

This miraculous body that mediates our interactions with the phenomenal world is interconnected rather than separate. This is the reality, as science attests, but our experiential discovery of this is enhanced by meditation on the body and bodily sensations. We become aware of the absence of clear boundaries between our bodies and all else – our interconnectedness. We are not a drop in the ocean of the universe, but the ocean in a drop, as Rumi said.

Photo: Surveying Alladale Wilderness Reserve, Scottish Highlands

Meditation 9: Being, boredom and the sense of ‘lack’

Being open to all experience in the present moment also includes being open to and curious about boredom. And about wanting that which is not here in this moment or resisting that which is here. We can become fixated, ruminating on the past or being anxious about the future. Should and shouldn’t rather than being welcome and accepting of our experience with contentment and openness.

Photo: Rondane National Park, Norway

Meditation 10: The self and awareness

The intimacy of our experience of ourselves is fundamental to ‘who’ we are. It is made up of a constructed, categorical ‘self’, built and rebuilt throughout our lives. This self is changing, discontinuous and fragile. Awareness is unchanging, continuous and persistent. The experience of ‘self’ is a constant of meditation. Behind the clouds of identity is the blue sky of being or Be-ing. Still, silent and unchanging.

Photo: Above High Bradfield, South Yorkshire, England

Meditation 11: Presence in meditation

When we are freer from identifying with thoughts in meditation (a natural, effortless process) we become more familiar and intimate with presence (that most intimate of experiences). This enables us to have the freedom to creatively engage with all our experiences. We are more fully aware of them offering us choice and enabling curiosity. There is a joy in all of this because we have the choice to experience each moment with freshness and wonder.

Photo: Above Louchranza, Isle of Arran, Scotland

Meditation 12: Compassion and interconnection

Meditation enables us to ‘be with’ rather than feel separate; to ‘be interconnected’ rather than alone. It enables us to be interconnected (as we truly are) with each other, all life, the planet and the cosmos. The compassion and connection that meditation awakens us to is an experiential reality that reflects our being manifestations of the universe, rather than visitors to it. We can experience the underlying shared being and love that is inherent in our interconnectedness, revealed as the essence of simply being.

Photo: Agden, Low Bradfield, South Yorkshire, England