[audio:MM-Brief-Insights-for-the-Guided-Meditations.mp3]

All of the guided meditations contained in this mindfulness program are simply moment-to-moment invitations for your active participation. They essentially represent gateways to the same enriching, expanding, healing, and transforming space of awareness. These exercises in one variation or another have been cultivated and shared by numerous great Masters, teachers, instructors, physicians, and practitioners. Our intent is simply to bring you their heartfelt and timeless dedication for greater, clearer insight and understanding into your own being- and in helping you to tune and refine your inner capacities for awareness and well-being….  this is fundamental to our art of awakening.

These guided meditations are meant for you to listen, but the work is still yours. You will need to immerse yourself into this process of inquiry for your own self-discovery. You are in the driver’s seat here, and I am simply providing you with words for navigation. As best you can, you want to try and reside in awareness slightly below my stream of words- just as you would with other thoughts, emotions, or sensations arising in awareness so that you can take it all in- and so that you are not distracted or carried away by what I am saying during the guided meditations. It is your effort and your discipline to practice these meditations and exercises over and over again that will bring you the true benefits of mindfulness… and of awareness.

Your fullness of engagement and attention to the instruction are essential- and your practicing with regularity fundamental to cultivating insight and understanding into your own interiority. This mindfulness practice takes patience and forbearance- you need to find regular time for this discipline to make it work. It’s not magical or extraordinary, although the direct experiences may periodically cast the wonderment of illuminating insight, profound relaxation & calm, a sense of freedom from your pain or suffering, etc. But whatever experience you may be having in your meditation practice, it like everything else is impermanent by nature. The exercises may also seem rather inauthentic at first- very ordinary- and sometimes perceptually boring with their perceived monotony and repetition in practice… but this discipline has over 2500 years of time-tested success in bringing its practitioners a greater sense of peace, harmony, and understanding into the nature and mystery of their own minds.

Here and now, the power of this mindfulness practice is its openness to whatever is happening and unfolding moment-to-moment– without attachment or judgment to things as they are. In stillness of our practice, we rest in awareness as best we can. We are not trying to force any particular outcome or feeling. We are simply present with our experience in this open & curious awareness moment-to-moment, and over time, with disciplined practice, we will discover a new familiarity- and a new Way to be with our own interiority. What will reflect and reveal itself will be greater insight, understanding and compassion for all that we are- and for all that we are part of…

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