Guided Meditation: Embodied Metta, with Tara Brach
Welcome, my friends. We'll begin our meditation and the title of this meditation is Embodying Metta which is loving kindness, really bringing the felt sense of loving kindness alive in our bodies.
So if you'd like just to adjust how you're sitting in any way that allows you to be comfortable and closing your eyes, taking a few full breaths.
And let these breaths gather your attention, collect you, bring you right here, nice deep in full, out completely, filling the lungs with the in breath, releasing with the out breath.
Letting the outer corners of your eyes lift, letting the eyes soften and the brow be smooth. So your eyes are smiling and you might feel a smile at the lips, a slight smile, what Thich Nhat Hanh calls smile yoga because it sends a message to your entire nervous system to relax, helps you get in touch with a sense of benevolence and ease.
See if you can feel the inside of your mouth smiling. The eyes are smiling, the mouth is smiling, and letting all the little muscles of the face relax.
You might visualize and feel the sense of a smile at the throat, that curve of a smile there. And sense the openness it creates.
You might sense your throat filling your neck. Space, openness, receptivity, allowing the shoulders to fall away from the neck so that ease is spreading now.
Feeling the length, the volume of the arms and letting the hands be soft, you might soften the hands again, let them rest in a very easy effortless way.
And still feeling the eyes are smiling. The mouth is smiling, smile at the throat, and then smiling into the heart, visualizing and feeling the spread of a smile through the heart and the chest area, and sensing the space it creates, the space that has room for whatever is here.
And letting that sense of a smile, the heart, just radiate outward, further relaxing the shoulders, the arms, feeling it radiating and relaxing the upper back, mid back, lower back, the receptive, open presence.
The eyes are smiling, and the mouth. The throat and the heart.
And now letting this next breath be received in a softening belly. This breath and now this one. And again.
Relaxing through the lower torso and you might visualize and have the felt sense of a smile spreading through the belly. And sense how that openness of a smile. It makes room for whatever is here.
Feeling the aliveness, the space in the belly and continuing to scan down the body with this image of a smile, this openness and receptivity of a smile, letting that openness spread through the legs, the feet.
So that if you widen the attention now, you will sense the atmosphere of a smile spreading, permeating, and expressing through your entire body.
Sensing the space around you filling with a smile, allowing a further expansion, openness, ease.
And you might deepen your attention and notice if there is any part of your body that sensations or your emotional body that is asking for a healing attention, that there is something calling for acceptance, for openness, for healing, to sense the spirit of a smile spreading through that area. So if you could smile into any place that feels wounded or blocked or tight,