Home & Lifestyle, Wellness
Guided Meditation: Falling Awake
Lesson time 15:06 min
Discover how lying-down meditations can help you “fall awake” in this guided session.
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Topics include: Guided Meditation: Falling Awake
Teaches Mindfulness and Meditation
Mindfulness expert Jon Kabat-Zinn teaches you how to incorporate meditation into your everyday life to improve your health and happiness.
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- So when you wake up in the morning, first of all, it's questionable whether when we say we woke up in the morning whether it's actually true that we've fully woken up. Very often we might jump up out of bed on autopilot before we hit the floor where we're being driven. Why not actually not jump out of bed the moment we are awake? What about maybe even setting the alarm clock 10 minutes earlier than you need to, and when it goes off finish the job of waking up by rolling into this corpse pose and just feeling the body as a whole lying here breathing? And just feeling the belly rising on the in breaths, falling on the out breaths. And the invitation is to fall awake. How might we do that? We can tune into the breath sensations in the body. And in this posture, of course, there's nothing to constrain the belly. So you can actually feel the belly ballooning up and pressure on in each in breath without forcing or pushing it at all but just the natural expansion as the diaphragm contracts and the volume of the chest expands. And then the opposite on the out breath-- the breath leaves the body, the diaphragm comes back up, and the abdomen drops back down towards the floor. And we can ride on the waves of the breath wherever the breath sensations are most vivid for you. So of course, practicing in this way the mind will not stay with the belly or with the flowing movement of the breath, but it will wander off and get caught up in the thought stream. When you notice that your mind is not here in the body, in the belly feeling the breath moving in and out in the natural flowing movement, then noticing what is on your mind. The body's still doing what the body's doing. You're just not paying attention, because you've gotten carried away. You've gotten distracted. So can you notice what is on your mind now that you noticed it? And then without blaming yourself or shaming yourself or actively pursuing whatever it is that you got caught up in, can you come back to the belly? Can you come back to simply lying here on your back and experiencing the breath flowing in and out effortlessly through the body moment by moment by moment and breath by breath by breath as we lie here. Each time you find the mind wandering noticing what's on your mind and then gently escorting it back to your belly, back into the body, and right back into this moment. And then you can play with say try to put all your attention in your right hand. And what are you experiencing as you put your mind in your right hand and feel what's here to be felt? As I do it, I'm experiencing a universe of sensations in the right hand mostly in the palm but also in the fingers and the back of the hand and the thumb, of course. It's just a very rich sensory landscape. And so now let's take our attention and just see if we can drain it out of the right hand and bring it over and let it fill the left hand. And just seeing what the result of that intention is, to pay as clos...
About the Instructor
A pioneer of the Western mindfulness movement, Jon Kabat-Zinn has spent more than 40 years studying, teaching, and advocating the benefits of mindfulness. In his MasterClass, he teaches you how to cultivate a mindfulness practice, reduce your stress, and soothe your thoughts with meditation and movement. Jon shares expert tips and guidance that meets you where you are. Let this class help you make the most of being alive.
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Jon Kabat-Zinn
Mindfulness expert Jon Kabat-Zinn teaches you how to incorporate meditation into your everyday life to improve your health and happiness.
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