This is the Raisin Meditation. Before beginning, you want to start with two
raisins and a glass of water. So if you need to go get them, pause the video
here and go get them so we can start. And we'll begin with a breath meditation,
just to sort of get us in the mood for experiencing the raisins in this way. And
so you can just notice how you're sitting... How your feet are making
contact with the floor, if they're making contact with the floor...
How your weight is in the chair, or whatever it is that you're sitting on...
And letting yourself feel the sensations of contact, of warmth or coolness...
How your hands are resting on the counter, or on your lap, or wherever they are...
And we'll spend a moment just paying attention to breath.
And that'll mean for you, just, there's no right place to feel the breath, it's just
wherever you're feeling it. It could be your belly, or it could be your chest, or
it could be your nostrils. And if you want to close your eyes for a moment,
you could do that... Just find the actual sensations of breathing...
And noticing there's...
It's not just a breath in and a breath out, there's actually a pause in between,
where your breath turns around on its own.
And there's no need to change your breath in anyway,
because you're breathing just fine. And we'll just do this for a few breaths...
When you're ready, letting your eyes open... And we'll begin to pay attention
to these raisins, because that's what this meditation is about, after all. And
picking up one the raisins... And, we want to look at this raisin...
I want you to pretend for a moment like you'd never,
Ever, seen a raisin before, like you just landed from Mars and
you wondered what this object is. You might not even know that it's edible.
And so you're looking at the, how the light hits it. And
you're seeing that it has crevices and indentations...
...that it looks different whether you're looking at it from the side or
you're looking at it on end. That its color is...
Now, we think of raisins as being black, but
the color might actually have some brown in it, if you look at it, or
some gold. And there's a certain way
it feels in your fingers as you touch it. You can roll it around in your fingers and
feel that... yours might be drier than mine is, but mine feels kind of pliable.
Because if I press it, it squashes a little bit.
You can even see if you can smell anything. I can detect a little bit of
a smell... I don’t have a very good smeller, but I can smell this raisin a little bit.
Now I'm going to suggest you try to do something that sounds kind of strange,
which is see if you can hear your raisin...
Now, it's not going to make much of a sound, so
you're going to need to give it some help. So you squeeze it a little bit, and
roll it around in your fingers, applying a little pressure.
You might be able to hear some crinkling or some popping as things readjust inside.
And now, taking that raisin, and bring it to your mouth. And, of course,
the tendency is to just pop it in your mouth, chew it, and eat it, and swallow
it, but we're going to make this a slower process. So as you bring it to your mouth,
placing on your lips, bring it in the mouth between your teeth,
don't break the skin just yet. And roll it around in your mouth.
And let it visit different parts of your mouth. Let it go to your palate...
Go to the front of your tongue, to the back of the tongue, over in your cheek.
You'll be like a squirrel and put it over in your cheek there...
Bring it over to the other side. Now,
if you've been pretty disciplined about this, you haven't broken the skin yet,
so... When you're ready, just gently tap it with your teeth,
just enough so you can break the skin.
And you may be able to experience a little burst of flavor.
It's hard to keep from chewing it. I find myself wanting to chew it now, but
just rolling it around. Feeling the flavor,
changing its shape by pushing it up on your palate...
And when you're ready... Without taking big bites,
just small bites... Maybe you'll even be able to hear the bites.
Feel the flavor, taste the flavor. And
you'll notice it's beginning to break up a little bit into smaller pieces. And
it's both feeling the raisin in your mouth.... Tasting
the flavors, feeling the textures, hearing the sounds....
And the pieces in your mouth get smaller and smaller - that is,
if you're able not to already have swallowed it, which is possible...
And pretty soon, the raisin's gone. I still taste some of the residual
flavor of the raisin... When you're ready, taking in a little sip of water...
Feeling the coolness of the water as you swish it around in your mouth and
swallow that... Now we have a second raisin.
And this raisin, of course, it's not the same raisin, it's a different raisin.
You might look and see how much different than the first raisin.
This one I notice for me, it's a little bit smaller... It's actually a little
browner than the other one was. And, of course, the wrinkles on it are different.
And this raisin we're going to explore a little bit about where it came from.
This raisin didn't always exist as a raisin. It used to be a grape.
It was a grape in a vineyard somewhere. And that grape needed certain
things in order for it to survive and to grow. It needed sun, it needed soil.
It needed a place in which to grow. It needed water, whether from the sky
and rain, or from irrigation. And if you look really closely...
I can just barely see this on this raisin... There's a little...
...place where the stem was.
This is the umbilical cord for the grape and for the raisin,
the place where all the nutrients came in.
Nutrients from the soil and from the sun, from the water... And
the soil itself, this raisin couldn't exist without the soil. In a way,
the raisin IS...the sun and it IS the soil.
In fact, the soil came probably from volcanic rock ages and
ages ago, before it was broken down. The nutrients in the soil came from plants and
animals that have decomposed and provided nutrients for
it - all that's in the raisin. And we're not done yet, because this raisin,
when it was still a grape, it got picked by some laborer, who took it and
put it maybe in some cardboard between the rows, and left it out there to dry or
in a drying bin, until it dried enough to get the wrinkles that we see and
the color that we see here. And then it had to be gathered up,
packaged in some way, and put in a truck to go to a packaging plant.
It was put in the kind of container that you found it in at the grocery store.
The trucker had to get it there, driving on miles and miles of road. Which you
couldn't do without gasoline, which came from the ground, somewhere, some sort of
petroleum product, and somebody built the truck, so it's everything... There's so
much that went in to getting this raisin to you here, now - the grocery store,
the clerk, who you purchased it from when you got it off the shelf, and
now here it is on your counter, and in your hand, this one small raisin,
everything, everything's in this raisin, the sun, the sky, the rain...
In a way, it's not separate from those. And that's really one
of the lessons of mindfulness, is to discover that everything is connected.
There isn't anything really that's totally separate from anything else.
And now, if you want... Actually, to me it feels a little sacrilegious to do this,
but if you want, you can eat this raisin. And
maybe not as slowly as the first raisin, but give it some time.
Really taste it, hear it, feel it.
And over the next week,
see if you can bring the same sense of curiosity and exploration to the things
you do in daily life, like walking the dog, brushing your teeth, taking a shower,
walking to the car on your way to work, or driving on the highway.
Maybe you shouldn't do it driving on the highway just yet, but
things where you can just really notice where you are and what you're doing.
That's going to be your informal practice for this week. And for
the 30-minute daily formal practice that you'll do, this will be a body scan.
And you want to see if you can bring that kind of curiosity and
attention to body sensation, and
we'll guide you through that when you find the recording session on
the website. And for this week and
beyond, whether it be with a body scan or a sitting meditation or yoga,
you want to be gentle with yourself with all of these practices. And,
even though... you might remember from the Getting Started Worksheet, you listed some
things that you wanted to have happen... See if you can just let those go for
a while and not have expectations of how your experience is supposed to be.
Some people think that it ought to be peaceful, or
it ought to be pleasant, or there ought to be some sort of wonderful peak experience.
But just let your experience be your experience, and
that's what we'll do with all these experiences.