(soft music)
- [Narrator] Take a moment
to tune in to where you're sitting.
Notice the support you have from the chair, or the cushion,
paying attention to the actual sensations of contact.
Find a position of stability and poise
with your upper body balanced over your hips,
and shoulders in a comfortable posture.
Hands on your lap, or your knees, arms relaxed.
And bring awareness to your breath.
Feeling each breath as it comes in, and goes out.
Let the breath just be as it is without trying to change,
or regulate it in any way,
allowing it to flow easily and naturally.
As you sit, begin to visualize
the most beautiful mountain you know,
or have seen, or can imagine.
Let this image gradually come into greater focus.
Allow the sense of this mountain, and its overall shape,
its peak high in the sky.
The large base rooted in the bedrock of the Earth.
Notice how massive it is, how solid,
how unmoving, and how beautiful.
Perhaps your mountain has snow blanketing its top,
and trees reaching down to the base,
or rugged granite sides.
There may be streams and waterfalls
cascading down the slopes.
There may be one peak, or a series of peaks,
or with meadows, and high lakes.
Imagine the sound of the streams,
the sounds of the birds calling out from the trees.
When you feel ready,
imagine bringing the mountain into your own body,
so that your body and the mountain in your mind's eye
become one.
Imagine sharing the massiveness,
and the stillness as you and the mountain become one.
Grounded in this sitting posture,
your head becomes the peak,
supported by the rest of the body.
Your shoulders and arms, the sides of the mountain,
your buttocks and legs, the solid base,
rooted to your seat.
Experiencing in your body,
a sense of uplift from deep within your pelvis and spine.
With each breath,
visualize becoming a little more of a breathing mountain,
alive and vital, but also still, solid, and grounded.
As you sit, visualize the sun traveling across the sky,
the light, and shadows, and colors changing moment by moment
in the mountain's stillness.
Imagine the surface of the mountain
teeming with life and activity,
streams, melting snow, waterfalls, plants, and wildlife.
Visualize how on the mountain,
night follows day, and day follows night.
Imagine the warmth of the sun,
followed by the cool night sky studded with stars,
and the gradual dawning of a new day.
Through it all, the mountain just sits,
experiencing change in each moment,
constantly changing, yet always just being itself.
It remains still, as the seasons flow into one another,
and as the weather changes moment by moment, and day by day.
Calmness abiding all change.
In summer, there is no snow on the mountain,
except perhaps for the very top.
In the fall, the mountain may be covered in leaves
of brilliant colors, red, yellow, orange.
In winter, the mountain may be covered
by a blanket of snow and ice.
In any season, it may find itself at times
enshrouded in clouds, or fog, or pelted by freezing rain.
People and animals may come and go on the mountain.
Throughout all of this, the mountain remains as itself.
It is unmoved by the weather,
and by what happens on its surface.
It remains the same.
As we go through our days, and our lives,
we can take moments to meditate and be mindful,
to tune into our own central unwavering stillness
and groundedness in the face of everything
that changes in our own lives.
Over the course of a day, a week, a month.
We can take a moment to also appreciate
the constantly changing nature of mind and body,
and of the outer world.
Just like the mountain,
we have our own periods of light and darkness,
activity and inactivity, our moments of color,
and our moments of darkness.
By becoming the mountain in our own mindfulness practice,
we can link up with its strength and stability,
and adopt them for our own.
We can use its energies to support our energy,
to encounter each moment with mindfulness,
and equanimity, and clarity.
It may help us to see that our thoughts and feelings,
our preoccupations, our emotional storms, and crises.
Even the things that happen to us
are very much like the weather on the mountain.
We tend to take it all personally,
but its strongest characteristic is impersonal.
The weather of our own lives is not to be ignored or denied.
It has to be encountered,
felt, known for what it is, and held in awareness.
Sit for just a moment, until you hear the bell,
breathing deeply, and being aware of the stillness,
and strength of your own body.
(soft music)
(bell chiming)
As we go through our days and our lives,
we can take moments to meditate, and be mindful,
to tune into our own central unwavering stillness
and groundedness in the face of everything that changes
in our own lives,
over the course of a day, a week, a month.