The floods of sense consciousness and delusion take us away from a place where we might feel stable, assured, comfortable. We experience a loss of autonomy and receptivity. We can use the quality of wise deep attention (yoniso manasikāra) to turn attention to the source of our actions and our being. The roots are found in the domain of body and mind.

Beginning with a review of the terms mind, heart, body, consciousness, attention and awareness, this guided meditation takes us through their workings. Wise deep attention (yoniso manasikāra) keeps bringing us back to what’s important now.

Standing meditation compels full body awareness – one gets the sense that the body is intelligent. Once establishing a suitable stance and posture, give attention to how breathing feels in the body. Then, ‘What’s important now?’

Beginning with deep appropriate attention (yoniso manasikāra), attend to where your strengths and values are. Let them grow and be fully felt with awareness. This resources the heart so you can stand your ground in the face of the floods.

Help with hard-wired anger; how to think about ground, space and rhythm in a non-conceptual way; citta seems like a toddler; how to disengage from deep patterns of negativity; how to respond to boredom; is it recommended to thoroughly achieve samatha before moving on to vipassana; how to respond to deep pain in the heart; question about impermanence.

It’s very helpful to start the day with resolution: What can I say no to? What can I say yes to? Using the precepts as a frame, generate boundaries that will moderate energies and help you remain firm and grounded in the face of the floods.

The standing posture provides a simple process whereby energies can be balanced, soothed and steadied. Opening channels of the body so breathing can flow through, an open energy – light, spacious, repelling obstruction – becomes available.

Open mind and open heart require open receptivity – listening without taking on, accepting without adopting. This requires the quiet power of embodiment – acknowledgement – which isn’t doing anything other than acknowledging. Things then shift and pass on their own.

First grounding the body, then settling the breathing, guidance to explore and ease areas of the face and head.

Practice with bringing up notions of future, past, other people and myself and the relationships between them. Receive what is activated in the body and mind without adopting them. Open to the feelings and movements that arise.

In walking, experience the fluidities and exchanges of movement. Walk through the sense realm, noticing how objects change. Walk through your mental field in the same way, the wallpaper changing as you move along. Notes on reclining meditation conclude these instructions.

Open up the currents to other people – mistakes, grudges, hurt feelings – and listen. You can’t forgive if you’re still wounded. Use the brahmavihāra to open the heart towards others. Then you have not just cleared the floods, but have been enriched by the relational experience.

Where is the experience of bodily energies found in the suttas; what is the source of Ajahn’s ‘forensic precision’; how to us somatic presence with the 3rd and 4th foundations of mindfulness; please help with insomnia; experiencing resistance to standing meditation; grief and pain experienced with ‘Future and Past’ exercise; how to deepen into the ‘neither/nor’ space; is samādhi developed by sustaining sati; how to deal with overactive citta; how did you deal with the fear of death when being robbed in India?

With the recognition of the ending of this session, consider birth: what we’ve been through is receding, nothing new yet has begun, and we’re not going back to the same old thing. Birth is arising into that which we’re not yet entirely clear about. Nourish the potency of arising with mental qualities of goodwill, compassion, celebration and equanimity.