This guided practice awakens a relaxed and friendly attention that rests in the breath and opens to whatever is arising. We deepen that presence with the intention to truly say “Yes” to experience, allowing life to be just as it is.

Learning how to recognize and rest in spaciousness, allows us to discover the love and wakefulness that is our source. This meditation guides us to discover interior space, exterior space, and then the continuous space that is suffused with awareness. We then explore how that awareness is experienced as heartspace—vast, illuminated and tender.

Shaila Catherine offers this 20-minute teaching on impermanence and not-clinging in the mode of guided meditation instructions. We practice being unattached to pleasant and unpleasant feelings and releasing all clinging connected with sensual desire or aversion. To cultivate non-clinging, first notice the experience of clinging, perhaps by observing physical tightness, mental contraction, or a sense of separation. As you become mindful of the changing nature of experiences, allow yourself to deeply accept this fact of impermanence. Allow experiences to arise and be known, and also let them end.

This 25-minute guided meditation by Shaila Catherine explores ways of recognizing and working with the five classic hindrances that arise in meditation: sensual desire, anger, sloth and torpor, restlessness, and doubt. We observe how hindrances arise, and learn how to respond wisely to them.

Behind the changing sounds, sensations, feelings and thoughts is an alert inner stillness that is purely aware. This meditation begins with accessing the receptivity of a smile, awakening through the body and opening the senses. We then sense the background of awareness and relax back to inhabit that wholeness. When the mind is distracted, the pathway home is a relaxing back, and the essential practice is non-doing, allowing life to be just as it is.

Our breath can be a home base that allows us to meet life with a relaxed, wakeful presence. This meditation helps us calm and settle the mind with long deep breathing, and then establishes a mindful presence with our natural breathing. When distracted, we learn to relax back again and again, learning the pathway of homecoming to the aliveness, openness and mystery that is always Here.

Lama Gendun Rinpoche writes, “Happiness cannot be found through great effort and willpower, but it is already there, in relaxation and letting go.” This meditation turns us toward this naturally arising happiness by awakening awareness through the body, and then practicing “relaxing back,” over and over, into the aliveness and presence that is always here.

The primary qualities of a healing and freeing presence are being alert, open and tender. This meditation arouses these qualities by engaging a mindful awareness of the breath, and then a relaxed, gentle attentiveness to the changing experience of the moment. It ends by bringing lovingkindness to ourselves and all beings.