Finding Your Home Base

This week we posted a new meditation on the CMP website, “Finding Your Home Base.” When we engage in meditation and mindfulness practices, the purpose is to give ourselves the opportunity to “wake up” to our present moment experience and to cultivate habits of mind and heart that allow us to be our happiest. In the practice, we’re not trying to relax. Instead we are becoming aware of our experience in that moment - whether we are relaxed or not. The end result, over time, may be that we feel more relaxed, but this is not our goal in the moment. Similarly, over time we may find that we are happier because we have created the habits that support our happiness, but our goal is not to change how we are feeling in the moment. In fact, two of the most essential attitudes of meditation and mindfulness are “Non-striving” and “Acceptance”. Essentially, our practice time is a time for “being” rather than doing.

That said, some practices may be more comfortable for us, easier for us to sustain, or less prone to cause anxiety or distress than others. Some practices may open a wider door to our present moment experience or a sense of spaciousness and connectedness than others. One of the powerful attributes of our personal practice is that we have agency - we get to decide how to engage in what is a very personal exploration - unique to each of us.

Finding Your Home Base, a new guided meditation in the Library section of the website, offers an opportunity to explore how different present-moment-oriented practices feel for each of us individually in the body and how they may serve us during our practice time. Perhaps tuning in to sounds helps us to feel connected to the “now” and to others; maybe sensing into the movement of the breath through the whole body rather than just under the tip of the nose is more accessible to us right now; maybe paying attention to sensations in the body helps us to feel grounded and stable in support of our practice, and maybe intentional movement helps to create the conditions for our practice.

Some people report, for instance, that focusing on the breath can initially cause anxiety. Meditating when we’re flooded with a sense of unease can be difficult and so it’s important to know that we have a choice and that other gateways are available to us. For some people, years of dissociation have made perceiving sensations in the body difficult. Over time, we may build up our ability to do so, but in the interim, we can also use sounds to help us connect with our present moment experience.

Lastly, Finding Your Home Base will hopefully invite an attitude free of self-judgement around what you are “supposed” to be doing or how you are “supposed” to be doing it during your meditation practice. It is an invitation to explore many facets of your present moment experience.

We hope you find it supportive.

May all beings everywhere without exception feel empowered to rest in their present moment experience,
Your CMP Family