Welcome to part 2 of our meditation foundations. If you have not already read//watched//practiced part one I recommend you go back here and do so. These practices build your meditation foundation and as such they build upon each other.

In today’s meditation we will be starting our practice with non reactive and simple observance using the tools of breath, body sensations, and feeling tones. We have already practiced observing the breath in our part one.

Body sensations are any tickling, tingling, vibrating, pumping, warmth, coolness, pain, ache etc that we may feel in the body. Our practice today will be to observe these sensations without tacking on stories or judgements of the sensation—simply observe. If the sensation is very strong and distracting from your practice of observance drop away from the sensation, move if you need to, or scratch that itch-without adding on feeling of failure. Come back to the breath and begin again finding a new sensation that you can observe without distracting thoughts, stories, or judgments of it.

Now, feeling tones. These are the broad categories of emotions. We have pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral feeling tones. A pleasant feeling tone, for example, may be present when you feel a sensation of relaxation in the shoulders or a recurring place of tension in your body. An unpleasant feeling tone may be an ache or a pain in the body that before meditation we would try to avoid or remedy by moving. A neutral feeling tone is something that you have no strong emotional feeling towards. Maybe it’s a light breeze on your skin or a subtle warmth on your upper lip.

It may be hard to see the far reaching effects of becoming mindful of body sensations or feeling tones, but in the BIG PICTURE this practice done in your meditation laboratory, as I like to call it, will help you to take pause between thoughts and autopilot reaction. This will help you to respond with compassion and mindfulness to yourself and the world instead of reacting through the lens of old conditioning.

May these practices reach you all far and wide.

May you be happy. May you be well. May you be at peace and at ease. May whatever benefit you feel from this practice radiate out from you and into our shared world.

Find more inspiration for mindfulness and deeper meditation practices on our Raising Wellness Youtube Channel.