A guided practice that expands your perspective so that you can see: your thoughts and worries can still exist, but there’s just a little more space around them.
Our guest this week is Shamash Alidina. He offers a guided practice to invite us to consider how feeling smaller can actually be a big relief. It’s not that we diminish our value, but rather that we take a moment to feel that the world is bigger than our worries, and that we are held and surrounded by immense beauty, wonder, and support. In this meditation, you’ll:
- Connect with and ground in your senses and your body
- Widen your perspective
- Open yourself to the experience of awe
Shamash Alidina: A Meditation to Awaken the Joy of Feeling Small
Read and practice the guided meditation script below, pausing after each paragraph. Or listen to the audio practice.
- Find a comfortable position sitting or lying down. Let your eyes close if that feels comfortable, or allow your gaze to gently rest on the floor in front of you.
- Perhaps there’s something on your mind today—a worry, a problem, something you need to sort out or something you wish were different. That’s absolutely fine. You don’t need to clear your mind before you meditate. Your mind is allowed to come along for the ride. Just take a moment to notice what’s there. You don’t need to go into the whole story. Simply notice the feeling of it.
- How much space does this worry seem to take up? And where do you notice it in your body?
- Now bring attention to your breathing. No need to breathe in a particular way. Simply notice the breath coming in and going out, breathing in and breathing out. Become aware of the points of contact between the body and whatever you’re supported by the chair, the floor, the bed. Feel the weight of your body being held right now. For these few moments, you don’t have to hold everything together. You don’t have to be productive or solve anything or get anywhere. You can simply be here, and that’s it.
- Let’s begin by noticing the space your body occupies. Sense the shape of your body. All the way from the top of your head to the soles of your feet, noticing the edges of your body, places where you end and the space around you begins.
- Now gently widen your attention to include the room that you’re in. You can notice the sounds around you. Notice the walls, the ceiling, the space above your head, the space on either side of you. The body is here in this room, and there’s all this space around it.
- Now imagining widening your view beyond these walls. Imagine the street outside, the trees, the pavement, sidewalk, the people walking past, the cars moving along the road. And beyond that a whole town or city, stretching out in every direction, thousands of people, each with their own plans and hopes and disappointments and stories, cups of coffee being forgotten and your own little world is part of all this. Not separate from it, but woven into it.
- Now let your attention rise above the rooftops towards the sky. Notice the sheer openness of the sky. It stretches far beyond the buildings, the roads, the boundaries of everyday life. And while you’ve been busy thinking, planning, worrying, doing all the things you need to do, the sky’s been there all along.
- Now widen your view even further and imagine the earth beneath you. This amazing, enormous planet, slowly turning as it travels through space. You’re sitting right now on a planet. Just take that in for a moment, a planet traveling through space, surrounded by stars and galaxies with distances so vast they’re difficult for the human mind to comprehend. Some of the light reaching us from distant stars began its journey long before you were born, long before your current worries existed, and long after today’s problems have passed. The universe will continue unfolding in ways we can’t even imagine.
- Now gently bring to mind the worry or problem you noticed at the beginning of this meditation. Let it come back into view and notice that the problem itself hasn’t changed. And yet as you hold this worry in the context of something much bigger, do you notice any difference? Maybe it feels a little lighter, or maybe it seems a little less overwhelming. What takes up a little less space? Or maybe nothing feels different at all. Just notice what’s true for you. The problem is still there, but maybe it’s no longer the whole picture. The problem stays the same, but the space around it grows. And sometimes that’s enough to help us breathe a little more easily.
- Now slowly begin to bring your attention back from the stars, back towards the sky, and back to your body and the points of contact with what you’re resting on. Feeling the gentle movement of your breathing and the sounds around you, taking a moment to appreciate this simple experience of being here. Thank you for taking this time for yourself. And remember, the next time life feels a little too much, you can always look up. The sky is still there, and you don’t have to carry the whole universe on your shoulders.
