Here is a recap of the Cultivating Serenity Meditation Practice.
This is a meditation for developing calm and alertness. It’s aim is to allow you to be more useful in everyday life.
Meditation on Cultivating Serenity
These are the 10 key phrases of the contemplation.
Meditation Posture – Sitting in Chair
Meditation on the Breath
You can wet your finger and touch the centre of your upper lip to mark the preferred spot.
Review of Meditation
We do a review using a circle practice. We start off with Body and Focus, and later extend the review to include Mindfulness and Attitude.
More Detail
The meditation can be lengthened or shortened. Here are some notes on a longer version, and on a shorter version. The shorter version can be used at any place or time when you need to re-group.
Cultivating Serenity – Go!
Here is a mind-map of the main words and sub-words to create a feeling of calm and alertness. In class, I made an analogy to a Cat poised on a branch patiently waiting to pounce on a bird. It is ready, alert, calm, patient, and open. The cat eventually leaps. It goes!
The point of this variation is to counter our North American societal belief that meditation is an exercise in numbing our selves, to calm down. This meditation provides the experience of being hyper alert to our senses while being calm, grounded, and safe. We experience being ready to act in a clear and crisp way. We can turn into the events in front of us. We are ready. We leap. We Go!
Serenity Words — Personal Check-in
This can be done at the beginning of any sit as a quick checkin. It helps us contact our ground and settle. It’s also useful if you get lost, simply re-start from the Ground.
Here is a mind-map of the main words and sub-words.
ps.You can be playful and identify your own sub-words. The point is to develop a process to settle into your meditation sit.
Credit
A big Thank You to Bonni Ross for introducing me to this work
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