Guided Mountain Meditation

Sit with a straight back, your head held erect on your neck and shoulders, allow the shoulders to fully relax. And place your hands on your knees. Bring your attention to the flow of your breathing. Feeling each inbreath and each outbreath. Just observing your breathing without trying to change it or regulate it in any way. Allowing the body to be still. 

And as you sit here, picturing in your mind’s eye as best you can the most beautiful mountain that you know or have seen or can imagine.  Observing its overall shape, its lofty peak high in the sky, the large base rooted in the rock of the earth’s crust, its steep or gently sloping sides. Noticing how massive it is, how solid, how unmoving, how beautiful both from afar and up close.  A centred, rooted, unmoving presence.

Now as you sit here becoming aware of the fact that as the sun travels across the sky, the light and shadows and colors are changing virtually moment by moment. Night follows day and day follows night. A canopy of stars, the moon, then the sun. Through it all, the mountain just sits, experiencing change in each moment. Constantly changing, yet always just being itself. It remains still as the seasons flow into one another and as the weather changes, moment by moment, and day by day. Calmness abiding all change.

By becoming the mountain in our meditation practice, we can link up with its strength and stability and adopt it for our own.  It may help us to see that our thoughts and feelings, our preoccupations, our emotional storms and crises, even the things that happen to us, are very much like the weather on the mountain. We tend to take it all personally but its strongest characteristic is impersonal. The weather of our own lives is not to be ignored or denied. It is to be encountered, honored, felt, known for what it is and held in awareness. And in holding it in this way, we come to know a deeper silence, and stillness, and wisdom. Mountains have this to teach us and much more if we can come to listen.

Adapted from: Mindfulness Meditation, CD Series 2, Jon Kabat-Zinn