Here is the link to the guided meditation. I encourage you to first read through the description and the meditation transcript below prior to your practice.
Meditation Description and Preparation:
Please read through the following description and the meditation transcript below prior to your practice.
If you do not feel ready to connect with yourself through this meditation, please honor that.
Please respect your present capacity to engage in opening your body, heart, and mind.
Our capacity for openness, receptivity, and mindfulness are cyclical and ever-changing, just like every other experience and energy in our lives.
If, in this moment, you do not feel resourced, prepared, or ready, please respect this and wait for a more auspicious time to engage in mindful awareness.
For this meditation and with great respect, I am using the Zen Buddhists’ term “shoshin” which refers to “Beginner’s Mind”.
During this meditation, we will practice cultivating Beginner’s Mind.
Beginner’s Mind is a practice that can free us from expectations, judgments, habitual, unconscious living, dis-embodiment, comparisons, and assumptions.
When we cultivate Beginner’s Mind, we engage with the world, our experiences, and the present moment as if we are experiencing them for the first time.
Beginner’s Mind is similar to how children engage with the world, with an open mind, heart, and soul, and with enthusiasm and excitement found in the ordinary. Because children are able to engage this way, the mundane becomes sacred.
Beginner’s Mind asks us to come to each moment with curiosity. With fresh eyes. Without expectations. Free from our past experiences, ideas, and memories.
Beginner’s Mind helps us to sharpen our focus on what is present. It helps us to awaken to, what meditation teacher Tara Brach calls, “the life that is right here”.
With this practice, we can learn to awaken all of our senses as if for the first time; and as we do so, open our connection to the “life that is right here”.
The research has shown that a practice of mindfulness is very effective in creating more satisfying and pleasurable sexual experiences.
Mindfulness helps us to be present without judgment. It helps us to manage our distractions more effectively.
Judgment and distractions are two things that prevent us from experiencing more vibrant, alive, and energetic sexual experiences. When we can manage them more effectively through a practice of mindful awareness, we set ourselves up to have more awakened sexual experiences.
Mindfulness helps us to be present in our body, with our sensations and our sexual energy, as well as our sexual experiences without judgment. It also frees us from comparison; from comparing ourselves to others, to images, to myths, past partners, or our own past experiences.
When we are more fully present in our body/sensations and our heart/ emotions without judgment we are more receptive and positively attuned to the experience.
I encourage you to come to this practice regularly. The more you practice Beginner’s Mind, the more you will be able to adopt this approach during sexual activity.
>> LINK to the Beginner’s Mind Meditation
Transcript of the Meditation:
Come into a comfortable position. Close your eyes.
Notice your body and how it comes into contact with the chair or whatever you are sitting or lying on. Notice how this feels. Pay attention without expectation.
Begin to deepen your breath. Inhale to the count of 5 and exhale to the count of 5. With each inhale, let the breath fill up your belly. With each exhale, empty your belly completely.
Breathing in for a count of 5, filling, receiving; breathing out for a count of 5, emptying, letting go.
As you empty your belly, imagine that all your expectations, preconceived notions, distractions, judgments, comparisons and assumptions are also leaving your mind and heart and body.
Pay attention to your breath as if for the very first time. Notice how the in-breath feels in your nostrils, the temperature and texture.
Notice how it flows down your throat, into your lungs, and diaphragm. Notice how it fills your belly just like a ballon. Notice what this feels like.
Name the sensation if you can. But don’t get stuck on it, just let it come and go.
As you exhale, release all your expectations and thoughts, and sensations with the breath. Notice what it feels like to be empty, free, unattached.
When you take in your next breath, pay attention as if it is the very first time you are inhaling. Notice how this breath carries the energy of life into your very being.
As you exhale, notice as if for the first time, what it feels like to empty yourself completely.
Tune into the sensations in your body. What kind of sensations are present? Where do you feel them in your body? Be curious without judgment. Be compassionately aware.
Feel the clothes on your skin, or the wrap of a soft blanket, or your hands resting on your lap.
What do you feel? What is the temperature? The pressure? The texture? How do these sensations reside in your body? Feel these experiences as if for the first time. What arises in your consciousness?
Take a moment to acknowledge these simple sensations as if this is the first time you are tuned into your body.
Notice how these sensations and your body hold the energy of the erotic life force.
Our erotic energy resides in the subtle, nuanced moments that require us to pay attention, to notice, to tune in, awakening as if for the first time.
As you tune in, acknowledge that you are connecting more deeply to the erotic energy, the life force itself as it resides within you.
Keeping your eyes closed, listen to the sounds around you.
How do the sounds you are hearing land in your body?
Do they feel inviting, comforting, distracting, annoying, soothing?
Notice sound as if for the first time. Listen as a child would. Open to the possibilities. Do not be attached or burdened by expectation or routine or sameness.
Let yourself listen with fresh ears, with curiosity and compassionate awareness.
Take a moment to notice any other sensations.
What are you seeing behind your closed eyes?
Are there any fragrances in the air?
Notice whatever is present without expectation, assumptions, or comparison. Practice being curious, open, and receptive.
Breathe into the experience as if for the very first time.
Now settle into the present moment. Allow whatever emotion or thought that arises to flow through you. Name the emotion or the thought, without judging it.
Notice how you can be aware and non-attached to your thoughts or emotions. Notice how they come and go like waves.
Notice how you can come back into the present moment with a beginner’s mind. Curious, nonjudgmental, compassionate, and free of expectations.
Pay attention to any awareness or awakening happening within you now. In this moment, the energy of the life force, the erotic, is humming and flowing throughout your entire being. The more we are awake and aware, the more we will connect to this energy.
Notice as if for the very first time your engagement with the erotic energy flowing through every sensation, every moment. You can connect with this energy anytime by coming into mindful awareness, being present. Using a beginner’s mind.
Now let’s transition. Beginning to bring your consciousness back to the room you are in.
Take a deep breath in for the count of 5, filling your belly. Exhale for a count of 5 emptying your belly.
Slowly bring your awareness back into the room.
Rub your hands together. Wiggle your toes and fingers.
Cover your closed eyes with your hands and blink open your eyes. Slowly lower your hands when you are ready.
As you return to your day, see if you can use a beginner’s mind as much as possible in your experiences or interactions.
Next time you prepare for any kind of sensual/sexual activity you can practice this meditation to help bring you into a beginner’s mind with your sexual experiences.
Post-Meditation Suggestions
If it feels good and relevant to you, please journal after this meditation. Write about what this meditation experience felt like. If you would like, you can journal every time you practice, and track the changes you experience.
You can also journal after your sexual experiences in which you practiced mindful awareness and beginner’s mind.
Making sure as you journal you do so with compassion and non-judgment.
If you are interested in learning more about my Wild Belonging course, I’ll be making additional announcements on Instagram. You can follow my Instagram channel here (@ryancouplestherapy).