
When we feel centred, we feel good. Gone is the sense of being crowded or rushed. What remains is a lovely spacious quality that is profoundly healing. Try this exercise while you’re sitting. With a bit of familiarity you’ll be able to do it while standing or even when walking.

Sit comfortably and take a few full deep breaths. All the way in and all the way out. As you exhale let the body relax into the chair; deeper and deeper.

Front
With your eyes open, become aware of the space in front of you. Note the various objects and get a feeling for the distance they are from you. In your imagination, look right through and beyond them. If you are sitting in a room, you may see the wall and then imagine the street on the other side of the wall and the houses across the road and the trees behind them and the beach and the sea and the sky and so on. Extend your sense of space in front as far as your imagination will allow. The main thing is to develop a tangible feeling of a vast space in front of you.

Behind
Then go through the same process behind. Imagine you have eyes in the back of your head and expand the feeling of space as far as you can in that direction. Add this to the feeling of space in front so that you are held in a sandwich of space.

Right and Left
Now do the same process with the right direction and then with the left. Strengthen the sense that you are at the centre of an infnitely large wheel of space.

Up and Down
Finally, become aware of the space above you. Extend it up, through the roof and out to the stars. Then add the awareness of the space below; the foor, the ground, the bedrock and possibly right out the other side of the planet. Once you have established all of these directions, (front, back , right, left, up, and down) then intensify the feeling of being in the centre of a vast sphere of space. Recognise the quality of mind that is present at this moment. It may feel wonderfully calm and at the same time very alert.

Try taking this state into your daily life. With practice, you will be able to contact the feeling of being spaciously centred in but a matter of seconds.


This meditation is excerpted from Meditative First Aid by Tarchin Hearn, you can download or read online the whole booklet here: https://wangapeka.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/EbookMeditativeFirstAid.pdf