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Letting go meditation introduction

Welcome to a powerful guided meditation, led by Paula Chichester, that centers on the journey of self-love, loving others, and the art of letting go. This practice draws from Buddhist teachings and modern mindfulness techniques to help you release blockages that may be holding you back in everyday life. Through positive affirmations and visualization, we’ll tap into your inner peace and help you to move on from negative emotions and past experiences. Whether you’re a beginner or deepening an existing meditation practice, this session invites you to take deep breaths and be fully present, embracing the flow of life with mindfulness.

As Paula moves through the meditation script, you will explore the energy within your whole body and opening up pathways for positive energy to flow and just let go. You will connect with the present moment and the deeper, peaceful rhythms of life, much like Tibetan and Buddha-inspired meditations. This practice can be part of your morning meditation routine or serve as a sleep meditation, guiding you into a deep sleep with each out-breath. This journey of letting go and inviting love in is here to help you find inner peace and embrace life as it comes.

Settling into your meditation practice

Paula Chichester: Let’s begin by finding a comfortable position to sit. You can sit in a chair, you don’t have to have your back not resting on anything. You can even lie down. It is best to feel comfortable.

You can close your eyes or keep them slightly open.

If you are sitting with your back straight, then notice the position of your pelvis, which is your sitting bones.

If you’re sitting on a chair, or if you’re sitting on a cushion, then notice where your sit bones are in relation to what they’re sitting on, and maybe just rock your pelvis forward and back just very little bit to see if you can feel a situation that allows your belly to relax.

Make sure your pants are loose, so that you can maybe bring your attention down into the lower part of your body. Breathe into your belly, quietly.

Noticing the breath

Begin to notice your body. How we’re breathing. And if breathing into our belly isn’t easy, that’s okay.

Just feel our breath all inside of our lungs. Like we’re filling up our lungs. Allowing our breath in our lungs to hold our backs up.

If you’re lying down, that doesn’t matter. But feel as if by taking a full breath, your spine is somewhat massaged and comforted. We feel our breath breathing into our back, expanding the lower ribs, and expanding under the hips.

As we breathe, expanding the breath into our collarbone area, then we also notice the position of our head on our spine. Maybe just the way we were just playing a little bit with our pelvis.

Playing a little bit with the way the head rests on the spine. Maybe just move your head around just a little bit. Maybe take your chin up and down. Find a place where your head feels more comfortable.

Maybe you need to bring your chin down a little bit more than usual, because we want to feel that the place in the back of our head, where the head reaches the spine, is somewhat open and relaxed, and that allows our jaw to relax, and our eyebrows to relax.

Feel like we’re breathing with our whole body we fill up our lungs on the inhale, and when we exhale, we imagine that that out-breath is not just going out our nose, or our mouth, but also going down our arms and our legs and out the crown of our head.

We begin to create some kind of relationship with this whole body, and we think, why am I doing this? Why am I sitting here?

I am here to heal myself so that I can heal the world.

The main attention we’re going to place during the whole meditation is we’re going to continue to follow our breathing in.

Not stressing, but just filling up the lungs, your whole body as much as possible in a very gentle way. And exhaling through the whole body.

This is like the baseline, like if we were rockin’ real bad, this is the bass and the drums, it’s always there, boom, boom, boom. Now we’re going to add to that the melody.

Visualizing love

We’re going to imagine that we are surrounded by all the people in our life, whether we know them personally or not, that bring us pleasure and love and joy when we think of them. Love us. People would like to love us. There have to be a few.

See if we can entertain, explore the idea, or the feeling—it’s more of a feeling—that as we breathe in, we’re going to breathe in this feeling of being loved, cared for, and just pretend, imagine.

If it helps, you can think of this love and care and concern pouring into all of your pores, your breath as you breathe in and filling this body with this sense of wellbeing, care, and love, which is what all creatures need.

We can imagine that there are hundreds and millions of beings around us, including animals and trees that are showering us with this sense of wellbeing and care and nurture.

Even if you don’t feel anything, just suspend your skeptic just for a while, pretend it’s coming in maybe in the form of a pink light, or a rainbow light, energy, humor me for a little bit, please.

When thoughts arise, like, I don’t believe this, or I don’t deserve this, or this is just bullshit, suspend that for a moment, and continue to focus on the breath.

Breathing in this care and concern. Let it fill up all the parts of us.

We feel like we’re a dry sponge that you put it in the water, and it soaks up all the water, and we’re allowing ourselves to soak up all the goodness.

Then we can shift the focus to all of these beings around us who are showering us with goodness and love to then thinking about their needs. What they need to be whole, well, happy, and joyful. Then, when we’re breathing in now, we’re breathing in the goodness for us. When we breathe out, we share it with all of them.

It comes into all of our pores, it fills up all of our body. It energizes all the cells in our body so that they begin to vibrate with a sense of joy, receiving, and giving.

We receive not just from people, but from beautiful places, plants, earth, sun, sky, rain, and all the goodness of our world. We can just allow ourselves to absorb it, give it back.

We have this imagination of all these beings, the earth, the plants, and everything.

Then imagine that it’s all taking place in this spacious sky, like in a clear day. If you’ve ever laid down and looked up at the sky and watched the clouds disappear, then all these beings all around us, we’re going to just allow them to dissolve, disappear into this vast space around us.

The actual sense of the beings are gone, but the sense of this love that they’re receiving and giving is still there, in this big space. Take a moment to feel space behind you, on top of you, to the side of you. Like you’re sitting on top of a big hill breathing.

Take a moment to notice the mind, the “me” that’s breathing in, breathing out. There’s a sense of an agent, isn’t there? I am breathing.

If we can take our attention, focus attention, instead of out in space around us, to the space inside of us.

If we can feel that this sense of “me” can also dissolve into this space, like a cloud dissolving in the sky, like an ice cube melting in the sea.

Still aware, we’re still breathing, that’s all.

Then we close our meditation. It’s a wish, may I be healed, may I have all the love I need, may my needs be met, may I be able to ask appropriately for my needs.

May you be healed, may your needs be met, may you be happy, may you be able to ask appropriately, and may we all create an inner landscape of friendship; where I am my own best friend, where I am free to love myself, to forgive myself, as I love you and forgive you.

We are all just doing the best we can.

Credits