Coming Home to the Breath - Nothing to Accomplish

Meditation should be as easy as a child dreaming nice thoughts, but we run into our active minds, our worried minds, we have distractions, we worry we’re not doing it right..... there are so many ways we can lose self-compassion and increase our personal stress.

Any sense of positive self-regard goes out the window. People begin meditation with high hopes, then come crashing down when they run into their own critical minds. Their self-compassion and self-acceptance go right out the door. Stress isn’t reduced, it increases.

They tell themselves they just can’t do it and blame themselves.

This meditation offers a remedy for that. We bring the freshness of a child meeting an experience for the first time, without expectations.

Click to Hear the meditation: Coming Home to the Breath

We set an intention just to notice the breathing, without any goals or wish to attain anything special.

Just to be aware of the breath as best we can in the moment.

We enter this meditation with no agenda for change.

Our only intention is to be here now.

We intend to meditate without effort, or as effortless we can in the present moment.

We just want to observe or breath and let it be. If we lose track of our breathing because of thinking or emotions, then we just begin anew on the next breath.

In a sense this approach is an embodiment of The Heart Sutra, one of the key teachings of Zen Buddhism.