The following meditation is led by Tara Brock, meditation teacher, psychologist and author.

Closing your eyes and feeling the sitting posture from the inside out, meaning just sense

if there's a quality of sitting upright and also quality of ease.

Take some moments just to let go a little.

Notice if there's any areas of obvious tightness or tension.

Bring a gentle listening kind of attention to the heart area.

And just notice the state of your heart right now.

For some, this might be the first time you've really checked in with yourself today or in the last week or whatever.

It's really listening in sense.

Whatever mood, whatever quality of wanting or fearing, openness, closeness, numb, sensitive.

How's your heart right now?

You might deepen that listening and sense what your intention is for tonight.

Your intention for this meditation.

So you're sensing into where you feel most sincere, where there's perhaps a longing, a sense of what really matters.

One of the most direct portals to presence is awakening and relaxing through this meditation.

You might begin by feeling the area of the eyes and the brow and just softening the eyes, letting the brow be smooth.

You might even sense a smile spreading through the eyes, lifting the corners of the eyes a bit.

Receptive, present, relaxed.

Feeling the mouth relax, the jaw unhinged.

See if you can relax deep into the root of the tongue.

You might again sense a slight smile forming at the mouth, the inside of the mouth smiling.

Widening the attention just to feel the face, tingling, vibrating, still liveness at the face.

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