The following meditation is led by Tara Brock.

To access more of my meditations or join my email list, please visit TaraBrock.com.

Welcome. It is a pleasure to be together again and I'm as I was meditating. I was feeling

how very real and meaningful it is to belong together in a field like this and how hard it would have been to imagine in the past that it was possible.

And yet here it is manifesting. So again, it's really just feels wonderful to connect in this way.

I wanted to start the morning meditation instruction period with what we sometimes call the art of practice.

Just a bit of a kind of a big picture of the art of practice. And most meditations that you'll find around the world have one or both of two elements.

And one of the elements is to in some way concentrate or focus or direct the attention.

And this is where we choose an anchor like the breath of the body or sounds. The anchor can be changing. We can have an anchor of the body and systematically do a body scan.

That's a way of collecting the attention and grounding. You can choose several touch points in the body and just move from one to the next.

For some people it's listening to sound. Some people it's moving through a mantra set of words that are meaningful like meta, the loving kindness phrases that we choose.

And the purpose of this style of directing the attention is to quiet the mind to collect the attention and actually increase the the strength and the penetration of our attention.

And also can be to cultivate inner states like peace, like love to cultivate love compassion. We're directing the attention in purposeful ways.

So that's one category. The other category is mindfulness and mindfulness is that non judging, receptive awareness that recognizes what's going on right here and now.

It understands that look sees feels the nature of reality, right as it is, just as it is.

And as you might imagine the two elements in many styles of meditation come together. So you may be collecting the attention with the breath, but you're also being mindful of the breath.

Are you might be resting in mindfulness and periodically collect or come back to a primary anchor to strengthen the sense of a steady mind to quiet the mind again.

But here's the thing. Each of you is ultimately customizing these elements to work with your particular body mind conditioning.

And so we give instructions, but there's inevitably going to be ways that you have to kind of not listen and really attend to, well, what does this body mind need right now in this moment.

And you might get some habits of how you meditate, but actually it's really important to keep staying fresh and sensing, okay, right now what serves.

So there's a kind of fresh listening that we're doing all the time.

And what you'll find is that for most of us anyway, we need some purposeful collecting, focusing, the more concentrated kind of practice at the beginning of a formal meditation.

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