I would like to invite you to just close your eyes and let's just take a moment to tune

in together. Let these moments be ones of coming home, right, to your experience here. I'd

like to invite you to take a few full breaths. They're conscious, full breaths, inhaling deeply, maybe holding the breath for a moment and slowly let

you go. So the in-breath is opening to receive and the out-breath are relaxing, let it go. So even as the breath is in its natural rhythm, you can sense a collecting of your attention.

See if you can relax with the breath. Noticing if you scan through the body if there's any habitual tightness or clenching, see if you can soften a little.

Let your senses be awake. Where are the sounds around you? Where are the sensations in your body?

Aware without any judgment of whatever mood or emotion might be here.

It's feeling your intention for the evening, whatever line which it is that intended in some way to be present and awake.

So welcome to our final class in this series on meditation, this introduction to meditation.

What we've basically been exploring is how to cultivate mindfulness, how to sense this power of presence to awaken our natural wisdom and compassion.

We've been doing this as a kind of training that brings mindfulness first to this aliveness that's sitting right here, this awareness of sensation, and then how to bring mindfulness to the emotions that we sometimes call the inner weather systems that we live with, how to bring mindfulness to thinking, how to notice when we've been off in thoughts.

And in a deep way how this mindfulness can awaken us from what I often call this trance that we spend huge swaths of time in and bring us here.

So you might even just just start this moment, sense if you want to just close your eyes, just mentally say the word here, here, and sense the possibility of being awake, aware of your body and sensations,

aware of whatever thoughts might have been drifting through or still here, feelings.

So that as you open your eyes there's more of a consciousness of presence itself, which is the gift of practice.

One of the challenges as we enter the world of meditation is that we encounter a lot of different strategies.

And you might have noticed through these weeks or if you've been exposed through books and other classes, and this is true even in the mindfulness and vipassana tradition,

that you'll be instructed to pay attention to the breath perhaps or maybe to listen to sound mindfully, you might be guided to bring your attention to thoughts of loving kindness or thoughts of forgiveness, you might be guided to investigate your emotions in a certain way,

or maybe to do nothing and just rest and choice of awareness, but there's all these different approaches.

And you might go to one particular class and a meditation teacher will teach you a style, let's say, be with the breath, just really focus on the breath, and come away thinking, okay, that's meditation.

And what's so interesting to me is that the Buddha supposedly taught 84,000 skillful means, which are strategies for bringing our attention into presence.

And that's a lot, 84,000.

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