Sit quietly and relax tension in both body and mind. Start with a focus on the breath. Breathe naturally, without special effort, and let mind and awareness join with the breath, until you experience a sense of deep relaxation. Let this relaxation flow through the body, with a special focus on loosening the gut.
As the feeling of relaxation spreads, you can contact a part of experience not so tightly bound to the usual physical and mental structures.
Tarthang Tulku
Dynamics of Time & Space, Exercise 13
The wind was waving the leaves. Patches of bright sky speckled through. I breathed deeply and with the exhale, released what I was holding. I unfocused my eyes. In that un-focusing, shades of green and bright sky became diffused; the breeze stimulated shimmering light and color. Exhale again—sensations of sound and feeling expanded inward awareness. Thought-strings about what I was doing, and also feeling the widening spatial realization, allowed the thoughts to pass like strings of fireflies, and after the strings passed… more available space, the feeling of well-being suffused awareness, then airy thoughts about recognizing the feeling arose and passed un-grasped. The shimmering green and flickering sky seemed almost like a dream, as background sounds, and body-feeling filled the expansion of my beyond-body awareness.
Moments later, as I narrowed my focus, the objective leaves became more defined, and borders were more distinguishable. ‘Things‘ in my mind continued to arise, but they were accompanied by a vision of having just come from a more open and deeper perspective, and a more complete feeling of well-being. On this side of that deeper experience, I saw my own depth being more open than my normal gathering tendency to continuously fix to a specific point in time. That ‘seeing‘ showed a different kind of knowing than I am normally accustomed.