Floating leaves, floating thoughts

Using the image of leaves floating through the air, this meditation helps you observe thoughts without engaging them. You’ll practice shifting attention to the space around thoughts. A calming way to settle down and feel more easy.

Why this helps? Open awareness creates space from thoughts instead of being tangled up in them.

Transcript

Setting The Sky Scene

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For this open awareness meditation, you're going to imagine a big, big blue sky on a warm, sunny fall day. Imagine you're walking to the park and it's warm in the sun, and you see a big old tree over in a vast field, and you go over to it, and you stand under that tree, and as you look up into the tree, you see how very big and wide it is, an old tree with big branches stretching out across and above into the big vast sky. You see all the colors of the rainbow, vibrant reds, soft yellows, flaming oranges, and deep greens, the leaves all floating down on this calm breezy fall day, and between the leaves and the branches the big, big blue sky above, stretching out infinitely into space in all directions, deeply blue and vast. And as the breeze blows, the leaves fall and float away, all the colorful leaves falling and floating away in the wind into the vast blue sky. Thoughts are like leaves. If they appear in your awareness, just let each one float on by. Like the many colored leaves falling all around you, just let them float by. You can move your attention from the leaves to the big vast blue sky, visualizing the bright clear blue sky extending from behind and in between the leaves and branches. Notice the space between or behind the leaves and the branches, the vast open sky. Infinite, stretching in all directions. The sky is like your awareness, and the leaves are like your thoughts, floating in the space of awareness. Continue on with this visualization for as long as you like, noticing what it feels like to gain some space from thoughts, just allowing them to float by like leaves, floating, colorful leaves floating in the sky of your awareness, and see what it feels like to shift from looking at the leaves to looking at the space between the leaves and the branches of the tree to the blue sky. So just keep visualizing this vast blue sky, infinite and spacious, with all the beautiful, colorful leaves floating away in the breeze.