Ep. 290: Sitting on 6-23-26 (BBSSBB meditation & "What is our life about?")

So the meditation practice that I learned from Elizabeth that we're going to do tonight is called BBSSBB.

It's an acronym that stands for different components or different things that we're going to bring our awareness to for the course of the meditation.

So you have a sense of where we're going.

I'm just gonna tell you what each of those letters stands for, but not so that you have to remember, because you don't need to, but just because sometimes it's nice to have a sense of, oh, this is the direction we're going in.

There won't be any surprises, all right? So the first B stands for balance, where we just sort of check in with how our body feels balanced in our cushion or in our seat.

Then the next B stands for breath.

We're just checking the sensations of the breath.

Then the first S stands for sensations.

And we'll check in with sensations in various parts of the body, starting with the head and then moving down in sections.

And just literally noticing what kind of sensations do I feel in my head? What kind of sensations do I feel in my torso, in my arms? in my legs.

Okay, that's it.

Just sort of checking in with how is the body feeling internally? And then once we've had that kind of strong foundation with the inner awareness, we move it outer and we check in with the sounds around us.

The second S stands for sounds.

And just like with the sensations, just means being aware.

What are the sounds around us? Checking and listening, okay? And then the next B stands for boundary.

where we bring our awareness specifically to the boundary of the body, the skin.

We feel the quality of the air on any exposed skin we have.

We feel the sensations of the clothes that we're wearing on our body, especially as parts of the body that are moving as we breathe.

The feeling of what's covering your torso as your chest and belly move.

Can you feel the slight contact that cloth is making against your skin? So checking out the boundaries of the body.

And then the final B stands for boundless.

Remove our awareness beyond the boundaries of the body and just feel the space around us.

Feel the space of this room and perhaps even beyond the room.

At first, that may seem merely metaphorical, just an idea, something you have to visualize, but actually it's possible to feel literally not just what's in the the skin bag right but what's beyond it as well you know our awareness is not bounded by the body you know we can feel the space around us right and so it's asking us to tune into that and so all those taken together together right bbssbb it's like think it's just a way of checking like this is what we can be aware of know all just concrete things that any ordinary person who has no experience with meditation would be able to recognize and make sense of but saying every moment all of this is available to us and yet we're so often not aware of all that right and so it's a way of actually just saying and what else and what else is part of your awareness check in be here now fully so often when we think of being here now we think of only the breath or something narrow, a narrow band of our present moment experience.

But actually our experience is wide and deep.