Home Base: January 4 - 10

My Imaginary Meditation Space

I'm heading into my fourth year of mindful blogging. At the start of a new year, I like to revisit the building blocks of a daily meditation practice. Let's start with establishing a mindful home. Abiding in the here and now happens on 3 dimensions: 1. Physical space

2. Inner landscape

3. Home base

Physical space means creating a peaceful spot within your dwelling. This could be a quiet corner in a room with natural light, a comfortable chair where you can sit without discomfort, a weathered rock at the beach, or an entire room dedicated to reflection. Fill it with sacred objects, pictures of loves ones, candles and flowers. This is the least essential element. I've meditated on a plane, waiting in line at Trader Joe's and in the waiting room of the doctor's office.

Inner landscape is composed of your dreams, memories, worries, old patterns, thoughts, emotions, and all the stuff you carry around in your head and heart consciously and unconsciously. No matter how Zen-like your physical space, you bring all of your mental clutter into mindfulness. That is the whole point of the practice, to become intimately aware of your interior life. Mindfulness invites in and makes space for the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Home base is where your inner world intersects with your outer world. Traditionally this is called an anchor. It could be the movement of the breath in the body or the feeling of the hand on the heart. Jeff Warren, a gifted meditation teacher, uses the phrase home base as the place in the body where we rest our awareness and return over and over again. My breath is my home base and my place of refuge. Even after many years of practice, I continue to discover how the breath holds me and grounds me.

Practice

I'm convinced this first building block of mindfulness could be the only thing you practice for the rest of your life, and you would become a wise and compassionate human being.

Let's meditate. Arrive home to yourself. Pay attention to your physical surrounding, the walls that protect you, the familiar objects that fill the shelves, the sounds of your day. Feel the chair you are sitting in and sense your feet on the earth. Open to all of your senses. Arrive home.

Show up as your full self. Acknowledge your thoughts and feelings. Honor your emotions. All are here to protect you and teach you. Make room for everything. All are welcome. No need to change anything. Arrive home to your inner landscape.

Find your home base. Is it the sound of your breath? Is it the warmth of your hand resting over your heart? Is it the vibration of life pulsing in your hand and feet? Is it imagining grace surrounding you like the sun at the start of the day? Is it love or gratitude that always abides deep within your heart? You know best which of these feels most like home.

Linger in this place. Feel the shape of it. This is your home base. Claim it as your own. Remember the path through your inner landscape to this place. Also know that thoughts will distract you. Worries will sweep you away. The demands of the day will call you away. When this happens, remember to return to your home base. This is the heart of the practice - learning to return home again and again and again.

Visit your home base every day, many times during the day, even for just seconds at a time. Even as you depart from here, allow part of your awareness to remain.