1. Meditation is easy! Just patiently relax the invisible eyeball with infinite pupils in the center of your brain until is-ness softens.
2. Hum until your whole head is buzzing, then relax and let the tingles settle at the bottom of your feet like you are a snow globe.
3. Many animals use hair to detect extremely subtle vibrations. You are one such animal. Feel into your follicles, from your legs to your ears. From changes in the air to the thump of your own heart, sensation ripples across them constantly.
4. Give your complete, rapturous attention to a sneeze. Get completely out of the way of it, do not help it along. Let the exquisite build and climax progress on its own. Have fun tracking the exact moment it's over and relaxing into the emptiness it leaves (for a harder challenge, do this with stubbing your toe).
5. You are a puddle, music is rain.
6. Watch a video that makes you cringe, but do not cringe. Don’t contract any of your muscles as you watch it. Pay careful attention to what arises when your reaction is not expressed as contraction. Just ride the waves of energy it produces until they crash.
7. When your focus slips and you find yourself returning to the object of your focus, 𝘴𝘢𝘺 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘬 𝘺𝘰𝘶. Generate and send gratitude toward whatever element of yourself did that, because it was probably hard work and some appreciation will go a long way toward making it happen again.
8. Note the line between imagining feeling really good and feeling really good and then dissolve it with soft awareness.
9. Mouth to mouth resuscitate yourself. Imagine your body as cold, your heart as still, your lungs as empty. Breath life back into your body. Feel each system reboot, each nerve bundle light back up. Express gratitude to your savior.
10. Imagine an apple, rapidly rotating. as it is lowered into milk, the force of its movement sends sheets and tendrils of liquid hurling in every direction. Your heart churns and burns, that's ok. Listen to a dynamic song and let the energy of it fling love in every direction.
11. Literally ground. Lay face down on it. Feel its solidity. Let your tension leak into it. Ease up on the distinction between you and it.
12. “This vastness of awareness is still an object in awareness”.1
13. Next time you see your buddy, smile and say 'my buddy :) :) :)' to them, slowly and effusively. Notice what happens in your chest when you say it, and how it changes as they hear it. Play around with emphasis on certain syllables, for example 'my buddyyyyyyyy :)'.
14. Stop taking responsibility for your experience.
15. Consider that you may be overestimating how long the feeling you are avoiding will last if you let it catch up to you.
16. Drugs are keys to a door and you are the house. Find a window.
17. Depression is stillness, anxiety is literally awakening.2
18. Anything can be the focus-object of your meditation, including the desire not to meditate.
19. Freestyle EMDR: Pretend your eyes drank too much coffee. Let them romp and gallop and skitter-scatter around in your skull while resting a percentage of your attention on your emotional tone as you do.
20. Constrict your awareness to a tight laser beam, and try to bore a hole in an object in front of you. Then, as you start to fatigue, equally spread the light in that laser completely equally in all directions. Notice what happens to your muscles as you do.
21. Set up in front of a mirror and look, really look, at your asshole. Watch it breathe, watch it wink. It's as much a part of you as your eyes. Recall your fleshliness. Breathe.
22. Imagine getting up inside your brain, curling up next to your cortex, and just shushhhhhhhhing the shit out of it.
23. Your chest has been replaced by whatever divine material puppies' bellies are made of.
24. Your imagination is for more than mere visualization. Reach out with your other senses- can you feel the earth rotating? Can you feel it hurtling through inky infinity? Feel the benign but majestic flow of radioactive waves passing through your body.
25. Excess energy got you wound up? Try reverse kundalini. Let it all drain into the ground, right out of the bottom of your bottom. Trees share nutrients through their roots. Be a tree.
This one is from Rob Burbea
This wording is from Michael Taft
Bear with me, there’s a point: I held my husband as he died almost a year ago, and when I wrapped my arms around him one last time he exhaled into my ear because the force of my squeeze released the breath he’d died taking. I’ve spent so many of these months imagining that moment as the precipice of reanimation instead of finality. I wanted to breathe life back into him but couldn’t. So I’ve spent the last year barely being able to breathe myself. So, will be trying #9 tonight.
#13 knocked me sideways, but not in the way you might expect. I’ll confess, I misread it at first (don’t you dare judge me, I’m 77 and these eyes play tricks sometimes!). I thought it said: “Next time you see your BODY, smile and say ‘my buddy.’”
So off I went to the mirror. Now, I don’t always recognize that face looking back at me and I’ve been known to be a bit sharp with her. But I smiled and said, 'my buddy'. And oh, what a shift. In that moment I realized this reflection, this body, has been my truest friend all along. My guide. My teacher. And now, officially, 'my buddy'.
So thank you for this prompt. From here on out, every time I catch my reflection, she’s getting a smile and a “hey there, buddy.” Turns out misreading can be pure magic.