The World Could Be Otherwise: Imagination and the Bodhisattva Path

by Norman Fischer

How do you do it? Sit down in meditation posture and come into connection with your body and breath. Let yourself relax, and focus your attention not so much on your thoughts, feelings, or sensations as on the spaciousness that surrounds them. Mind or awareness itself is wide, without boundary. Within this wide openness—always there, though you may not have noticed it before—thoughts and feelings arise and pass away. Some of them you like; some of them you don’t. Usually you are focused on the feelings and thoughts. Now shift your focus a bit. Let thoughts and feelings slip into the background and allow the background spaciousness to come forward. Settling down and paying attention to body and breath will absorb the free-floating anxiety that is usually there in your mind without your knowing it. This enables you to relax and let go into that generous spaciousness. Sit in the midst of it. You can say to yourself, “This is life: body, breath, consciousness. I share it with everyone and everything. It holds and protects me.”