In the Holding Your Breath exercise, we created an artificial uncomfortable situation as a way to practice turning towards something unpleasant and experimenting with how the way we react to it can influence how it affects us. Now we're going to learn a meditation in which we deliberately bring a difficulty to mind, turn towards this difficulty, invite it in and make it the focus of our attention, and then work with it through wherever we’re experiencing it in our body.
Before starting this meditation, you’re going to gently bring to mind a difficulty that you’re experiencing. This could be:
If you're not experiencing anything like this right now, you could choose something that’s been weighing on you recently that you’ve been struggling with, or you could bring up something from the past that's been bothering you. It doesn’t have to be something extreme; anything that you’ve been dealing with that’s been troubling you at all is fine. In fact, when you first start practicing this meditation, you probably don’t want to focus on anything too strong or unpleasant or uncomfortable, unless you're already in the midst of something like that, in which case, since it’s already here, you may as well invite it in.
Take a moment to find some difficulty you’re comfortable inviting in and exploring. Please don't force yourself to bring up anything very unpleasant that you'd rather not have to deal with right now, just choose something you're comfortable working with. Then, on the next page we’ll learn and practice the Allowing in a Difficulty and Working With it Through the Body meditation.