Guided Meditations

Mahamudra — The Diamond Realm of Mind

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• Take a comfortable seat, and fix your body still.
• Focus for a few moments on your breath, to get the mind settled.
• As you focus on the breath, relax your control of the breath, so that the body breathes automatically, and you are simply watching it.
• Start to get a clear feeling of being simply the watcher. Cultivate a state of mind where you are in the back seat, and someone else is driving.
• Now, take this same watcher state of mind, and turn it to your thoughts. Relax and let the thoughts rise at will—you are no longer the thinker, you are simply watching whatever arises.
• Whenever any thought or picture surfaces in the mind, be careful not to grasp onto it or let yourself fall into that thought. Keep yourself at a distance, as the watcher, and simply observe.
• Observe how each thought or picture rises from a state of nothingness, and then dissipates back into nothing.
• Next, observe how with each passing thought, your awareness is colored by the object it is focused on.
• See how the watcher arises together with each passing object of thought. See how the watcher too is just a moment-to-moment karmic ripening. There is no fixed, solid awareness; there is only the moment of experience.
• Then as you watch, turn your mind to emptiness— see each and every passing thought or picture that arises as lacking any real substance—nothing but a ripple on the surface of your awareness, nothing but a moment of mind.
• As you hold this watcher state of mind, the ripples of thought start to fade. Concentrate then on the space between the thoughts. Explore that silence. Ask yourself a question then: what is awareness without any object to be aware of? What is a watcher without anything to watch?
• Focus the mind then on the emptiness of the watcher itself—how your very awareness is nothing but a moment-to-moment ripening, with no real nature of its own.