Instructions: How to Bend a Spoon
Choose a simple spoon - not so thick that it's overwhelmingly challenging to your mind and not so thin that it can be easily bent by hand.
1. Sitting in a relaxed, comfortable position, hold the spoon between your fingertips.
2. Bring your attention to your heart space.
3. Allow your mind to become quiet or allow the mind chatter to drop into the background.
4. Keeping your awareness anchored in your heart space, expand it to include the spoon. Get a sense of the energy of the spoon. Notice sensations you may be experiencing both in the spoon and in your hands.
5. Continuing to connect with your spoon while keeping your awareness anchored in your heart space, expand your awareness even further to include the energy above and below you and all around you. Allow that energy to move into your body, through your arms and out your hands into the spoon.
6. As you connect these energies together, allow yourself to imagine and feel inside of yourself, the experience of the spoon becoming flexible and malleable. Imagine the molecules and space inside the spoon expanding and softening.
7. As you continue paying attention to the spoon, feel the spoon soften and bend it.
Meditation Tips
Just let it rest there.
Do not fight against this. Acknowledge it and return your awareness to your heart. Do this each time you are distracted by thoughts, sounds, etc.
You are only inviting a deepening into the present moment. Sometimes my meditations are busy and filled with mind chatter. That’s okay. Each meditation is different.
I started with 5-minute segments. You may want to join a local meditation group for more information and support.
TIPS:
Heart Center: The energetic center for heart-centered awareness is located in the center of your chest about one inch below your clavicle bones. (The knobby bones just below where your neck meets your chest.)
Centering Yourself: Stand with your body like a tree with deep roots. The wind may blow your leaves around, storms may come and go, but you feel your solid core both reaching up into the sky and deeply into the earth.
Mind’s Eye: Your imagination. Some people find it helpful to bring their attention, or awareness to the internal center of your head.
Heart-Centered Awareness: We can know something (to have knowledge of something) from our minds and we can have a more intimate, direct experience of something by focusing our attention or awareness through the heart. Essentially, we see with the eyes of the heart.
Breathing: Our breathing helps us bring energy into our body and release any resistance, either physical, mental or emotional. By first acknowledging any tightness in your body, mind or emotions (without judgment) you can then breathe into is and on the out-breath, invite it (give it permission in this moment) to dissolve or dissipate. This helps us let go of resistance and surrender to the process.
Listening with your whole body: This is akin to “receiving the spoon,” or “taking it in,” and consists of a direct experience. To fully “experience” your spoon, engage all your senses and observe what you experience. Notice things like your impressions of weight, temperature, vibration, density, heaviness, lightness, the edges, flimsiness, hardness, roughness, coldness, heat, etc. Take it all in.
Holding an intention: When we hold an intention, we want something to happen. Visualize the spoon in your mind’s eye or imagination becoming flexible, fluid, mobile, etc. Visualize and imagine the sensations of the spoon becoming soft, flexible, fluid and mobile. When you do this, you are holding the intention that the spoon is malleable.