This is a guided meditation on the poem The Guest House, a poem by the 13th century Sufi, Rumi. The poem can be used as a guide for meditation. In this poem, Rumi takes quite a familiar metaphor, you find it in various Buddhist stories going back quite a long time before Rumi. You'll find it in the Sufi stories as well, this metaphor of a guest house, or a host, and the notion of visitors or guests arriving and leaving. So, it's a lovely metaphor of how the host, symbolising our true self or our true nature, or simply awareness, and the guest being the contents of our awareness. Be they simple sensations, perceptions, or more complicated forms of thoughts and feelings and emotions, and clusters of thoughts and feelings, such as depression. These guests may stay only momentary or they may stay a little bit longer. But the key metaphor is the fact that the constant background or the space in which all the guests come, that is our true nature or awareness, remains a constant presence. Indeed, it is the timeless presence, the now that is always here and always now. And the guests, of course, are transient, constantly coming and going, coming and going.
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