I'd like to invite you to begin by taking a couple of slow breaths in through your nose,
Out through your mouth,
Making your exhale a little bit longer than your inhale.
One more inhaling through your nose and exhaling out through your mouth slowly.
I invite you to bring your awareness now to where your seat meets the chair,
The base of your spine,
And to imagine that there is a root that can grow from your body,
Down through the floor,
Through the subfloor,
Through the foundation of the building you're in,
All the way down into the soil.
Sending it down until you feel it anchoring in,
Your earth meeting the earth.
And through this cord,
You can send down away from your body anything that needs to be composted or given back to the earth today.
And you can also draw up any nourishment that you need,
Seeing it come up this root and pool in the lower part of your body,
Making you heavy but not stagnant,
Steady like the base of a mountain.
Then I invite you to bring your awareness up through your core,
Your chest,
Your neck,
Your face,
All the way up to the crown of your head.
And imagining that there's a small string that can travel up from the crown of your head,
Through the ceiling,
Through the roof,
Through the sky,
Through the atmosphere,
All the way until it connects to a star.
And again,
Using this connection as a way to give up and away any extra mental heat or activity that needs to go.
And you can also draw down starlight,
Stardust,
Sparkle,
Vitality,
Seeing it come down this little string into the crown of your head,
Into your face and neck and shoulders,
Around your heart until it meets the earth's energy.
It can even travel down through your root to be grounded into the earth.
So now you are this clear channel between earth and sky,
And these energies can just flow through you easily,
Gently,
Sending any earth energy where it's needed in your body,
Sending any starlight where it's needed in your body.
And when you're ready,
I invite you to just settle back into your breath and bring your awareness to your heart now and allow your heart to take you now to a beautiful landscape and see it in your mind's eye.
It could be a place that you've been to before or not.
Whatever appears first is perfect.
So you are here in this beautiful landscape now and you're safe.
You are absolutely safe here and your own wise and well ancestors are a loving presence surrounding this entire landscape,
Protecting you and allowing what needs to happen inside of this meditation to occur.
So you might notice that it's the autumn season in this landscape and it's starting to become dusk.
So notice what autumn is like here in this place.
What are the signs that show you that it's fall?
They may be obvious or subtle.
What do you see or hear or smell?
And the light is waning now,
But you don't have to be afraid.
As the darkness comes,
It feels soft.
It feels gentle and it is inviting you to become the autumn yourself.
So as the light wanes,
You feel your rigid sense of self waning too.
The boundaries between you and this landscape get soft,
Blurry,
Gentle.
Your awareness can loosen.
It can extend out beyond your body now and you can feel yourself becoming a part of the soil.
It's cool and moist and it smells so good.
Another part of you becomes the trees and the plants nearby.
Their leaves so gently falling away,
Their energy going down into their roots now.
Another part of you becomes the deer finding a soft place to lie down for the night.
You are big and fast and you contain the whole of this landscape within you now.
Feeling yourself as the fungi whispering to one another beneath the ground.
Feeling yourself as the cold snap in the air as the deepening darkness.
Your entire being extending out and joining the chorus that sings,
It is time to let go.
It is safe to fall asleep.
You don't have to hold on so tight.
Let go.
And your beloved dead surround you in this unbecoming.
They join you in this dissolution,
This letting go of anything that is untrue for you now.
You become the land just like they became the land.
And because you're no longer holding on so tight and there's this openness,
Anything in your being that has been decaying or dying or toxic can be digested by the earth now with ease.
In this darkness,
It's just quietly eaten,
Gone from you,
Composted.
This deep,
Dark night passes and there begins to be an almost imperceptible shift in the light as dawn approaches.
Your awareness has been roosted in an owl's nest,
But as the sun draws near,
You begin to draw yourself back together.
Your heart,
Your hands,
Your lungs,
Your skin,
All parts of you are recomposed,
But they can only carry that which is true for you now.
Old stories,
Old beliefs about yourself,
Old hurts,
Old ways of being that separate you from the earth are just left in the landscape.
Now they're part of the soil.
Feel the renewal,
The fresh beginning that's offered to you.
And softly,
Softly,
Softly,
The sunlight returns to this sleepy place.
And you are you again,
But different.
You became the autumn season for a night and that is not something that can be forgotten.
As the morning light grows,
You see the dew on the grass.
You feel the cold on your skin.
You take a deep breath and you let this world that you have visited fade away around the margins,
Knowing that you can always come back.
This place is just for you.
And so you return now to this world,
To this time,
To the room that you're in.
You feel the clothes on your skin,
You might wiggle your fingers and toes.
And when you're ready,
You can open your eyes.
Many blessings to you this season.
