Find a comfortable position.
Let your body settle.
And when you're ready,
Gently close your eyes.
Notice the natural rhythm of your breath exactly as it is.
Feel the surface beneath you,
The weight of your body.
And with each out breath.
Feel the body soften a little,
More into the stillness.
Many of us spend our days trying to feel bigger.
More significant,
More certain of our place and importance.
We carry the weight of that effort everywhere we go.
But there is another experience,
Rarer and I think much more nourishing.
That goes in the opposite direction.
The experience of feeling genuinely,
Wonderfully small.
Not diminished or insignificant.
Small in the way you feel when you're stood at the edge of the sea and the horizon stretches further than the eye can hold.
Small in the way that you might feel beneath a glorious sky full of stars.
Small in the way that is actually,
If you let it be,
A profound relief.
Because when we feel that kind of smallness,
Something happens.
Problems that felt enormous begin to find their actual size.
The weight we've been carrying realises it doesn't have to be carried by us alone.
We remember in the body,
Not just the mind.
That we are part of something much larger than ourselves.
Let us go there.
Bring to mind a moment,
Real or imagined,
When the natural world stopped you,
When something so beautiful or so vast or so quietly extraordinary caught you off guard.
And just for a second.
The ordinary noise of your life.
When quiet.
Maybe it was the sky,
The particular colour of it at dusk.
Or the first stars appearing.
Or the light breaking through a cloud that almost felt intentional.
Maybe it was the sea,
That particular roar and pull and ancient indifference of it.
The way it moves without asking your permission.
The way it has been moving since long before you were born and will be moving long after you've gone.
And how that continuity,
Rather than being frightening,
Somehow feels like a comfort.
Perhaps it is something smaller.
A single spider's web,
Threaded with dew in the early morning.
Lycan on a stone.
Silver grey and growing so slowly it barely seems to move.
And yet it's been growing for longer than any of us have been alive.
Or a tree so old it has witnessed centuries of human lives quietly from its roots.
Allow whatever comes to be your moment.
Let yourself be in it fully.
And notice what happens in your body when you really let it in.
Maybe something opens or loosens.
Perhaps the chest expands.
The sense of being the center of everything.
With all the exhausting responsibility that carries.
Maybe it softens into something more like belonging.
You are small,
You are held,
And those two things are not opposites,
They are the same gift.
The Earth has been here long before you.
You'll be here long after.
And right now,
Right in this moment.
You are part of it.
Woven into it.
Made of the same matter as the stars and the soil and the sea.
Your worries are real.
Your life is real.
And it is also,
In the most beautiful way,
Very,
Very small.
And the world is very,
Very large.
And that largeness,
That vastness is holding you.
Allow these affirmations to find you from that open expansive place.
I am small.
I am held.
Both are true.
I belong to this earth and this earth holds me.
Or is available to me in the ordinary world.
Every day.
Now begin to bring your awareness back.
Notice the space around you,
The surface below you the sounds,
The weight of your body in this moment.
Bring your attention to the natural rhythm of your breath.
And when you're ready,
Gently open your eyes.
And an invitation to come back to this practice whenever you need to remember how held you are.
