This is a centering practice to help us get present,
Open and connected.
We work with our body and with our nervous system and use our awareness to bring together the intelligence of our head,
Our heart and our body.
Through repetition this practice can help us become more embodied and support the creation of new ways of being and new habits.
You can do this practice sitting or standing.
If you're seated uncross your legs and place your feet on the floor.
If you're standing put your legs underneath your hips and soften your knees a little so that they're not locked.
So I invite you to drop your attention from your thinking down into your sensing and your feeling.
Our sensations always take us into the present moment so one of the quickest ways to become present is to feel and sense ourselves.
Let your attention follow the breath down into the body,
Noticing how the breath moves the body.
Feel your chest,
Your ribs,
Your belly moving with the breath.
Noticing the expansion and the contraction of the body as you breathe.
Notice the temperature in your body.
Places in the body that are warm or cool.
Notice places of relaxation or of tension,
Places of tightness or softness.
Perhaps you notice places of tingling,
Itchiness,
All other sorts of sensations.
There's no right or wrong here.
You don't have to be relaxed,
You just have to be as you are and be aware of how it is in this moment.
So we're practicing both awareness and acceptance.
This is where we start,
This is the truth of where we are right now.
And then bring your attention down to the center of your body,
To the center of your being,
To the center of your being.
This is where we start,
This is the truth of where we are right now.
And then bring your attention down to the center of your body,
So just a few centimeters below your belly button.
If you place your hand there,
You can feel the breath that's moving your hand.
And it can be a beautiful way to feel yourself from the inside,
From the inside out behind your hand.
So we're bringing our attention low into the body,
Into our center.
And then we're going to take time to center in four different directions.
Dimensions or aspects of our being.
So we're going to start with our length,
Centering in our length.
So settle your way down into the lower body,
Into your seat if you're sitting,
Or all the way down to your feet if you're standing.
Really feel that,
Pull that connection downwards,
Letting gravity hold you.
And from there,
See if you can lengthen through your entire body up to the crown of your head,
Creating space between all the vertebrae in the spine.
So that now you're both allowing yourself to settle down into your feet,
Into your sit bones,
As well as lengthening up at the same time.
So you're sitting or standing tall in your full length.
See if you can find a sense of sitting or standing in your full length.
See if you can find a sense of sitting or standing in your dignity,
In this balance between the lower parts of the body and the upper parts of the body.
The connection to the ground and the connection to the space above your head.
Sitting or standing tall in your inherent dignity.
And from that length,
We're going to center in the second dimension in our width.
So bring your awareness to a sense of widening out from side to side,
From left to right,
Feeling the widening across the face,
Ear to ear,
Across your shoulders and collarbones.
Maybe you feel the widening of your torso with your breath.
As you're breathing in,
Feeling the way the ribs widen to the sides,
Hips,
And the width of the soles of your feet.
And if you'd like,
You can stretch your arms out to the left and to the right to feel into a widening beyond your own physical body.
So stretching your arms out to the sides to let your aliveness,
Your energetic body come all the way out.
Finding a way to relax into the sense of width and widening,
The balance between left and right.
And then you're going to feel the widening across your shoulders,
The balance between left and right.
And an awareness that this width is also the place where we express ourselves,
As we're doing with our arms,
Expressing ourselves into the space around us.
Where there's a meeting point with the world,
With other people,
Other beings,
The world at large.
So this is the place where we can have meeting,
Where we can have boundary.
And then we're going to move to the third dimension of centering.
We're going to center in our depth.
So becoming aware of the back and the front of our bodies,
And the space in between.
We're going to start by placing our attention on our back,
So that we really come into the back of the body,
Feeling the space between the shoulder blades,
The whole back of the torso,
Upper back,
Middle back,
Lower back,
Back of our hips,
Back of our knees,
And perhaps dropping the heels a little bit more into the ground underneath your feet.
See if you can let yourself really feel and expand into your back body.
You might like to give yourself a little bit of a stretch here,
And you might like to consider the connection to what's behind you,
Your own life history,
Your past,
Your ancestors,
And also your teachers,
The people who have supported you in your life to come to this point now.
So anyone who's had your back,
Or has your back now,
Perhaps that helps you to lean a bit more into the back of your body,
This awareness of the support at your back.
Letting your awareness move from the back of your body,
Through the inside of your body,
Through your own depth,
All the way to the front.
As you continue to breathe,
Noticing the way the inhalation expands the front of the body,
Making more space in your chest,
In your belly,
Creating more depth,
In your belly,
Creating more depth inside of the body.
Feeling that whole front side of the body,
The face,
Chest,
The belly,
The fronts of the legs,
Toes,
And the coming away that this front of the body is the place where we are facing the path into the future,
Where we are orienting to where we wish to go.
It's just noticing how that feels in your body,
This orientation towards the path ahead.
So we're now centred in our depth,
Balancing the front and the back,
Past and future.
Then evoking a sense of the whole of you,
So the length,
The width and depth.
See if you can feel these different dimensions in your body.
And we arrive at the final dimension that we wish to centre in,
The dimension of what matters to us,
What we care about.
So you can place a hand on your heart or anywhere else on your body that supports this connection to what matters to you.
This could be people,
Your family,
Your friends,
Your community,
Your colleagues.
It could be the beings,
The non-human beings that you care for and love.
Maybe what matters to you is a quality or value,
Maybe what matters to you is a quality or value,
Integrity,
Courage,
Joy,
Kindness.
Letting what matters to you centre you,
Letting it inform your entire being,
Letting it shape you.
You could find a shape with your hands,
With your whole body,
To express that intention,
That commitment to what matters to you.
So here we are,
Centred in the four dimensions,
Present,
Connected.
Noticing how it is to be here.
Check in with your state,
Your condition that you've arrived in,
Your mood.
What do you notice at the end of this practice?
