Coping With COVID-19 (Practice 1): Ground, Breathe & Expand

Welcome to this practice on "Coping with COVID-19 - Meditations and Mind Health Series”. The intention of this is to contribute something that is helpful for people during this difficult time. Ben intends to create a weekly practice.

Transcript

Hello and welcome. So I'm recording this weekly mindfulness meditation practice and the intention I've set for this is to help people to connect with their feelings, Stabilise and also to reflect with the hope that this will help you in some way in dealing with the current challenge or crisis that we're all facing at the moment. The practices are designed as a daily practice and they'll be updated with a new one each week. What I'd like to suggest going into the practice is that you go in each day setting yourself an intention or with some reflection on why you're doing the practice but also hold very lightly your expectations on yourself. Each time we sit for practice the experience can be very different and it's enough to just sit or in this case today stand and do the practice. I hope you find it helpful. I have the tradition of starting my practices with this gong sound which I'll do live to indicate the start and the end of each practice. For today's practice I'd actually like to ask us to all start standing up so if you can just stand have your knees ever so slightly bent and find a relatively comfortable relaxed standing position. I'd like to start the practice today with just a minute silence and just to softly offer that you let any feelings or emotions that come through during this minute just flow freely. Don't try and do or attempt anything just let them flow. You Now I'd like you to just feel your feet in the ground as you're standing there and what I want you to do is physically shift your weight from one foot to the other spread the toes in the ground and feel the left foot and then shuffle or shift your weight over to the right side. Just do that shifting of weight a few more times and then find your center with your feet spreading to the ground on both feet. We're going to take a few breaths and we're going to use our arms with some gentle arm movements to help us. What I want you to do is starting with the arms by the side just breathe in and raise your arms comfortably up above your head and then breathing softly out through the mouth just take a soft breath out and allow your arms to slowly come down by your sides. On an in breath raising your arms up above your head and on an out breath just letting them fall softly down by your side as you blow out softly through the mouth. Just do this same four or five more times and this time find your own comfortable breathing rhythm so inhaling in your own time raising your arms up and exhaling in your own time letting your arms fall back down by your sides. Let your body just do whatever it wants to this is just to be a comfortable movement just to encourage the breathing. And then from here I just like you to bring your hands now just about an inch away from your belly place them with one palm over the other and I just want you to take another handful of breaths where now you inhale down into your belly where your hands are hovering and then you softly exhale starting from the belly and letting the breath move softly up and out. Just continue with a handful of your comfortable breaths breathing in down to the belly just under your hands nice soft deep breath in and then starting at the belly and softly allowing the air to flow back out. A few more in your own comfortable breathing rhythm. Okay now if you're enjoying the experience of standing you can stay standing alternatively you can sit or lie down for this second part of the practice maybe just choose today what feels right and you can change that each day. Once you're there just get comfortable. What I'd like you to do is bring your attention to a point at roughly the center of your body sort of where the chest meets the abdomen around the solar plexus. I'd like to you to imagine a small speck of light there maybe it's a white light maybe it's a sunlight type light. I just want you to visualize or imagine just softly allow don't work too hard to make this happen this light expanding so it's expanding from that pinprick light just start to fill your stomach and body area. And then it's expanding slowly to surround the whole of you. And at this point that lights there to restore you on that soft level to just feel some of your needs right now. Hope you feel stable secure okay just for this moment. And then I'd like you to imagine that light expanding out further expanding out wider and as it does it encompasses the people you're living with at the moment or your nearest and dearest people in your heart. So that's light is now touching those people in your inner circle. And then just imagine that light continuing to expand out further to touch your broadest circle or community of family and friends. And imagine that it continuing to expand out further to contact the larger wider community you're a part of. Maybe people you don't know or have never met who are a part of your community. And then just slowly over the next minute or two imagining and visualizing that light continuing to expand ultimately to touch or encompass everyone across the world or the universe depending how you imagine really expanding that light to the limits of your what you can visualize or imagine. Cover as wide as you can possibly imagine. And then just allowing your awareness or attention to float back again to a sense of yourself and bringing that light back to just encompass you. Just surround you. And then bringing it back inside you to just a comfortable level back to the center of you. From there we're just going to wind out of the practice. So I'd like you to take some breaths again maybe some deeper breaths. In and out. To feel your body and where it connects to the floor again so your feet or your sit bones or your back. Just to be aware of and even maybe imagine your surroundings. And we're going to use the gong to help you come back. And what I'd like to request is that you just take back out with you into the rest of your day from this practice. A bit of an intention or a reflection to continue into your day and your life in a way that has some connection to what feels right and important for you at this moment. Just keeping that in your awareness as you go into the rest of your day. Thank you.

Reviews

What a lovely way to connect to our inner light. I love how you encouraged that light to move out to encompass the entire universe and then helped us bring it home. 🙏🏼✨