Hi everyone,
Welcome to our second practice.
So I'm going to pick up on two ideas from last week's practice.
One being feeling our feet on the floor and the second being connecting with our breathing.
What I'd like to encourage you all to do is not only do this each day in your practice this week but also whenever you think of it throughout the day,
Either feeling your feet on the floor,
Really feeling the connection of your feet on the floor and or taking some deep breaths or breathing right down into your feet.
We'll start with our gong sound.
And then with our one minute silence.
So take this as an opportunity to really connect with whatever you're feeling in a very open and honest or genuine way to yourself.
What am I feeling?
And now for today's practice you can continue sitting with your feet on the floor today or you can stand up,
Whatever you prefer.
If you're sitting,
Sit in a comfortable position.
We're going to start again with some deep breaths like we did last time.
Today as you breathe in I want you to imagine yourself taking a breath right down to your feet,
Right down into your toes and as you breathe out your breath starts down at your feet and moves softly up and out.
So this is a visualisation in terms of what the breath actually does.
It moves into the chest and the lungs and it moves the abdominal organs so you can feel like you're breathing right down into your belly.
I want you to imagine the breath going right into your feet and really solidly grounding your feet into the floor.
So on an in-breath your breath moves down and moves down towards the feet.
On an out-breath it starts down at the feet and moves up and out.
Just continue with your own breathing rhythm,
Find your own comfortable breathing rhythm.
You can soften and lengthen the breath a little bit actively if that serves you today.
So we're going to add a visual imagery to this practice.
So I want you to imagine your feet are like the base or the trunk of a tree and down from your feet into the floor extend deep roots.
Roots that connect you to the earth below,
Roots that stabilize you in this frenetic and somewhat hectic,
Fast changing time.
If you're familiar with the Lord of the Rings books you have the characters the tree ants.
And what the ants do is they are trees but they're able to move around the earth so they can walk and move but they'll stay stable in one place for a very long time,
Sometimes years before they very carefully decide and thoughtfully decide to move again to another place.
So I want us to connect with that tree and like part of ourselves to stabilize to the earth underneath us and just maybe to slow down a little bit in our movements or decisions about what we do next.
So whatever imagery works for you for this,
Imagining your feet connected to the floor,
Feel them,
Spread your toes,
Take a few more of those breaths right down into the feet and just come back to your connection with the earth,
The stable earth underneath you.
Back to your foundations,
To your roots.
I'm going to give you a few minutes to work with this in your own way.
So you've got two pieces to connect with you,
You've got your breathing and breathing right down deep and you've got your feet and the connection with the earth below you.
One more please.
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