Finding a comfortable seat and closing your eyes.
I want you to first send your awareness down into your heart,
Down to the center of your chest,
Just sitting with whatever is right now.
Letting go of the day and even if you have a particular situation in mind that you're seeking clarity on,
Seeing if you can set that aside for a moment and just find a baseline for yourself.
That baseline will be different every single day and so try not to judge if for some reason that baseline is a little more anxious today than it was yesterday.
Just sitting with yourself in the heart space,
Tuning in with the cadence of your breath,
Finding a rhythm that feels comfortable to you and just getting acquainted with how it feels to be in your heart.
From the heart I want you to visualize a small spark of light that grows with your attention so as you watch it,
It goes from being a pinprick to brighter and brighter.
As it slowly expands out from your chest,
Covering your entire body until you are wrapped in a sphere of the light emanating from your heart,
Taking notice of the color of the light perhaps.
This light is going to show you your boundaries.
It's going to shed light on the places where your attention is needed,
Where there are gaps perhaps or there's armor.
Just taking your time and sensing in to the entirety of your system,
From your back to your hips all the way down to your feet.
Are there places where you feel vulnerable?
Where you feel like people closest to you can pierce right through?
Are there places where you've been wounded so many times that you've erected quite the fortress where no one can penetrate,
No one can get through and no one can see your vulnerability?
Most of us have many such spots of either porousness or hardness.
Some of us even have spikes in places where we still carry anger or frustration or resentment.
That's okay.
I'm going to have you pick just one and perhaps it's one that brings up a particular situation for you.
If not,
Just continue to scan.
Sometimes things don't have a story,
They're just there.
So picking one area where you feel like your boundary could be repaired,
Just shining the light of your awareness upon it as the light from your heart has illuminated it.
And before you do anything,
Send it love.
It's there for a reason.
It's protection you needed at some point.
Your survival depended upon it.
One of my teachers,
Martha Beck says that things cannot change until they are allowed to be what they are.
So we do not meditate just to fix ourselves or be better.
Sure,
We get there eventually because we're paying attention to ourselves and we're learning.
But we don't go in with a mindset of alteration,
Of judgment or critique.
Sometimes presence is the one thing you need to heal something you've been grappling with for a very long time.
Once you've gotten to know this particular boundary,
This area where you are hard or too soft,
I want you to imagine that you can ask it what it needs most.
How can you help?
What is it trying to teach you?
Sometimes there'll be a rush of information and sometimes it'll just be quiet.
Just sit with the quiet.
And if you're being bombarded with memories or emotions or stories,
Just try to let them flow right by.
Imagine you can surf them.
You see them for what they are.
You care for them deeply,
But you're not going to identify with them.
You're learning.
Not diving in.
After some time,
Especially if you feel like you've gotten some important information just by sitting with this boundary,
You might want to ask,
Is it willing to be healed?
Is it willing to be repaired?
See what it says.
Is there a place where you need to say no?
Is there a place where you need to say yes?
Is there grief for having said yes when you meant no?
And if so,
Just treat it very gently.
Know that you were doing the best you could and that your presence in this meditation is your effort to do better.
You may want to visualize the light from your heart beaming into that particular spot,
That one boundary that you're looking at.
And just lighting it up,
Warming it up,
Repairing any holes,
Sanding down any rough spots,
Showing it the care it's asking for and the care that you deserve.
Sometimes this process will go quickly and sometimes it takes a while.
For the purposes of this meditation,
We'll go ahead and close,
Imagining that we are retracting the light all the way back into our heart space,
Knowing that it is there and available to us whenever we need it and that we can complete this exercise over and over again each time we feel like we've hit a spot where our boundaries aren't quite what we need them to be.
Life has a way of teaching us those places and so we'll return to explore,
To care for,
Shed light on and to heal,
Always seeking to find the boundaries that are true to us and trusting that when we show ourselves and we show our boundaries,
There are those out there who will love us and appreciate us because we do.
