Good morning.
Find a comfortable and steady seat for your morning meditation.
Feel the earth supporting your body as you plug into her nourishment and encouragement.
Feel your spine is tall and the center channel is open and receptive.
Invite your hands to rest up on the knees,
Index fingers touching thumbs gently,
And the other fingers naturally curve inward,
Forming two empty bowls.
Now bring your mind to the sound of the bell.
As you practice this empty bowl meditation,
Begin by bringing your awareness to the movement of your breath.
Invite the breath to be the object of your awareness for this meditation.
Do not interfere with your breath right now.
Just notice it and let your lungs do their work with no effort on your part.
Pay attention to your breath in a relaxed way.
And then bring your awareness to the tip of your nose and begin to sense the air entering the nostrils.
Sit quietly and feel as if you are inside the tip of the nose.
And from this space,
Remain aware of the movement of the air across the nostrils.
Feeling the inhale coming in with a coolness and feeling that the exhale of the air going out carries a warmth.
Feel that you are here now.
In the Bhagavad Gita,
Krishna explains to Arjuna who he is as Arjuna inquired to really know God beyond his form of Krishna.
So Krishna attempts to explain who he is.
Krishna says,
Of poems,
I am the sacred Gayatri.
I am the month Marga Shirsha,
The beginning of the year.
And of all the seasons,
I am the blossom filled spring.
Keep feeling your breath move across the nostrils,
Awakening your sense of smell as you breathe in the fragrance of the king of seasons of springtime.
Krishna continues to say,
I am goodness in everything good.
And when you use your Sattvic discernment,
You will see the goodness in everything.
Of all the Pandavas,
I am Arjuna.
So Krishna is saying that Arjuna,
Who he is speaking to,
Is the greatest goodness of humanity.
And we can also decipher that this means the divine is also within us as our greatest goodness.
Follow the air into your nose as you inhale and then follow it to the throat,
The lungs,
The diaphragm,
Down behind the belly button where you experience a natural stop.
Stay here a moment and then follow the exhale as it goes upward to the diaphragm,
Lungs,
Throat,
Out the nose a few inches in front of the nostrils where there is a second stop that is outside the body.
The movement of breath is time.
At these stopping points,
The breath stops and time stops.
And there is only pure existence.
Feel the divine is present in these pauses.
You are surrounded by and filled with divine love.
The moment you allow the lungs to breathe in and become like an empty bowl receptive,
The divine enters your heart and fills you with pure love.
God pours love into you when you create the space.
In springtime,
We naturally clean.
We clean our homes,
Our cars,
Our closets,
And in Ayurveda,
We cleanse our minds and our bodies.
We create the space for goodness to enter,
For healing to happen,
For rejuvenation to begin.
Most bowls are full of ambition,
Competition,
Thoughts,
Feelings,
Desires,
Anger,
Frustration,
And fear.
God looks for empty bowls into which love can be poured.
Agama means inhalation,
And Nigama,
Exhalation.
In these two processes,
God is breathing and whispering divine love into your heart and into the heart of every being.
As you practice this empty bowl meditation this month,
Spontaneously stay in the stops,
The pauses between breathing in and breathing out.
Whichever stop you feel more comfortable in,
Remain there without effort.
Practice sincerely every day for this month,
Or maybe longer,
Without expecting anything.
Eventually,
You will experience that at each stop,
You can stay a little longer.
And when you can do that,
The inner and outer stops begin to merge.
They merge at the third eye,
And this is the true merging of Shiva and Shakti.
Practice without expectation.
Trust everything will happen in time,
Or beyond time.
When you stop naturally and pause and remain there without effort,
You will have an experience.
This extended natural pause,
The suspension of breath,
Also suspends thought.
And in this space,
The magic can happen.
Dhanvantre Namaha Om
