In The Winter Of Our Life

This guided meditation offers a way to find stillness, space and resource in the midst of the "wintery" moments of our lives: when we don't know what to do, when we are confused or things feel frozen. It offers us access to the true resource of wellness inside, and the capacity to breathe in and around our experience, making space for what is. If we can allow the winters of our lives, we can make way for the possibility of spring.

Transcript

Feeling the support that's here,

Such a key pivotal part of our wellness is being able to resource and find support.

And it's wonderful when we find support outside of ourself through dear friends or colleagues or mentors or teachers,

What a profound gift to have people that we can call on outside of ourself.

And sometimes that isn't available and it's so important to also always remember the profound resource that's immediately available inside of ourself and around us energetically,

Even if it's just in the form of gravity or the way that your breath is always here or that I imagine for all of you in this group that you can always find a warm place to sit where you feel like your needs,

Your basic needs are being met.

You're clothed,

You're sheltered,

You're hydrated.

And there's some resource in that just feeling like,

Okay,

I'm actually well right now.

Taking that in as a gift,

As support,

As resource,

Letting it hold you even more,

Letting your body with whatever parts of it feel well and in balance,

Be a resource to you,

Steady presence of your breath,

Steady presence of gravity and mother earth holding you,

Be something that you can arrive into and resource out of.

When we dive deeply into that resource,

We remember that there's so much space underneath and inside of our experience.

So no matter what experience you're having,

There's space and awareness and wellbeing right in the belly of that experience and all around it.

See if you can feel that,

See that.

We're going to utilize our breath,

This ever-present,

Sustaining,

Love-filled experience that we get to have of breathing,

As well as we're going to resource off of our body right now to bring even more presence and aliveness into us by breathing into our lower belly.

We've done this before in this group.

I'll have you visualize a golden goose egg or a golden balloon in your low belly,

In your dantian space,

Which is in between the pelvic floor and the navel and in between the front and back of your body.

On the inhale,

Imagining that golden balloon expanding and filling up,

Picking up a lot of space.

On the exhale,

We're going to visualize it squeezing every last drop of air out.

And you can start gently.

And as you do more,

We're going to do it a little more vigorously,

Squeezing all the air out.

You can squeeze up on your perineum and just really squeeze the belly all the way back to the spine to clear out any stale prana or breath out of your body.

So please just keep doing that for a few moments.

In to the low belly.

On the exhale,

Squeezing every last drop out of your golden goose egg.

On the inhale,

Let that golden egg grow as large as you can.

Hold your breath for just a few moments as it's so full before you release.

And then when you squeeze out the air,

See if you can hold the breath out for a few moments before you breathe in again.

We're going to do three more,

And I invite you to really exert yourself now,

Filling up all the way.

And on the exhale,

Squeeze all the air out before you breathe in again.

Great.

We're going to do one more.

And this time,

Hold the breath out until you really need to breathe and then breathe freely and relax and just see what happens.

One more big one.

See how close you can get to the space that you find when you have the air out and you're holding there.

Dissolve into that space.

And as you relax now,

Just feel your body.

Feel the movement of life force in your body.

Just let the flow of life force be all that you are.

Notice how you are and what resource is available to you now after that practice.

Rising from inside your body.

Let your life force fill every cell of your body and beyond your skin.

Today,

We're going to explore finding resource,

Finding stillness,

Finding wellness in the midst of it all,

Whether that's cultural tumultuousness,

Relational dynamics that are hard,

Not knowing what to do,

Or just deep emotions such as grief or overwhelm,

Finding a resting place for yourself,

Not to avoid,

Not to shut down or dissociate,

But to truly allow profound rest and resourcing so that you can show up fully so that you can return to your life more full,

More present,

More engaged,

Because you're coming from a place of resource,

Of wellness,

Of alignment.

Like that breath practice shows us when we really let go,

Like squeeze every drop out of everything that we had in us,

That we were managing,

Thinking,

Feeling,

Planning,

Squeeze it all out,

Let it all go,

And then just open up.

You might notice there's a sense there's just more room for what's true,

More room for aliveness and capacity that comes forward.

I'm going to read part of a poem.

It's called Winter Grief.

It's by David White.

Let the rest in this rested place rest for you.

Let the birds sing quietly and the geese call from far off,

And let the sky race from west to east when you cannot fly,

When you cannot lift a wing to fly.

Let evening trace your loss in the branches against a fading sky so that you can give up and give in and be given back to,

So that you can let winter come and live fully inside you,

So that you can retrace the loving path of heartbreak that brought you here,

So that the world and everyone who has ever lived and ever died can come and go as they please,

So you can let yourself not know what not knowing means,

So that you can let winter be winter,

So that you can let the world alone to think of spring,

So that you can give up and give in and be given back to,

So you can let yourself not know what not knowing means.

See if you can find that inner stillness that comes from letting the world be as it is.

We're not turning away from it.

We're not ignoring it,

Pretending it's not there.

We're also not rushing forward with our habituated patterns,

Our belief that something's not right,

Our distrust of ourself and our experience.

We're doing something else entirely,

Which is to bring witness and awareness and presence to what's here,

To allow it to be as it is,

The beauty,

The horror,

The mess,

The glory,

The confusion,

The wisdom.

Let it all be here,

And to see what's possible when we don't turn away,

But we also don't react out of old patterns.

It takes so much courage and bravery to do this,

And that's why we resource off of our breath,

Our awareness,

Our grounded body,

Our opening heart.

I love this poem,

And I wanted to bring it forward because there's also inherent in this poem,

This innate trust in winter.

It's part of it all,

Just like there has to be an innate trust sometimes in death or loss or change.

It's part of it.

It's built in,

Right?

It's just built in that we have winter.

Some people have more winter than others,

But it's part of it.

It's what creates spring.

So it's such a profound act of faith,

Trust,

And resource to actually trust the winters of our own life,

The darkness,

The composting,

The stillness,

And the not knowing.

It's so generative,

Actually,

If we can allow it to be.

See what you can do right now to allow yourself to feel the resource we've created and to just breathe and abide in the space of not knowing,

In the space of winter,

As a sacred part of it all.

And to find yourself in the midst of it all,

This part of you that's okay,

That's here,

That's breathing,

That's aware,

That's supported,

And that you are giving your loving attention to on this Tuesday afternoon or whenever you are doing this practice.

You're never lost.

You're always right here.

So much of our resource can come from the ability to breathe in and around our experience,

To make space for what is.

Because in that space,

There's possibility,

There's alchemy,

There's change,

Possibility.

To see if you can find anything that feels wintry,

Might feel constricted or confusing or something you don't know what to do with or an emotion that's sometimes hard to feel.

I invite you from this resource place we've created in this practice to just let it be there and see if you can breathe in and around and through it.

It's like we're ventilating it.

We're just with it fully.

Ideally,

See if you can bring the warmth of compassion to whatever you are experiencing,

Whether it's yourself or the situation or the emotion.

Sometimes it's hard to be with things as it is because our mind starts to say,

But what if it never ends?

What if it gets worse?

What if I need to do something?

What does this mean about me?

We have all these ideas.

It's stressful,

It's painful,

Sometimes shameful to let our experience be as it is.

The trick that our busy egoic mind is missing is that if we don't actually take in something as it is and let it be here and show us its reality,

We can't actually appropriately respond.

We're going to jump to conclusions.

We're going to let our fear drive us.

We're going to make assumptions.

Or we'll get so overwhelmed,

We'll just turn away and not actually address what's going on at all or see what's trying to happen.

See if you can,

In the safety and ground of this practice,

Let everything be as it is,

Breathing in and around it and just be with it right now in the not knowing or in the winter without knowing when spring is.

There's so much surrender in that.

There's also,

See if you can notice,

There's a lot of life and wellness in that.

Surrendering to winter is the only way spring comes.

And as you surrender or allow whatever's here to be here,

See if you notice that in that process,

There's more of you present.

You might feel there's more movement in your body,

More warmth,

Or just more grounded stillness.

See what you notice becomes available when you stop pushing against.

Let the rest in this rested place rest for you so that you can give up and give in and be given back to so that you can let winter come and live fully inside you so that you can let winter be winter so you can let the world alone to think of spring.

What I notice for myself is that when I stop thinking,

Reviews

Exquisitely tender, nourishing and restorative. I loved how the beautiful poem was woven into the practice. Thank you so much 🙏🏻