Look Where You Want To Go

This guided meditation offers a way to work with your nervous system, so we can keep opening up to possibility and create a life that we want to go toward. We practice giving your attention to what you love, and letting the good inside you and around you be in the foreground of your awareness. Letting our inner wisdom guide us towards what needs to change and to where our potential is.

Transcript

So just taking a minute to settle and arrive in your body.

Just letting yourself be exactly as you are,

However that is in this moment.

Feeling the support of the earth underneath you.

I find it really helpful to just take a moment to celebrate that you are giving this moment to yourself.

It's quite a thing in our modern busy lives to find the time to tend to your inner life,

To slow down and to come inside.

It's a real gift to yourself and really to your whole life.

So just taking a moment to celebrate that you're here.

You're doing this with your precious time and attention.

Again,

Your most precious commodity in your life is your time and your attention.

It's the most finite thing.

And you're giving it right now to your inner life,

To your inner wisdom,

Your inner light.

And as you start to track your breath,

Letting your system settle and slow down.

We're not making ourselves slow down.

We're just creating space and silence and stillness as a container for whatever is present in our body or our mind right now.

Paying attention to yourself,

How you are,

To what you're feeling,

What you're noticing.

That part of you that's aware all the time of what's going on in and around you.

We're just going to let that be the only thing going on right now.

In order to let our system settle,

We're going to bring our awareness down into our low belly,

To the space in between your perineum and pelvic floor and your navel,

In between the front and back line of your body.

You could imagine a golden goose egg in that space.

It's called the Dantian in Qigong and some Asian traditions.

It's a place that holds a lot of our life force,

Our capacity.

On the inhale,

Just letting that space in the low belly expand and fill up with breath.

On the exhale,

Just squeezing the air out,

Letting it squeeze towards the center line of your abdomen,

Right in the middle,

Squeezing every last bit of air out.

And then you refill again.

Please do that for a few more times.

Squeezing every drop of air out by squeezing from the front and back line of your abdomen,

But also lifting up on the pelvic floor.

And on the inhale,

You're just softening and relaxing so that things can open.

Good.

We're going to do three more.

I invite you to do a bit more vigor with it,

A fuller in-breath,

Expanding that golden goose egg or that golden balloon in the low belly as much as you can,

Filling the abdomen with fresh life force.

On the exhale,

Squeezing in and up as much as you can,

Squeezing out every drop of stale air,

Stale prana.

Just clearing the space.

Great.

We're going to do one last one.

And on the exhale,

I invite you to squeeze every drop of air out and then hold the breath out as long as you can.

Really notice the still,

Silent space that's there when you're not breathing.

And then breathe when you need to.

And then relax.

And now just notice how you are.

Notice what's present.

Just bathe in it,

Float in it.

Sometimes people notice a lot of life force and flow in their body after doing that breath practice.

Just see what's true for you.

If you notice more flow in your body,

See if it feels good.

See if you can relax into what feels good.

Letting the good be in the foreground is an incredible practice.

Letting the enoughness be what you're giving your attention to,

Especially inside yourself,

Is so powerfully healing.

So as my teacher Ajah Shanti says,

What you give your attention to creates your life.

We're going to work today with what we're giving our attention to on a regular basis.

What lens we're seeing the world through and the perception,

The patterns,

The perspectives that that creates.

And what it's like to let go of the habituated parts of us that get anxious and worry and suspect the worst and judge ourself and assume it's not going to go well,

Which are all protective mechanisms that are worthy of compassion and even appreciation.

They've worked really hard in our life to take care of us,

To protect us,

To prevent things.

But it can also create a life over time that's not in alignment with what we want.

So as my surf instructor kept saying to me,

Look where you want to go.

Don't look where you don't want to go.

Don't look at the coral reef that you don't want to hit.

Look at the wave you want to catch.

Look at the direction you want to angle your body and therefore your life to go toward.

As you breathe in your body right now,

You're opening up that perspective.

Looking where you want to go,

Giving your attention to what you love.

And right now,

Sitting here,

Just letting the good be in the foreground,

Seeing if you can find what feels good in your body.

See if you can celebrate the moments where the mind becomes more open or spacious.

Celebrating that you find yourself here in this moment,

Tending to your inner light and taking care of yourself.

There is goodness in and around you.

We're leaning into that.

We're giving our attention to that.

Andrea Gibson,

Who's one of my very favorite poets in this world,

They say something like,

I notice my happiness is equal to how much I am focused on who isn't loving me or on how much I'm loving.

This idea that if we focus on what we love versus what should be loving us or what's not loving us or what's not enough,

The amount of our happiness is so distinctly defined by that.

So give your attention to what you love,

To where you want to go,

To what calls you on a heart level.

Feel and notice and perhaps celebrate your enoughness right in this moment.

There's nowhere else you need to be or any other way you need to be.

To be enough right now.

Feel the goodness inside of you and around you as much as you can.

We're not negating or dismissing or suppressing what's hard.

That's never a part of my teaching.

But we're just shifting our focus to what you want and what you love and seeing what happens.

Give yourself the relief.

Put your attention on where you want to go.

Put your attention on what's enough and good right now.

To use my surfing analogy,

If you think about you riding this wave of your life and you could give your attention to the rocks and the coral reef and the things you don't want to go toward,

I.

E.

The people,

The situations,

The patterns,

The trauma that you're trying to avoid,

Or you can make a choice to put your attention on where you want to go.

You're fully present.

You're participating and co-creating your life.

You're putting your attention on where you want to go,

Where you want that wave to take you.

And as you just open into that,

See what you're shown.

See what your life and your body and your heart shows you that it wants you to head toward,

To put your attention behind,

To make a possibility.

Angle your body,

Your awareness,

Your vision towards what you want to happen.

The power of our attention is incredibly important.

Put your attention on what you love and what loves you,

What's already loving you.

That's already enough.

It's already right here.

I hope that because we've opened up our body some with that breath practice that you can tell the difference between what your mind thinks you want,

What your mind thinks you should go,

And what your soma,

Your body,

Your heart can show you.

Your mind's going to start to think it's just what it does.

It loves to plan and problem solve.

Right now we're going to keep bringing our awareness out of the mind,

Which tends to go up and forward,

And just keep dropping it back and down into your body,

Into your heart.

It's like staying on your surfboard,

By staying in your body,

Staying connected to your ground.

From there,

You open up to where you want to go,

Towards what you love,

Towards what's important to you,

What you want to put your attention on.

If we focus on who's not loving us,

Or what other people think,

Just as Lao Tzu said,

Care about what other people think,

And you will be their prisoner.

We're bringing our autonomy and our well-being back into our own heart,

And letting it show us what we want,

What's true,

And what needs to change,

Guiding us from the inside to the out.

When I talk about where do you want to go,

It's so human and so common to want to see the full staircase,

To see our full future,

Like all 40 steps to get to wherever we think we want to go,

And that's just not how this works.

I haven't ever seen it be that way,

Even for incredibly intuitive people.

What life usually shows us is the first and maybe second step.

So see if you can move in that prayer,

Just show me the first step.

Change me into the one that can take it.

Give me the courage to see and step toward that which is mine to do,

That which I love,

That which is true for me.

Show me the way.

One step at a time.

And maybe it's not showing you anything.

It could be that you're just opening and softening more and more into your body as it is right now.

That is also an incredibly good thing to just marinate in,

To abide in,

Because it can show you your well-being,

Can show you your enoughness,

And that which is already okay,

That you are living from and surrounded by.

I have this wonderful teacher and he'll often say,

Don't follow any path that tells you it's going to get you to enough.

You already are enough.

See what that feels like,

To really feel your enoughness,

And from there you open up towards where you want to go or to what's calling you.

But it's not going to get you to enough.

It's impossible.

Because enough is already here.

Your life is created by what you give your attention to.

Our life,

I want to be clear and say,

Of course,

Often our life is full of all sorts of circumstances that are very difficult and painful.

So,

It's not like the people that are in a war zone gave their attention to war and therefore they find themselves suffering.

That is not what I'm saying.

What the teaching is pointing to is that no matter where you find yourself,

No matter how hard a situation is,

And legitimately so,

Sometimes it's overwhelmingly painful on this planet for many people,

But in the midst of that we can still give our attention to what we love.

And we can choose what we put our attention on to the best of our ability.

There's this really sweet painting that I have that has these two prisoners.

They're wearing the classic prison stripes and they're both painting.

There's this window that looks out at some trees and it has the classic prison bars over the window.

And these two painters that are prisoners are painting and one's canvas has the bars on it.

And he's looking over at his inmate's painting which has the trees on it with no bars.

They're both looking out the same window.

One sees only bars and one sees only trees.

And that's what this teaching is pointing to is it's not getting rid of the fact they're both in that jail cell but what they give their attention to changes everything for them and their mind and their well-being.

Just like surfing,

I can spend my whole ride when I finally catch a wave looking at the coral reef,

Feeling scared or I could spend my whole ride angling myself toward the best part of the wave I want to ride and enjoy my life.

That's our choice.

We don't get to choose a lot sometimes about how things go but we can choose what we put our attention on and that is a powerful gift.

Up.

And see what your heart shows you.

And before we finish today,

See what comes when you ask your heart,

Your awareness,

Your soma to show you your next step.

Whatever it is.

We only need one or two to continue on our journey.

Just see what comes.

Maybe it's a voice saying,

Trust it's going to be okay and you might notice how incredibly vulnerable that is to trust that it's going to be okay.

Maybe you're hearing something else entirely but just open up and feel whatever you feel and just let whatever you're being shown just land in you and guide you.

Maybe it's telling you to say the hard thing or to change something that you don't know how to change and you just keep stepping forward.

Or having faith in yourself.

Remembering you're already enough.

Just as you are right now.

Bring your attention back into your lower belly.

And take a few breaths.

And when you're ready,

Step into your day.

Giving your attention to what you love.

Reviews

❤️Thank you❤️
I really really appreciate this content. It feels so incredibly important.
One thing I’d like to mention - In these meditations where we are asked to imagine something, or visualize something, or put our attention on something, I almost always feel like I need more time in quiet. I truly appreciated every word you said, and also, I would appreciate one really large chunk of uninterrupted quiet. I kept feeling “interrupted” while trying to put my attention on the good feeling things in life (and then also appreciated all your words too). Just food for thought!
Ultimately, much gratitude and appreciation! Thank you thank you! ❤️

Thank you, Elizabeth🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻How cool to find a meditation that totally follows certain principles that form the basis of my life!
“What you focus on, and the meaning you give things shape your reality.”🙏🏻🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🙏🏻

🙏🧡🙏

Just what I needed in this time of transition and uncertainty and impending move. 💜🙏

Bless 🦋

Thank you Elizabeth, wonderfully crafted into every day life, your guidance brings clarity, focus, peace and presence in a beautiful way. Thanks for sharing your wisdom.

I really connected with the guidance to place my attention on what feels good in my body. I have not come across a meditation like this before and it was incredibly intuitive. Thank you