So first get ready in your meditation posture.
Make sure you're comfortable and straight up so that you can sit for a few minutes without moving or moving very little.
Allow your muscles to become as relaxed as possible while still keeping your back straight up.
Relax the muscles in your face.
Relax your shoulders down.
Allow yourself to be very pleasantly relaxed and really look for enjoyment in just sitting and connecting with your breath.
Just how it is breathing by itself.
Just by allowing yourself,
Maybe you can already feel a sense of expansion,
Feeling your body as you relax more and more in this meditation.
And for this session I want to offer a certain perspective for contemplation that I find very beautiful and helpful and that allows me to connect with a sense of gratitude and humility and respect.
And this perspective is to see the planet below us or rather to realize that the planet below us is home to the bodies of all our ancestors.
In a way you can say that the planet is one huge graveyard and I want to not see that as a macabre kind of dark view but rather as a kind of perspective of the truth that indeed all our ancestors,
All the living beings in our bloodline,
Their vessels,
Their bodies have since their lives ended returned to the earth and in fact they have become their bodies have become part of the planet itself.
And when we realize this it can have a certain kind of effect on how we relate ourselves to our lives.
So when I walk on the earth,
Walking down the street,
Walking in the mall,
Wherever it might be,
If I connect to that perspective of I am walking on the graves of all my ancestors it becomes pretty darn difficult to behave without respect.
So for me a sense of respect is closely related to this view and there's also another gift I find that this perspective brings.
It's realizing that this body too will one day perish and become part of the earth and then my child or perhaps children at that time and any other progeny will in turn walk the earth with the potential of seeing it as the home of the bodies of their ancestors,
Including my own body.
So there's a certain awareness of opportunity that right now you and me and everybody who is alive right now we are the current fabric of humanity.
We are the current weave of human aliveness that's always changing and vibrating and adding new members and shedding other members at the same time.
So to see my part in this line of life that lives through vessels,
That lives through bodies,
Through generations and right now lives as this body,
Right now lives this life,
I can feel gratitude and opportunity.
I can feel connected to the unique moment that this life is.
So when you step off the meditation pillow today at some point you might feel lost or unsure or confused about what to do about something specific in your life and then maybe you can reconnect to this perspective of seeing the earth as the as the home of all the bodies of our ancestors and perhaps then too you can connect with a sense of opportunity and possibility.
This space of time that we're given to live our lives before we too return to the earth and form part of its material reality.
So I'd like to invite you to just sit with this perspective for a few more minutes and just let it do its work in you.
What does it mean to you when you see the earth as our collective ancestral burial ground?
