Good morning.
Welcome to today's meditation.
I invite you to find yourself in a comfortable seat,
Bringing the hips a little higher than the knees,
Maybe in a cross-legged position.
And then grow the spine tall,
Drop the shoulders.
And soften the gaze,
Either letting the vision blur or closing the eyes completely.
Every morning,
The break of a new day is a new opportunity to start fresh,
To start anew.
Bring the hands to heart center.
Let the thumbs reach into the sternum and let the sternum,
The heart space,
Reach back into the hands.
And setting an intention for our day that no matter what comes our way,
We'll approach it with love and compassion.
Bring your hands back down to the floor,
The knees,
Or the lap,
Wherever they rest.
Let it be easy.
And bring the awareness into the breath.
The other day I was walking in the forest.
The trail led up.
And as I walked,
A beautiful,
Large Douglas firs came into view.
As I got closer,
I saw their bark,
Those deep and dramatic grooves.
And there was one word that the trees were calling to me,
As if they were saying it out loud.
It was hard not to hear it.
And the word was resilience.
That amidst the logging in North Vancouver where most of our ancient trees were cut down,
There's a few,
Maybe a few hundred years old,
Or possibly even a thousand,
Of Douglas firs and red cedars that managed to survive and hold on,
Continuing to grow,
Reach their roots deeper and spread their branches wider.
And the word resilience is how they call out to those that pass by them in the forest.
Bringing the awareness deeper into breath.
Noticing where the breath lives,
Where it's naturally holding on this morning.
Is it in the low belly or in the chest?
Without controlling or shaping the breath in any way.
Just notice where the body wants to breathe.
And then starting to slow the breath.
Bringing the body from top of the head all the way down to the sit bones that were down into the earth.
Is there any part of the body that you can smooth out or soften?
As if you were to take an iron and smooth out the wrinkles of a shirt.
Is there any part of the body that you could breathe extra life,
Extra oxygen into?
Maybe the shoulders haven't fully woken up to start their day.
Can you breathe extra into the shoulders?
Maybe the hips haven't fully awoken either.
Can you breathe extra into the hips?
Maybe the spine is somewhat rounding.
Can you breathe into the spine and grow nice and tall?
Even though the eyes are closed,
Breathe into the eyes,
Behind the eyes.
Allow them to awaken.
Breathing in life and energy and vitality.
Breathing in warmth.
Breathing in resilience.
You can learn to rejoice in even the smallest blessings our life holds.
It is easy for us to miss our own good fortune.
Often happiness comes in ways we don't even notice.
It's like a cartoon I saw of an astonished looking man saying,
What was that?
The caption below read,
Bob experiencing a moment of well-being.
The ordinariness of our good fortune can make it hard sometimes to catch.
The key is to be here,
To be fully connected with the moment and pay attention to the details of ordinary life.
By taking care of ordinary things,
Our pots and pans,
Our clothing,
Our teeth,
We rejoice in them.
When we scrub a vegetable or brush our hair,
We are experiencing appreciation.
Relief towards ourselves and towards the living quality that is found in everything.
This combination of mindfulness and appreciation connects us fully with reality and can bring us immense joy.
Bringing the hands back to heart center.
Every breath,
Every moment of each day,
We have a choice.
We will live not in the future where it is filled with uncertainty and unknowing.
We will live not in the past because it is filled with doubt and regret.
Instead we will live in the future because it is full of abundance and beauty and appreciation of the simplest facts and realities of life.
It is in the present that we can feel our body,
That we can show up for others,
And we can connect to the pace of the nature that surrounds and breathes life into ourselves.
Have yourself a beautiful day.
Namaste.
