Window Meditation: For Isolation Anxiety

Mental health charities worldwide are telling us that pandemic has affected people's wellbeing significantly with support being requested at an all-time high. This meditation uses the window as a place for stopping and calming. Body Scan with guitar playing an original song entitled 'Be Still".

Transcript

Hi there,

Welcome to this relaxation.

My name is Joe Altoic.

I'm coming to you from England and it's January 2021,

The new year.

And I wanted to start the year by doing a few relaxation recordings,

Some meditations I've been thinking about doing.

I wanted to do a meditation about looking out the window,

Which is something that some of us can do.

If you can't,

And your eyes don't allow that,

I'd love to hear from you,

To understand your experience and be able to record a relaxation for you.

Many of my other relaxations,

For example,

Prayer for a pandemic and others on Insight Timer,

You'll find don't focus on the eyes,

So please refer to those.

So we'll call it window meditation.

We're going to have a body scan and then it's going to come to focus on the eyes.

And I've got some quotes about the eyes and a bit of eye science.

And then I'll sing you a song at the end.

It's a time of anxiety for many,

I felt some myself.

And I was interested in finding some simple practices that would help at these times just to settle and ground us and help us to feel connected to the bigger picture of life as a balm for isolation.

So the invitation here is to find a chair,

Take it to the window.

You might have a cushion or you can even stand,

It's fine,

Stand by the window.

Close your eyes and we're going to take three breaths together.

So pause the recording or take 30 seconds to come to the window.

Okay.

So now with your eyes closed,

You need to get a sense of the whole of your body,

The shape and the weight of it.

We're going to take three deep breaths in and out together.

So breathing in,

Feeling the weight and shape of your body and breathing out.

Nose or mouth,

It doesn't matter what it feels most kind of relaxing at this point.

So breathing in,

Holding in the belly,

Low down in the belly as you can and breathing out.

Okay.

Let's do one more together.

Breathing in and breathing out.

So in the words of Sylvia Plath,

The poet,

When I open my eyes,

The world comes alive again.

So just open your eyes and while you do it,

Maintain an awareness of your body,

And we're going to use that awareness in the next 10 minutes.

And what I mean by that is just sensing the shape and weight of your body.

And we're going to go through it now to help us get a sense of that if it's any kind of new experience.

You might have heard of being present,

Being mindful.

This exercise will help us to do that.

So we're going to go from the feet and we're going to come back to the eyes again.

So the invitation is just to look out the window and see what you can see.

So this is your perspective right now,

Wherever you're looking out to.

That's the place on the planet that you are.

That's the trees that you can see.

And maybe other people are doing this same meditation at the same time as you and they're seeing other trees or other buildings,

Other streets.

I wonder what you're seeing.

So just in the first instance,

It's accepting what's there,

Whatever might be there.

Even if it's a scene that you've seen many times before.

Maybe it's a view that you are looking to change,

You might be moving from that scene.

You might have a deep connection to it and not want to move.

Maybe somewhere in the middle.

But either way just accepting it today,

How it is.

It might be a city street.

There may be things that we would otherwise consider not nice to see.

There might be litter.

There might be signs of a less cared for part of the world maybe.

There might be fields.

There might be trees.

Whatever you're seeing,

Accepting it in this moment as it is.

And then getting in touch with the soles of our feet.

And feeling them in touch with the floor.

Feeling the pressure,

Light pressure there.

Moving over the feet up to the ankles.

And just letting your eyes move around that scene.

Maybe there are sounds as well.

I live in a house in London,

In England.

A community house.

It's quite quiet today but there are train tracks that run at the bottom of the garden and then also on the street.

Sometimes that noise is in the background.

Maybe it's similar for you,

There might be noises that come,

Again accepting that they're there.

So where were we?

On the ankles.

I'm going to move up into the lower leg.

Sensing the shape of the muscle and the bone.

And when we pay attention like this,

I know that for myself sometimes I can feel like,

Oh yeah there's a bit of tension there,

I can let go of that.

It's a bit like the feeling of your shoulders if that ever happens.

If sometimes we have been busy with something and then someone might come and touch our shoulders and say,

Hey you can rest those a bit you know.

Oh yeah,

I can.

So similar thing that we're doing for ourselves.

Oh yeah,

I can just let go of that posture in my leg.

That brings a bit more ease.

And it's self-compassionate as well.

We're moving up,

We're,

We're accepting our body as it is in this moment as well.

Knees and thighs.

Up to the pelvis.

There might be some pain there in some parts of the body and if that's there that's to be accepted to in this moment.

If we resist it,

More stress.

Accepting less stress.

Feeling the buttocks sitting on the chair or on the cushion.

Then we've got the lower belly.

That's the area that we're allowing to move up and down with the breath.

The breath's still happening.

Still happening in the background there,

Which you can be aware of.

It's got the tummy,

Stomach area.

We won't go too much into that today but you've got your organs there in process.

Deep breaths,

Relaxing that area of the body is what we can do to ease any discomfort there.

Smaller the back,

Spine,

The chest and the lungs.

Feeling the air coming in through the nose or the mouth,

Down into the lungs and then the oxygen is moving around the body.

And we've got the arms as well.

You feel the shoulders and what we said before.

I'll tell myself now I feel I can let a bit of tension go there.

Moving down the forearms,

Sorry the top of the arms.

Feeling both elbows and then into both wrists and then find the union with your hands.

I invite you to hold your hands.

Hold one in the other.

And take a moment to,

You can bring your eyes down to your hands from the window and just observe the wonder of hands.

Look at the shape of your hands,

Maybe move them gently,

Stroke them.

Whatever ability you have in your hands.

Imagine moving your fingers,

Move your fingers gently.

And then we'll move back up the arms up to the shoulders and bring that attention back to our neck and the breath again in through the nose.

Which by the way,

The nose,

I find a wonder of the human body.

It humidifies air as it comes in if it needs to for the lungs.

Looking always to bring air into the lungs in the most suitable way it can.

And nose and ears,

Hearing my voice.

Maybe have the headphones in there.

And we've got the eyes.

We'll come back to forehead,

Top of the head.

OK,

So back to the eyes.

So about a sixth of your eye is visible.

The rest is hidden in the socket which is evolved slightly back to prevent exposure and damage from sweat and from other damage that might come towards it.

Of course the eyelashes,

The eyelids.

Interest you to know that the eye is thought to have begun to develop about 500,

600 million years ago.

And this quote I have here is that the simplest eye were patches of photoreceptor protein in single cell animals.

And with every birth of another being,

The eye starts to develop two weeks after you're conceived in a human being.

Our fingerprint has 40 unique characteristics which is why it's used often with security technology.

The retina has 256,

Scientists say.

And they're being used a lot on these days.

So allowing your eyes to again rest outside.

And this may be a process that you know about already.

But there's a saying I like which is receiving something as though it's the first time you've heard it like beginner's mind.

I've heard it called.

I'll tell you what it means to see something.

So choose an object.

It could be anything from a tree to the road or if it's dark,

Look for something where you can see some colour.

But if you can't,

Look for some shapes.

Light energy is moving around if it's the daytime or the night time.

Less of it.

And it's bouncing around from object to have different textures of course.

And a bit like a camera picks up one pixel of a picture and presents it to the camera technology which assembles a picture.

It's based on the eye and what has happening is light is coming off points of the things that you see and coming directly in straight lines into your eye.

You might be aware that what we're seeing is turned upside down and then returned round again.

And this is because the point at which light enters is so small it can't bend so it needs to go straight in.

Meaning that light bouncing off the bottom of say a tree trunk will then come to the top of the eye where it's received and so the picture's upside down and it's the job of the optical nerve to move that around again.

I find it useful if I find these kind of things overwhelming to imagine they're going on to remember that they're just happening and the best I can do is keep healthy to allow them to happen.

I know that when I kind of give love to my eyes if that makes sense by sleeping well by giving them a cool flannel on a hot day,

Maybe a slice of cucumber,

Drinking water and also appreciating them.

Has someone ever told you that your eyes are beautiful?

Well let me tell you now,

Your eyes are beautiful.

Your eyes are a wonder of evolution and for sure everyone I'm speaking to will have slightly different shades and colours in there.

But over the aesthetics they are a beautiful current in the universe allowing us to see and recognise and ultimately to love by recognition.

So how do we want our eyes to,

What role do we want our eyes to play and how does our attitude towards them allow that to happen?

Let's go into the process a little bit more.

We have something called cones and something called rods in our eyes and the rods,

There's more of them and they deal more with shades and they're more at play in like darker atmospheres and the cones pick up light.

And you can look it up for yourself but there's millions of them in the eye.

About 120 million rods and five million cones.

I'm not a scientist,

Quite how they counted I'm not sure.

But they respond to different textures and those textures become colours which again are slightly different for all of us depending on the makeup of our eye.

A bit more on the science,

Light travels at around 300,

000 kilometres every second.

So when we see a flash of lightning that's three kilometres away we're seeing something that happened a hundredth of a millisecond ago which is not really that,

Not that long ago.

But of course we know we can see further than this.

The moon,

Our nearest neighbour,

The moon which used to be part of the Earth,

Interestingly I learned recently,

Is about 380,

000 kilometres away.

So that takes about one and a half seconds for the light to travel from the moon into our eyes.

So we're seeing the moon as it was about one and a half seconds ago.

The sun is 150 million kilometres away so we see the sun about eight minutes ago.

And so it goes on.

When Mars is close to the Earth we're seeing it as it was about three minutes ago.

And at other times it takes as much as 20 minutes depending on where the planets are positioned.

There's a star with the name Alpha Centauri and it's considered the nearest visible star to the unaided eye.

And this is about scientists think,

Astrologists think 270,

000 times the distance between the Earth and the sun.

That's four light years.

So we're seeing Alpha Centauri as it was four years ago.

Maybe that's enough for now.

So I'd like to read you a couple of quotes and then I'm going to sing you a song.

The first quote comes from Pema Chodron.

And Pema says when you open yourself to the continually changing,

Impermanent dynamic nature of your own being and of reality,

You increase your capacity to love.

You increase your capacity to love and care about other people and your capacity not to be afraid.

You're able to keep your eyes open,

Your heart open and your mind open and you notice when you get caught up in prejudice.

And Meister Eckhart says the eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me.

My eye and God's eye are one.

One seeing,

One knowing,

One love.

I read that quote.

So as with all my relaxations and meditations,

I'm going to sing you a song now to finish the relaxation.

And Be Still is about a friend of mine who lived with depression and anxiety for quite some time until it got to a point when they needed a life change and they sat by a window as you're doing now and just watched.

Did that for a couple of days.

We didn't know how share I lived in and we all supported that kind of attitude sometimes,

You know,

That you just need to stop and we spoke in the evening sometimes and this song came out of it.

So feel free to watch what's happening around you as I play this song.

There's a message from the windowsill where you sit there in your sitting still and green grows up the vine and flowers take their time.

There's a message and it's coming through the coming of the morning too.

You can hear it in the whispering of the birdsong sing be still,

Dear one.

Let the seasons go and let the rivers run.

Be still,

Dear one,

And you'll know.

And know you're sitting there and you hold your hands and roll your hair and you'll come back to there time and time again to watch the animals to watch the rise and fall of days and evenings and it all as it comes in be still,

Dear one.

Let the seasons go and let the rivers run.

Be still,

Dear one,

And you'll know.

So teach your children well and may your love the ringing bell sound in stories that you tell to them as they grow.

Cause they'll come back to hear through the seasons and through the years back from joy and back in tears to come back to your care.

Be still,

Dear one.

Let the seasons go and let the rivers run.

Be still,

Dear one,

And you'll know.

Be still,

Dear one.

Let the seasons go and let the rivers run.

Be still,

Dear one,

And you'll know the spring will come.

Reviews

What a beautiful, heartwarming meditation. Thank you so much Joe 💚🙏

This meditation was so different and beautiful. I loved looking out the window at the moon early in the morning before there was light and listening to the guitar and the soothing voice. Wonderful way to start my day. Thank you.