Welcome.
My name is Keith Parker.
Please prepare yourself.
Sit back,
Relax.
Some people like to sit up,
Some people like to lay down,
Whatever it is that's most comfortable and supportive to you for the session.
The session will be 30 minutes.
I'll also be giving you a guided practice,
Like a guided meditation to help to move your attention in particular places,
Which will help to facilitate those energies which are flowing,
Okay?
So let's get started.
So drop in,
Turn your attention inward.
Notice the interior space.
Notice what's happening in the space of the mind and what's happening in the sensations in the body.
And we'll get the energy starting to run.
Okay.
Throughout the session,
Try and be as deep and as connected to the witnessing as possible.
To witness is to be in pure awareness,
To be the sky and to notice the clouds passing through the sky.
The witness is that depth of your being,
The depth of your awareness in which you can see thoughts arising and thoughts,
Sesating or falling,
In which you can see sensations in the body arising and passing and noticing the transience of thinking and the transience of feeling,
Right?
So stay in or drop into that witnessing as much as possible throughout this practice.
And it is that witness,
That pure awareness that enables us to deepen our neutrality towards experience,
Which enables us to see it clearly,
To be non-judgmental,
To be equanimous.
And it is from that place of balance and equanimity in which we can start to have true insight as to the nature of things,
To not be pushed away or pulled towards things which we like or dislike that arise in the body-mind.
So come back to this witnessing regularly if you lose a sense of it at any point during the session.
Now place the attention in the space of the body.
Notice the whole body.
Drape your attention,
Canvas your attention in and around the entire body.
Just noticing how it feels at the moment.
And breathe into the body.
Send the breath,
Direct the breath towards the space of the body.
Almost as though the body were a kind of balloon.
And as you breathe,
The body inflates,
It fills,
It densifies.
And as you exhale,
It softens,
It deflates,
It disperses,
It lets go.
You might notice this very directly in the area of the belly,
Abdomen,
And diaphragm,
This filling and emptying,
But you can extend that to the space of the entire body.
So breathe consciously,
Just for a couple of minutes here.
.
Now for the next while,
As we energize and vitalize the system,
There'll be more of a body focus,
If you will,
A sense that what is being attended to moves through the body.
And here we make reference to the channels from the acupuncture system known as the meridian channels.
And the meridian channels,
When studied more and more,
Basically contour the shape of the physical body,
All the limbs through all the organs,
Through all the physiological systems.
And what we're going to do is try and scan our attention through the body systematically to help to facilitate energy flow through our channels.
.
So first notice or get a sense of the physiological systems you're used to.
What is it like to sense into your bone,
Your skeletal system?
Can you envision the skeletal system in your mind's eye?
Or maybe you can simply be with your skeletal system in the space of the physical body,
Holding your attention throughout it.
And from bone,
Can you connect to veins and arteries,
The primary conduits in which blood flow?
Can you get a sense of that when you feel into your body?
Maybe so,
Maybe not.
What about moving to the nerves?
You have the central nervous system,
The brain and spine,
And you have all of the peripheral nerves which extend from the spine or descend from the brain in the cranial nerves,
Innervating all of the organs and the rest of the body.
Can you get a sense of your nervous system and the tracts of the nerves themselves?
Now,
These physiological systems and sensing into the physical body in this way may take some practice,
May be accessible or inaccessible to some of you,
But what is it like to transition into sensing?
Well,
What about my energy body?
What about my energetic channels?
And can I tune my perception from the frequencies of the body or the frequency range of the body to the frequencies or frequency range or even domain of the energy field?
What's that like to tune into that?
They're deeply connected,
But in a certain sense,
They're happening.
They're perceivable through different channels of perception,
Through different frequencies.
Tune into the energy,
Tune into the energy field,
And notice what you do naturally when attempting to do so.
Now,
In a sense here,
We're filling up,
We're energizing these subtle energy channels,
Which are numerous.
There are a tremendous amount of them,
And they're rather complex when studied closely.
But we can understand there's an overarching organizational structure to the energy system,
The field,
And to the overall symmetry in the body,
And that is the midline.
The midline is the middle of the body.
If you put a mirror right through the center of the body,
There would be an equal reflection on either side.
Most things in the body are symmetrical,
Barring certain organs.
So we're going to start with making use of this midline as a body scanning practice.
So first,
Notice the whole right side of the body,
The whole right side.
Hold all of it in your attention at once,
Just noticing.
And now notice the whole left side of the body.
Once more,
Go back to the right side of the body.
Hold all of it at once,
So it's everything from the midline to the right.
And again,
Switching over to the left side.
Notice the whole left side of the body,
Midline to the right.
Okay,
And let that go.
Now let's just work with the arms and legs,
Quickly noticing the right arm and then the left arm.
Once more,
The right arm.
And then the left arm.
And now down to the right leg.
Once again,
The right leg.
And then the left leg.
And let that go.
Now notice that there is likely an asymmetrical or uneven perception of the sides of the body or the sides of the appendages.
You don't have to do anything about this,
But simply noticing it is very,
Very useful as things will automatically reorganize through the midline and we've been working with this approach of noticing the left and the right.
Now it turns out there are midline channels specific to our meridian system which we're going to scan.
And sometimes this is called scanning the microcosmic orbit.
Basically the back of the body and the front of the body,
The loop around the midline of the body,
Is a connection between two different channels known as the governing vessel and the conception vessel.
And they trace the midline.
So together we're going to trace the midline of the body,
Holding our attention on these two paired channels.
And we're going to start this at the perineum.
So if everyone can bring their attention to the perineum.
So the perineum is at the base of the pelvis.
It's where the root chakra is.
It is behind the genitals and in front of the anus.
And as we're doing this channel scanning or traveling the circuit of the microcosmic orbit,
Generally keep your attention focused and tight on the midline on the point we're scanning and to keep it at about the surface of the skin.
So starting at the perineum,
We're going to start going back towards the anus and we're going to go up the back.
Go slowly.
So back from the perineum and going back between the buttocks.
And holding the midline,
Holding center best you can where we go and noticing where your attention is kind of being pushed off center,
To the left or to the right,
And constantly returning back to the midline.
So going up between the buttocks.
Up the back of the pelvis.
Through to the upper buttocks and to approaching the back of the SI joint,
The sacroiliac joint.
And now starting into the lumbar spine,
The lower spine,
Again staying at the surface of the skin.
So you're not really with the skeleton so much and you're not in the spine itself,
But really on the back body on the surface of the skin,
Running your attention along the vertebrae up the back.
And we're now in the lumbar spine,
The lower spine,
The lower back.
Approaching the thoracic spine,
The mid back.
Starting to reach the lower shoulder blades or middle shoulder blades.
Coming up towards the base of the neck on the back and starting to engage the cervical spine.
The lower neck,
The middle and upper neck towards the base of the skull.
And once you get to the divot at the base of the skull where the spine connects in to the cranium,
Going up the back of the head.
Until you come up to the crown.
Take a moment to pause at the crown.
And then beginning to go down the top of the skull towards the hairline.
Slowly going down the central suture here,
The sagittal suture on the cranium.
Getting to the brow line and starting to make your way to the forehead and coming down the forehead.
And then in between the eyebrows.
And here you have two choices from the spot in between the eyebrows.
You can either stay on the skin on the front of the face,
Like across the nose and the lips until we get to the neck.
Or you can drop down from the space between the eyebrows.
You can drop down into the skull and come to the point at which your soft and hard palate meet at the roof of the mouth.
And to find this you can simply put your tongue up to the roof of the mouth.
And move it back along the hard palate until you feel the soft palate begin.
And that connection point between the soft and the hard palate is where to connect this point between the eyebrows to just drop down to the point your tongue is contacting.
And connecting through the tongue to the base of the mouth and then out onto the neck.
And we're all at the surface of the skin and the neck coming down to the base of the neck.
Again,
Staying at the surface of the skin,
Coming to the bottom of the throat and starting to move down the chest.
Continuing to move down the front of the chest and coming to the upper abdomen.
Down to the bottom of the breastplate and past the xiphoid process until we get to the upper abdomen.
Making our way towards the navel.
Noticing how the front body feels different than the back body.
The front body,
Most of it is the conception vessel.
The back body is the governing vessel and the connection point is where that soft and hard palate are in the roof of the mouth.
It's not necessary to make the junction there.
That is the connection.
And so we keep going down to the lower abdomen,
Approaching the pubic bone.
And the pubic bone continuing down towards the genitals.
And down and underneath the genitals until we get back to the perineum.
Okay.
Well done.
Now,
If you're having your attention at the perineum,
Get a sense of how that connects to the crown.
And whilst we made this loop from the governing vessel to the conception vessel,
Tracing the midline of the body at the surface of the skin,
Let's just connect for a moment to the central channel itself.
And this connection point is between the crown,
The top of the head,
The crown chakra even,
Down to the root chakra,
The perineum.
And just in your mind's eye or in the space of the body,
Trace between those two points.
Just get a sense of the connection straight through the center of the body between the top of the head and the bottom of the pelvis from the crown to the root.
Well done,
Everyone.
We're going to switch over to integration in just a moment.
And the last scanning exercise to do here is notice the whole right side again.
Just notice the whole right side.
And notice the whole left side.
And once more,
Notice the whole right side.
And notice the whole left side.
Okay.
And let that go.
And in general here,
We're going to focus for more than five minutes,
Closer to 10 minutes on integration.
And really to allow yourself to let go here.
If you've been sitting up,
Feel free to lay down.
Okay.
We're going to bring in appropriate tools to support integration.
So notice the shifts in the energy field as we do so.
You may get a sense of really expanding or connecting more from our emphasis so far,
Which has been much more with the channels of the body,
Which kind of outline the contours of the body and mimic or overlap a lot of what we're familiar with in our physiological systems.
And now we're spreading out an integration into the field itself,
Into the overall energy field itself.
And get a sense of that if you'd like to.
What's it like for you to extend your attention from the surface of the skin outward in all directions,
Left and right,
Front and back,
Up and down?
What is it like for you to dilate or zoom out or expand your perceptual field from the space of the body out into the field which surrounds you?
In this period of integration,
Really there is nothing to do,
Nowhere to go.
Feel free to simply be,
To surrender,
To let go,
To relax.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
So that is a means to help facilitate the last couple of minutes here and to further the integration,
Let's come back to the breathing practice we did at the beginning.
Breathe in such a way as to fill the space.
Now,
Whereas before we worked with breathing into the body,
See if it makes sense,
See if it is accessible to breathe into the field itself and the body is within the field.
So breathe,
Inhale and inflate,
Fill up,
Vitalize,
Compress the overall field with breath energy.
Exhale,
Soften,
Relax,
Release.
Let that energy disperse or distribute wherever it needs to go.
Do this consciously for one minute.
Breathe well into the body and the field within it.
Breathe in.
Breathe out.
Breathe out.
Last few breaths here.
And as you do so,
Focus the breath more and more into the body,
More and more into the chest and abdomen and pelvis,
Feeling into the pelvis and the legs and the feet and grounding.
And as we conclude to say any appreciation or gratitude internally that you would like to express.
And may this practice be not only a benefit to us,
But to all others.
May this practice not only be a benefit to ourselves,
But to all others.
And we'll close the session there.
Thank you so much for participating.
Please feel free to use this session anytime as a quick way or as a 30 minute way to energize and integrate your overall system.
It is a building and strengthening practice overall.
And feel free to use it as such.
Thank you so much and have a wonderful day.
