All right,
So I'm going to go ahead and light my candle,
And I'm just going to hold it for a second for us to connect to if you don't have another grounding object.
And if you have one,
Yeah,
Just let yourself connect to it in your own way.
I'm just having my eyes open to connect to this candle,
But you can do whatever is simple for your attention,
Into the sense of sight,
Or if the sense of touch is more accessible,
Or even a sound.
We'll just pause for a moment to let our attention find something simple.
I'm gonna go ahead and put down the candle,
But I just want to bring in,
You can have your eyes open or close,
I just want to bring in the acknowledgement of a fire.
A candle is a,
It reminds us that there is a flame,
And it's a flame that we can see,
But it's also a flame that we can feel sometimes.
It's a flame that sparks our heartbeat.
It's a flame that we feel from the sun.
Also acknowledging water.
I happen to have a cat fountain in my house,
But,
And it's really loud this morning,
It sounds,
My clients think it's a Zen fountain,
And I suppose it kind of is.
Anything can be anything,
Right?
So I'm reminded of water.
Water,
Too,
Is very accessible.
It's in our mouths.
We can feel water in our mouth,
Tangibly.
Intellectually,
We know we're about two-thirds-ish water.
So acknowledging water.
I'm hearing the sounds of the wind outside,
The wind into the leaves,
And so acknowledging air.
Sometimes we hear air,
But we're always experiencing air through breath.
I'm just taking a moment to acknowledge and honor this life-giving,
Hmm,
Life-giving-ness of air.
And then earth.
When I,
When I say,
When I call forth earth,
I feel my feet on the ground.
So I can see earth,
But I can feel my relationship directly with earth,
With my eyes closed.
I'm just letting us,
Letting us have a moment of gratitude for earth,
The land that we're on,
The land that shares herself with us in this moment,
Right now.
We're in relationship with land.
We're in relationship with earth,
Water,
Fire,
Air.
And we can experience that directly in simple ways in this moment.
If your eyes are closed,
Maybe just let them kind of softly open,
Just very gently.
We're not gonna look at anything specific,
But just let your eyes see your place in space.
Let your eyes see your sitting body,
Or I think we might all be sitting,
But if you're standing,
Let yourself see your standing body.
If you're laying,
Let yourself see what you can see laying.
Invite your eyes to look through a lens of simple.
What's a simple right now with your sitting body?
What doesn't need to be changed or fixed or maneuvered?
Maybe it's hands on lap.
Maybe it's the way the legs are touching the object under you.
Maybe it's feet on the floor,
Or maybe it's something that you can't see,
Like,
But you can feel like the pillow behind my back is something that comes forth.
I can't see it,
But I can feel the pillow behind my sitting body.
Maybe letting your eyes move a little bit more.
We're just letting our brains and our nervous systems know that we're in familiar territory,
Externally anyway.
We can see the solid walls and see behind us familiarity.
We can see that we're in familiar and stable settings,
And even if we're feeling different things inside of our body,
We can see that there's no threat or danger outside of our body.
We're just letting our brain really take that in for a minute,
And letting the eyes gently close to feel back into the simple.
What's just so simple in this moment in your sitting body?
Hmm,
And maybe just notice how your relationship,
I'm sorry,
Your body is in relationship with gravity,
And maybe just for a moment even let yourself kind of slump forward a little bit.
My body kind of wants to move real slowly back and forth,
But maybe you just kind of lean in a little bit,
Lean back a little bit.
There was nothing in the way.
I would just fall right into gravity onto the floor,
But there is something in front of me,
And I can also feel my feet kind of stabilizing me a little bit.
Just to let yourself feel our relationship to gravity.
When we slump over,
We can really feel it,
Really feel the weight of having bones.
Oh,
And then we might,
Yeah,
We might just let our weight go from side to side,
Or let's keep experimenting that we have a weight with us in relationship to gravity,
To earth.
Oh,
You might let yourself kind of slump back or lean back.
Depending on your posture or your context,
You might have something there ready to catch your leaning back,
Like I do.
I have a pillow that's like,
Oh,
I'll catch you.
You can lean back,
I'll catch you.
You might not have that in your context,
So just your own relationship with gravity in this moment.
The body getting to be heavy in different kinds of ways,
Again,
Based on your context.
My arms get to be really heavy in this moment.
My legs get to be really heavy in this moment.
There's nothing they need to do or go anywhere or fix anything.
They just get to be real,
Oh,
Real heavy.
I'm just kind of noticing in this moment what is supporting our being.
I really want to let our bodies answer that,
So if the eyes are okay to be closed,
Our bodies will tell us the answer.
What is supporting us?
Oh,
It's X,
Based on your context.
And letting yourself feel that,
Letting yourself experience the support,
This very simple,
Mundane,
But important support from under you or behind you,
However you experience it.
One of the great gifts of gravity is that it's always here,
So in some kind of way,
Support is always here.
It's always available for us if we orient to receiving what is just here.
We don't earn support from gravity.
We don't need to be worthy of,
We are just inherently worthy and given support from gravity,
Just like we are inherently given breath.
We can have an intentional relationship with breath in the sense that we can count breaths or we can hold breath,
But we can also let breath have us,
Like we do when we go to sleep at night.
We go to sleep and breath just has us a whole night long,
Breathes us while we're sleeping,
And so we can play with breath breathing us when we're awake.
One way to to play with this is,
If it's challenging or if it doesn't make sense that breath is breathing us,
Is a little experiment we can do is on purpose not breathe in,
Not hold breath,
But also not purposefully breathe in.
Eventually breath will breathe through us,
So there's an innate sacredness within our system in relation to breath.
We can just keep it simple,
Maybe just noticing breath through the nostrils or breath with the shoulders rising and falling or any other way you want to connect to the experience of simple breathing in this moment.
While you have some of your attention still oriented to gravity,
Some of your attention still oriented to how breath is moving your creature,
Moving your body,
Just let the eyes really slowly open and play with letting what you see come to you.
You don't have to look for things to see,
Just let the eyes open and let whatever comes into vision come toward you.
So your attention can stay really here.
And then what you see gets included from here.
Letting your eyes meander a little bit if you'd like to,
Or maybe your body move a little bit if you'd like to.
If there's anything that is kind of standing out to you that you connected with in the last bit of time and you want to jot it down or make a note,
Be something you got real curious about or something you want to maybe explore more later,
You can let yourself write that down.
And then we'll come back to the screen,
Back to each other and pause on our resting period.
