Hello and welcome.
The following is a guided meditation by Renee Seals,
A somatic movement educator,
Energy worker,
And astrologer.
This meditation is intended to help support your embodied meditation practice.
If in the recording you are prompted to do something that doesn't feel good for your body,
Please adapt and modify to make it work for you.
Please also note that the content of this meditation sometimes explores deep and subtle states and memories,
And sometimes guided visualizations.
You are encouraged to work with discernment as you practice with them.
If any of the guidance Renee offers feels too activating or uncomfortable,
Please listen to your body's knowing and pause the recording until a later time if you wish to return to it.
These guided meditations range anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes and do not require any supplementary equipment to participate.
We hope you enjoy.
Hi everyone,
Thanks for listening.
This is Renee.
I want to offer a guided meditation today for shifting perspective.
This is part of the series I've been offering on what I'm calling deep healing.
This is healing that's not about muscles or bones or any of your body tissues,
And it's not even so much about your mind as it is the kind of deeper patterns that we're all working with.
These deep patterns are bigger and more historic than anything I think any of us can imagine.
There's the patterning of our species that we're all working with and honestly in the process of.
You know,
I think it's easy to be in the present moment and think that we've arrived somewhere,
But the truth is that we're always traveling forward,
And the evolution of our species is far from over unless we destroy ourselves.
But you know,
We have become upright bipedal forms with opposable thumbs and you know,
Brains that are capable of critical thinking,
Of questioning,
Of innovation,
And bodies that are able to execute what our minds come up with.
That is pretty astounding if you think of you know what we have come from,
Which is a single-celled organism in the ocean,
Right?
So the upliftment of our consciousness is in the state of process,
And the meditation that I want to offer is about seeing that.
And I think right now,
But probably and probably always because it seems to be the human condition,
We look at what is fearful and we look at the negative.
And in this way we kind of future imagine negative stories and we create from that place.
And this is not so like out there or woo-woo,
It actually has a scientific grounding to it where you know,
Our species in order to develop,
We've had to be on high alert.
We've had to be in our sympathetic nervous system.
In terms of the age that we're coming from and the evolution of humankind into this moment of the industrial age,
There's been a lot of necessity for things like tribalism.
It has been a biological necessity,
Basically,
To know who your people are,
To know who your people aren't,
And to make contracts and you know,
Forge alliances and try and dominate.
That has made some kind of sense in order to build whatever it is that we've built.
But things are changing quite a lot now and there are more and more people on the planet and there are fewer and fewer resources.
At the same time,
We have a really different capacity for connecting with each other.
We have access to information and knowledge in a very immediate way.
We know something now about collaboration and collectivism,
Even just through pop culture and thinking about sharing economies or even something like memes or Twitter.
Like we know we can reach people instantaneously,
Basically.
On some level,
We're figuring out how connected we are to our brothers and sisters across the globe because we're feeling it in the temperatures,
We're feeling it in the global climate that is commerce and trade and anxiety.
So the experiences that we're starting to have are really shifting into a new and larger and more expanded body and collective.
At the same time,
We each want to take responsibility for how we're shaping that collective.
This is that adage of you create your own reality,
But we all create reality together.
This is as basic as if you're in a shitty mood and you wake up and you know you're in a bad mood and you perpetuate it because you treat other people poorly and you know it and you know it while you're doing it and you're like,
Hmm,
I was just really cranky and I didn't need to be.
That's the reality.
So we shape each other's reality,
We shape each other's experiences.
It's not a far out new age idea that you create your own reality.
There's the acknowledgement in saying this that we create the realities that we create within the context of our individual existence.
We really want to look at that and we want to look at how we each have different potential for shifting perspective,
But some potentials are more easily reached if you have comfort in your life.
So people who have their basic needs met,
They have enough food,
They don't need to work a million hours to pay their bills,
They feel generally safe.
These are people who can spend time thinking about shifting perspective and seeing the positive.
I want to say that if you're listening to this podcast,
You fall into this category and I fall into this category that we are incredibly lucky that even given the tumult and the chaos that is the United States right now,
And I know I have listeners in other countries,
But we're all affected by this tumultuousness and it's worse in other parts of the planet.
It has been worse in other eras and other times.
If there's the possibility that you go to a yoga class once a week,
Then there's the possibility that you can shift your perspective.
You should.
It's a blessing,
It's a gift to be able to shift your perspective.
The thing we need to remember is that we also have to do the work that's necessary to help everybody shift their perspective.
Because if you're off there on your own thinking everything is groovy and la la,
And meanwhile there's a reality right next door to you where the conditions make that shift really hard because somebody is faced with really different circumstances,
A different kind of necessity to be on survival mode.
The calm and quiet and space that you have in your yoga class once a week,
That adds up to something.
So we really want to be uplifting each other and that's important in our communities that we do this with everybody that we talk to,
That we try and maintain mindfulness of how we're affecting our environment,
And that we reach out with any kind of opportunity we can authentically offer to help anybody else have the conditions they need to shift their perspective.
So this might mean a little bit of altruism,
A little bit of philanthropy.
It might mean that instead of ignoring the person who's asking for money on the corner you give them five dollars or ten.
It might mean that instead of tuning out the news and only focusing on the internal,
That instead of that what you do is focus on the internal and get out more into your community,
Into spaces that are different than the ones you normally occupy,
And you see what the news is around you firsthand.
Engage with it a little.
One of the biggest dangers I think of yoga,
Meditation,
Astrology,
Tarot,
Whatever it is that is groovy and blissful and has this ascension quality to it where it's like yes this is a liberatory tool.
That's what it is.
It helps us to wake up.
But the danger is is that then we become complacent and we think oh I've reached somewhere.
I've arrived.
Everything is great now.
And then it's just looking for other people to validate and confirm.
So we really want to be intersecting and interacting and doing whatever we can in this moment is extremely important politically.
Doing whatever we can to share resources,
To share resources we have and have access to.
If you share with people,
You can do this as an experiment.
If you share with people,
They will share with you back.
Okay so the meditation that I want to offer today is actually a very practical and like really nerdy science-y way to integrate and shift perspective and to understand where different perspectives come from.
And what I'm going to offer is directly sourced from my teacher Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen.
And if you're a somatics person,
If you're a movement person,
I really would love to encourage you to look at her work.
She started what's called the School for Body Mind Centering.
And Bonnie is in her 70s now.
She's still teaching and a lot of her work has been in the study of embryology and development.
Human development as well as phylogenetic development.
So the development of our species,
The development of the human body and what happens in the first year of life.
And these primary patterns,
Basically what they do is they create different hemispheres in the body.
So this is your axes.
So your right and your left sides,
If you can imagine how they come together,
Right?
They formed differently,
Your right and your left sides.
So in your organs,
This is manifested like some of your organs are on one side,
Like your liver is on the right side,
And your stomach is on the left side,
Right?
They formed differently.
You have slight variations between each arm and each hand,
If not great variations.
Where they come together forms the vertical axis and this axis is a stabilizing axis.
All right,
So that's one plane.
Another plane is front body,
Back body.
Okay,
So front body you can feel that and back body you can feel that.
And then where they come together,
That's the lateral axis,
Right?
The coronal plane.
And when you were developing as an embryo way back in the day,
Your front body was basically like a tube and that tube became your organs and your back body was another tube and that tube became your nervous system and your skin.
And so you can feel how there's a difference between the front and the back body and the back body has this protective kind of quality to it because it literally like grew out and widened and wrapped around and met in your front and then came in and like brought your insides inside of you.
Isn't that crazy?
And then you have another plane and that's called the horizontal plane.
So if you keep your pelvis and your legs stable and you turn from your waist and you feel how your ribs turn,
Right?
And that's the separation between upper body and lower body.
And primarily what's contained in your upper body are your organs,
Your vital functions.
You could not live without your upper body and your lower body,
You know,
Is important.
It's your carriage,
It's your horses,
Right?
Your support.
But you could live without your lower body.
So we know something about the development here.
So check in with yourself now as opposed to even just a couple of minutes ago as we went through that kind of very brief introduction of what we're about to do.
And do you even already notice some shift?
Because I know that I do.
I feel slightly more integrated just having paid attention to those different qualities of meeting,
Of coming together,
And of differentiating and of moving apart.
Okay,
So we're going to go through basically a routine.
And this is a routine of spinal awareness.
And it's going to begin at the earliest developmental stages and it's going to end at the at a later one.
And then we're going to do a routine of spinal awareness.
This routine is incredibly integrating and you can do it in any shape.
Plenty of you who listen are somatics people and you might even know this series with kind of like rolling on the floor.
If you don't know what I'm talking about,
You could make it up.
You can just roll on the floor.
You could do this with yoga and sun salutations very much.
And you can do this with a lot of other things.
You can fill in any posture.
And you'll know what to do,
I promise you.
If you are preferring to take this in a more relaxed and kind of sensory space and you're lying down or you're seated,
Let whatever movement naturally arises come in.
So really let go of the premise of like a super upright meditation posture.
But also let your awareness just come into your body and if it feels like you want to move with them,
Just move with them.
So really invite the movement into this meditation.
Okay,
All right.
So begin by letting your eyes soften.
And your eyes can close or they can just simply be downcast.
And place your hands together on top of your belly button.
And then take some deep breaths into your belly.
Exhale and sighs out.
And I want you to imagine that as you inhale,
The inhale begins in your navel center and then it radiates out into the periphery of your being.
And then as you exhale,
That energy comes back in and condenses at your navel center.
So you can place the sun here behind your belly button.
And as you inhale,
It's moving into the full light of day,
Just getting brighter and expanding into your whole body.
And as you exhale,
We start to move through high noon and into dusk and then all the way into the deepest midnight and there's the condensing in.
Okay,
So two or three more breaths like that.
As you inhale,
Feel the radiance growing out of your navel center and into your entire being.
And as you exhale,
Letting it gently recede back in.
And last breath like this,
Inhaling.
And exhaling.
And exhaling.
So you can release your arms and do whatever you want with them now.
And what I'd like you to do is from your belly button,
Explore a relationship down to the base of your spine and up to the top of your head.
And this relationship is continuous.
So these three points all respond to one another.
And I want you just to go ahead and take any kind of exploration of this.
So any spinal movement that relates the tip of your tail to your belly button or navel center and then into the top of your spine.
And sometimes there's some confusion about where the tail and the top of the spine are for people and this is just because these places are kind of unfamiliar.
So if you touch the bridge of your nose and kind of point like down towards your cheekbones,
Where your finger would like shoot out the back of your head,
That's about where the top of your spine is.
Another way to say that is if you stuck your finger in your mouth and touched your throat,
You would be touching the top,
The front top of your spine.
So when you look for this relationship all the way to the head,
You can think of it moving even into your upper palate.
Now with the tailbone,
You could feel for it.
So you can actually use your hands.
And most people's tailbones are somewhere kind of up and back behind the anus.
And it's low.
Like I think there's some kind of misconception a lot that the tailbone is actually the sacrum.
Like people say tuck your tail and then folks do something with their sacrum.
But your tail,
Your actual tailbone is in your butt.
So you want to feel for that.
And therefore you could think of this movement as not just your head to tail to the quote-unquote navel center,
But actually as an organic movement that's mouth to anus with your guts.
Because this is what it was in the embryology.
This is the first spinal pattern,
The first spinal movement.
And what it is is kind of a pulsating.
So if you imagine that as a growing baby you were held in a contained space and if you like pushed your head up and back you would hit the parameter of your mom's uterus.
And then hitting something,
Hitting resistance creates pressure that would then cascade through your spine and down into your tail.
And because of how babies are growing,
Right,
Your knees are tucked up into your chest so your butt is pushing against another part of the uterine wall.
And then you would want to also push into that.
It's kind of like a rooting feeling.
And then that resonance or ripple kind of goes all the way up through your body,
Through your belly,
And into your head and into your mouth.
And you see little babies doing this when they reach to nurse or when if they're on the floor,
If they're lying on their back,
They'll push their butt back into the ground and you'll see them do this arcing thing with their chest sticking up.
And that's this pattern.
So that's what I'm going to invite you to feel for now.
And if you have some resistance,
Like if you're sitting and you can feel the floor under your bum or if you're like in a child's pose and you brought your head to the floor and you could feel resistance under your head or I don't know you could wrap yourself in a blanket or something,
But you want to kind of notice what happens when you push into something and how it ripples through your spine.
And for me,
I feel kind of an immediate calming effect.
And if you can continue to find the relationship into your belly and really let the belly soften,
Then as you go through this feeling,
This movement,
You might start to notice how it churns your belly.
And this is the basic digestive process.
So what we're stimulating here is the deepest sense of the parasympathetic.
Yeah,
So from this place,
I'm just going to invite you to simply come to a point of stillness and then open your eyes and notice how you feel.
Like notice how things look,
Notice where your orientation is,
Like where do you want to look?
Do you want to move around?
Are you very still?
Notice what the mind space is.
Okay,
And then allow your eyes to soften or close again.
And now I want you to start to contract your right waist and let your left waist grow longer.
So expand the left part of your body and condense the right part.
And then do the opposite and slowly begin to condense the right part of your body and expand the left.
And you could think of this also kind of as an organ movement and maybe link it to your breath.
So as you exhale,
You can feel the right lung condense and you can start to reach and stretch the left lung.
And then when you come over to the side,
You might inhale and feel the opening of the left lung and feel how the inhale can further condense the right.
Let's just keep it like that so you can kind of feel the movement of your lungs as what could be initiating this pattern,
Which is side to side.
And as you feel the right and the left lungs simultaneously or alternating,
Expand and condense,
Let the direction of your head or your face start to shift so that you're looking down on whatever side it is that's shortening.
So your face,
If you're tipping to one side,
Would tip towards the shortened side,
The condensing side.
And if your eyes are open,
And they may or may not be,
Or you could do this even with eyes closed,
You can start to work a little bit even with your gaze.
So the gaze could take you to the left and to the right.
But if you're working with the gaze,
Don't forget your lungs also.
Okay,
So this movement you might recognize as a reptilian movement.
So we came from single-celled organisms from tube worms,
Which were basically the last movement that we did.
And then we started to grow arms and legs and we became kind of amphibious or reptilian.
And in babies,
You see this when they start to develop the movements that will make them crawl.
So the first couple of weeks,
They're like jelly,
Right?
They don't,
They do the arcing back and they do the coming in.
If they've had a full term pregnancy,
If they have enough tone in their bellies,
Then they'll also curl in as well as arc back.
But then they're going to get a little bit older,
A couple of months,
You know,
A month or two months,
And then they're going to start doing this side to side thing.
And then they're going to start adding their arms.
And so you might try that if you're moving in some way,
That your arms also get added in.
So your elbow would come in on the shortening side and your lengthening side would take the arm up and over.
And you're always looking towards the shortening side,
So you're kind of following your hand with your eyes if your eyes are open.
And if you're preferring to work with eyes closed,
That's totally fine.
Just feel the internal movement.
And then finally,
If you're in a position where you can also move your legs,
You might experiment with including your legs so that the lengthening side lengthens,
Including the leg,
And the shortening side shortens,
Including the leg.
And you get this kind of military crawl thing or this amphibious crawl thing where it's called a bilateral movement.
So it's left side,
Right side.
And just feel that,
That one side is condensing and one side is lengthening.
And you can bring your breath into the lengthening quality.
And you can also bring your breath into the condensing quality.
And if your eyes are working,
Then your nervous system is too.
And your attention is staying at your hands with the eyes.
Okay.
And then slowly start to let this one come to a pause.
A pause.
Hmm.
And okay.
And then observe.
So for me,
I sense that after the first meditation,
Or moving meditation,
My attention was very much in the midline.
I was looking straight forward,
And my attention was all in my belly and back.
Now my attention is in the right and the left parts of my body.
And that makes sense.
That's what we were just doing.
But on a perceptive level,
I'm more open in my ears.
I feel less eye oriented.
And I have kind of a curious sensation,
Which is that I feel a spreading from my inner body,
Like out into the coronal plane.
So what do you notice?
You know,
What do you feel in your body?
Name it for yourself and look around or notice what you want to look at,
How the eyes want to move.
This time as opposed to last time.
Notice what the feelings are.
And can you sense this cognitive shift?
And it's not about labeling what it is,
Because it's going to feel different for everybody.
But it's the residue of the movements that we were just doing.
It's the physiological form.
Okay.
And now close your eyes again.
All right,
So now feel for your navel center again.
And see if you can kind of just start to move one limb forward at a time.
So it could be an arm or it could be a leg and then the other side left and right.
But just the upper or the lower body.
So it's either the arms or the legs.
And by arms and legs,
I also mean shoulders and hips.
So if you're like listening on the bus or something and you want to be really sneaky,
It's just kind of a very gentle movement of like one sit bone about a centimeter forwards at a time and a very kind of subtle drawing back through the shoulder.
Okay.
And now do the opposite pattern on the other half of your body.
So if you've been moving your shoulders forwards,
Now also move your hips.
But if the right shoulder is moving forwards,
Then the left hip is moving forwards.
And what I want you to feel for is the twist.
And it's not a big twist.
Okay.
It's not like you're going to go into a revolved triangle pose or something.
It's a very gentle twist.
And the feeling is that the lower portion of the spine is very gently twisting in one direction and the upper portion of the spine is maintaining steadiness.
But it's not like you're going to be moving forward.
It's not like you're going to be moving forward.
And what I want you to feel is maintaining steadiness.
But the back body and the shoulders,
Right,
Are also very gently moving.
So the central axis stays pointing forwards basically,
Like your navel and your heart center and your hips are gently twisting.
And they're creating an alternating spreading through the back of the hips and shoulders and a condensing through the back of the hips and shoulders.
And that's the same for the front,
The chest,
And the pelvis.
And all of it's happening at the same time.
So as one shoulder goes forwards,
You can feel how that creates an opening,
You know,
In one part of the collarbones and a condensing in another.
And as one hip goes back,
You can feel how there's a spreading in the back of the foot that's moving forwards and like a deepening quality in the front of the hip of the foot that's moving back.
Maybe you followed all that.
So both patterns are happening at the same time.
And this is what I want you to feel.
And this might be obvious,
But it's a contralateral movement.
And if you're up and moving around,
This is walking.
And so if you are moving around,
Then feel this in your walk.
Feel the way that your gait or the foot strike of your foot against the floor is throwing a leg forward or throwing a leg back.
And if you let your arms swing naturally,
Then you'll have this opposite movement,
This opposing movement.
And that swing,
The swing of your arms when you're walking or you're running helps you to be fast.
So if you've ever trained with running,
You know that if you want to run faster,
Move your arms faster.
So let's just feel that for a little bit,
That contralateral movement and it's this very,
It's this twisting around the central axis,
But the central axis stays vertical,
Right?
The central axis is what I mean,
Basically what we started with,
Tail to head or kind of this organic connection.
So any kind of,
You know,
Revolved yoga shapes would do this,
Walking,
Running,
Obviously with dance,
Your possibilities are limitless.
With Pilates,
Like if you're using this for a core workout,
This is kind of like radiation out of the navel and into the extremities and like a swimming or something movement,
Whether you're supine or prone.
Okay,
So then let's bring this back to a point of stillness.
Point of stillness.
And then open your eyes and pay attention.
Do you feel the cognitive shift?
So shifting perspective is not,
Doesn't have to be a mental battle.
It doesn't have to be a coercion of yourself to try and adopt some worldview that feels non-instinctual.
It can actually just be an experience like this.
And so what I want to offer is that if you're experiencing something in your life right now and you want to shift your perspective around it,
That you can meditate on it and do this routine and notice what arises in these different mind states.
In the different spaces,
We have different layers of our cognitive past.
So we have the different layers of evolution that we've gone through as a species and we have the different layers of evolution that we've gone through in our own human lives.
And so you might find that certain movements evoke something stronger than other movements.
Maybe a deeper sense of healing and peace,
Maybe foreignness and frustration.
My advice is to really stay with it and to continue to practice every day if you can.
All right,
So to close I want to read to you from the Mother Peace Tarot book.
This is a gift from my mom,
Vicki Noble,
Is the author,
Not my mom.
Vicki Noble wrote this book in the 60s or 70s.
I think it's like classic second wave feminism and it's amazing.
And like really beautiful cards and hand,
You know,
Hand drawings.
Oh no,
She wrote it in the,
Wow,
In 1958.
Okay,
So definitely recommend it if you're into that kind of stuff.
But I pulled a card for this practice and I want to read it to you.
So the card is judgment and the figure is an ankh,
Like an Egyptian ankh,
Which is basically a cross but instead of the top portion of the cross,
There's a circle there and it's kind of like Venus.
And this is a,
I think,
A primordial symbol of femininity and of the feminine ray,
The feminine love and magic.
And from this,
The heart space in this ankh,
There's this opening that looks like a diamond and a rainbow is pouring out of it and the ankh is standing on the,
On a planet Earth and the rainbow is cascading over the Earth.
So it's a really beautiful image of love,
Wisdom,
Showering over the Earth.
All right,
So this is what she writes about this card.
When you get the judgment card in a tarot reading,
You can bet some important decision has already been made by your high self or over soul.
You may not even be consciously aware of exactly what has happened but something has and it alters your reality for good.
You've been uplifted in some way,
Transported right out of the past and into a new present full of wonder.
You're not angry and you're not blaming others but taking full responsibility for a choice and for a new way of viewing reality.
You are making wise judgments.
Likewise,
You're in a new space of global vision and divine understanding.
In some way,
You're tapping into the very highest energies and using them with balance and foresight.
You're not being angry and you're not blaming them with balance and foresight.
The compassionate understanding of your heart is ridding you of old negative patterns that held you back and the same sympathetic understanding is having an effect on others around you.
You've stopped judging people from a narrow critical vantage point.
Now you see them with deeper caring and clearer vision.
You understand their foibles as well as their divinity and you accept them as a package of both,
Like yourself.
Judgment portrays an end to suffering and the beginnings of spiritual resurrection.
Now is the time to make amends for past errors.
If you have needed to be honest or frank with someone,
Do it now.
If there is some unhealed wound between you and another,
Heal it now.
Let your negative patterns dissolve.
Know that the positive forces in the universe are acting through you now and there can be no defeat.
Judgment is the card of the divine healer,
The absolutely transcendent and non-attached channel through which flow the highest forces of the universe.
You have an opportunity to manifest those energies right now and if you do they'll have lasting effects on your life.
You might want to work with envisioning the new age in your own specific way.
Let the visions flow through you and manifest in some way that will also allow others to see them.
Share your vision.
Let's all use this guidance to imagine the futures that we want,
To shift our perspectives,
And if there are places in your life where you've been really hooked on patterning that you know in your being isn't helpful to you,
You know you can get over it and I know you know what I'm talking about because we all have it.
I don't know what yours is but I know what mine is.
Then let's continue to work to shift our perspective and let's start to reimagine or to imagine what the spiritual potential is.
How this could unfold and play out in the most beneficial way possible to all involved.
It might feel a little bit like escapism and I urge you to take heed of that,
Like to not let it be a kind of blissed out thing but to really think critically about it.
Like what do people need,
You know,
And what really could be the best solution.
So if you're a critical thinker to go that way,
To think hmm how could this work out and it might take some magic or some,
You know,
Unexplainable I don't know how we would get there but I could see how this could work.
Yeah?
And if you're stuck in some place where you're just like this is shit it's never going to work out I hate it and you're living in misery at least in that corner of your life,
Then meditate on it and bring in this routine that we just did and see what happens.
I'm going to leave it there for now and thanks as always for listening.
I've really been appreciating your support,
Your donations that you give allow me to do this work and to put in thought and time and research to the meditations and to the podcast that I offer.
If it's something that's helpful for you and it would be useful for you to donate a little bit at once or even a recurring donation every month that's wonderful.
Thank you so much.
So thanks a lot and wishing you all the best.
Until the next time,
Bye for now.
