Welcome!
This guided meditation and breathing practice was offered by Renée Seals for Somatic Space.
Somatic Space is a weekly embodied astrology class where we practice attuning through our bodies with current astrological influences.
For this meditation please find yourself in a comfortable position where you can breathe easily.
I'm going to come down onto the floor and I'm going to set up my space with a yoga mat and a blanket on top of it because I want a lot of softness for myself and I love bed.
Okay,
So if I was just going to do this practice for myself I'd go to bed.
Um,
But I'm not.
So if you have a bed and you want to work in it,
Do.
All right,
So everything that I offer is always a suggestion.
If what I'm offering doesn't work for you,
Let it go.
Change it up.
Okay,
So when you've found your place on the ground if it feels all right to lie on your back you can start there.
If you'd prefer to lie on your side or your belly that's also great.
Cushions,
Pillows,
Blankies,
Stuffed animals,
They're all welcome.
We're just going to spend a few minutes practicing yielding.
And a yielding practice is a deeply relational practice.
So there's a kind of yielding that we can do when we're really tired where it kind of just feels like we merge into the bed or into the floor and you know you you just like give all of your weight.
But there's also a way in that that you lose yourself.
So when I'm really tired I can give myself to my bed and just lose myself to sleep.
And that is a wonderful thing to do and if that's what your body needs right now I hope you do it.
But otherwise a yielding practice is actually about maintaining some amount of awareness and really starting to invest that awareness into contact.
And so as I'm lying here on the ground I'm letting my attention move into the places of my body that are the heaviest.
My knees are bent,
You can have your legs out,
Okay so however you want to be lying down right now is great.
So I'm letting my body sense into gravity,
Becoming aware of contact,
And in the spaces where I'm perceiving contact,
Where I feel my weight being held by the floor,
I'm actively giving my weight even more.
So there's an invitation here to feel are you holding on,
Holding in,
Holding up,
In really subtle small muscle nervous system kinds of ways.
You might tune in with your head,
Your face.
Is it possible to give the fluid weight of your head,
Your brain,
And the inner contents of your head even more fully to the ground?
Are you holding on in your jaw or in your eyes?
And as you release any possible tension or weight that is ready to be released,
Investing even more deeply in that contact with the ground.
So where your head is meeting the floor,
Meeting your bed or your pillow,
And you're really feeling that the contact is there and you can trust it,
You can give yourself to it.
Find another place in your body where your body's weight is fully giving to the floor,
Whether it's the backs of your elbows or your pelvis,
The outsides of your ankles,
Wherever you feel your body's weight resting into the floor,
Explore the relationship that you have in the contact and to the relationship you're giving your weight.
So we'll continue the yielding practice,
Continue to work with it in your own way,
But allow your awareness now to move into your breath.
And I want to invite you to try to see if your body can allow some belly breathing.
And to breathe into our bellies is to relax the front wall of the abdomen.
It's to let the lower lungs fill up before the chest,
Before the upper lungs.
As your lower lungs fill up,
They press down in your abdominal viscera and you should feel your belly moving out as you inhale.
Now,
When you breathe,
Try not to breathe with force.
So we're not trying to push the belly out.
And this might mean that your breath doesn't feel as full as it possibly could.
So we're also not necessarily prioritizing super deep full breaths.
I want to invite in here the image of the ocean and tidal wave-like breathing.
And you might imagine that your belly is the sand at the shoreline of the ocean.
And your breath is a wave,
Your breath,
Your breaths are the waves.
And as the waves roll in,
They're all going to be different.
Some will be big,
Some will be little.
But as they contact this shore,
The water also seeps into the sand.
I want to invite that feeling into our low bellies,
The soft part of the belly.
That your breath can be like a wave or a tide.
And it can roll in and seep into all of the tissues,
Release back into the ocean of the atmosphere.
And some of you might even be able to hear the sound of your breath.
And as you listen to your breath,
You might notice that it even sounds like the ocean.
And if your body ever feels tensed or stressed,
Because you're trying to get your breath to move into your belly,
Relax.
We want to let it flow in softly,
Seep in like water seeps through sand.
Some breaths are little,
Some breaths are big.
And now let yourself imagine that the heaviest parts of your body are lagoons.
And if you've ever encountered a lagoon,
It's a place where the ocean can reach and fill up.
But then when the ocean recedes,
It stays full.
So there might be like a berm of shore that the ocean can roll over and fill up.
And when the tide is low,
The shoreline will separate the lagoon and it'll be like a pond.
So as you're breathing your tidal breaths,
And the ocean of your breath is flowing into the shoreline of your belly,
Let your breath start to spread out through your whole body into the heaviest parts.
Into the places where you feel the contact with the ground.
Like your breath can fill all these lagoons,
All these little ponds of weight in your body.
And all of the weighted parts of your body can also release back to the ocean,
Releasing on the exhale into the atmosphere.
