Structure, Stability, & Ease - A Meditation For Bones

This meditation focuses on clarifying our connection with our bones and skeleton. Our skeletal structures provide us with clear, direct pathways of stability and support. In movement practices we can avoid overuse and injury in our muscles by learning how to align and connect with our bones instead. As a meditative practice, connecting with the felt sense of bones increases calmness and inner stability.

Transcript

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.

I want to invite you,

As always,

Just to be comfortable where you are.

You can practice this meditation seated,

You can stand.

I love thinking about bones when I do yoga poses.

I love thinking about bones when I walk and when I dance,

So please feel free to take this meditation into your movement.

Begin by deepening your breath and you might find that breathing in through your nose and exhaling out your mouth in a sigh delivers a felt sense of relief to your body.

So when we sigh,

We have a physiological response and there's a relaxation that happens throughout several different systems in our organs and our nervous system.

As we inhale through the nose,

The breath slows down and we feel the touch of breath expanding into the tops of the lungs and maybe traveling down into the base or the back of the lungs.

If you relax your belly as you inhale and let that belly breath come in,

You might feel how the movement of your breath can travel all the way through your torso,

Maybe even into your legs and into your feet.

So let's take maybe three or four more breaths and as you breathe,

Listen for the sound of your breath.

This isn't a forced sound or something that you might be able to hear,

But it's a sound that you can hear in your body.

You can hear the sound of your breath.

You can hear the sound of your breaths and as you breathe,

Listen for the sound of your breath.

This isn't a forced sound or something that you manipulate with your throat in order to achieve,

But it's an attunement and a settling,

Subtle awareness.

Listen to the quality of your breath as well as the sound.

And with all of our practice,

We begin with the intention of non-violence.

And it's crazy to think that we can be violent with our breath,

But in fact we can be.

And we want to notice when there's aggression in the breath and invite a sense of easefulness and steadiness with our breathing and a welcoming or generosity with the breath so that there's no forcing.

There's no need to control your breath in this moment,

But just to feel it.

And then you might want to use your hands and bring your hands outside of your ribs.

And now as you inhale,

Feel the movement of your breath press out into your ribs.

And as you exhale,

Feel the way that the ribs contract back in towards the center of your body.

There's a narrowing in the torso and movement back towards the spine.

I just want you to feel this movement a little bit because sometimes when we think of bones,

We think of hard immobile structures.

And bones are actually quite vibrant.

They hold a lot of potential.

They are the storehouses of minerals in our bodies,

Of fat.

And as I mentioned before,

White blood cells.

They're incredibly important for our immune systems.

And longevity and perseverance through hardship,

We need the strength of our bones.

And feel now how your bones move so they are adaptable.

They can change and they're sensitive.

There aren't a lot of proprioceptors or nerves in our bones.

There's some around the joint spaces,

But sensation in the bone is very different than sensation in the skin or muscle.

And I find that the easiest point to access sensation is through imagination.

So if you can see your bones in your mind's eye,

And through this inner visioning,

Feel your breath.

Feel the way that your bones move.

This inner visioning,

Feel your breath.

Feel the way that your ribs move on your inhale and your exhale.

Now you might be able to feel where your ribs attach to your spine at your back.

So if you bring your hands to your back and you find the bony points that stick out at the back of your spine,

And alongside the right and the left of those bony points are some long and fairly dense layers of muscle around your spine.

Usually feels really good to rub them.

And it's underneath that muscle that your ribs attach to your spine at what are called the facet joints.

So when you inhale,

Can you feel the touch of your breath move into your ribs and then into your spine and into these spaces between the ribs and spine?

And I want you to invite an awareness and imagination and a sense of breath now into the bones of your spine.

And the spinal column has these kind of irregular pointy shapes in the back and on the sides where you feel your vertebra.

And then the column of your spine is comprised of big round discs,

Excuse me,

Big round bones and they sandwich the discs,

Cartilaginous discs between them.

And I want you to feel the shape of your spine and this will change depending on what body position you're in and that's fine.

So there I'm just going to name the different parts of your spine.

I want you to bring your attention to them and feel what is available to you in those places.

So if you were to let your head come forwards and scoop your tailbone forwards so that your back is rounded,

You would feel what is called the primary curve and this is a convex curve.

It moves to the back.

It's otherwise known as kyphotic.

So when you curl your spine to the back,

Curl your head in towards your belly,

These are the primary curves of your back and by primary that means it happened first when you were developing as a fetus.

You were kind of in this c-shape and the parts of the spine that are still in the primary curves are the sacral curve,

So this is the base of your spine,

The thoracic curve and that's the part of your spine where your ribs attach,

So from kind of your waist all the way up to just around your collarbones,

And then your occipital curve and the occiput is the base of your skull.

So there's three curves that curve more to the back than to the front and again the spine is more to the back than to the front and again this might change depending on what position you're in.

So if you're listening to this in a waterproof mp3 player floating on your back in a pool,

You might feel really different than if you're in child's pose,

But these are the places to bring your attention to right now.

I want you to breathe into your back body and see if you can feel the bone of your sacrum and it's the same root word as sacred and this is our anchor point,

The anchoring of the spine,

And relax around your tailbone.

Feel easefulness all across the front of the sacrum,

The part of the bone that's more towards your organs than your skin.

Breathe into the the front surface of your ribs.

Breathe into the front surface of your occiput in the back of your skull and feel how these parts of your body are wide in the back.

So they're broad horizontal width.

Okay and then we'll bring our attention to the secondary curves and as the name implies these are the the curves that developed after the primary curves and they started to develop in utero and then became strengthened and integrated after you were born and when you learn to lift your head up on your own the cervical curve started to develop and that's the curve in your neck and your throat so the part of the spine there that curves forwards and what's called the lumbar curve and this is where your lumbar back is and it's the space between your bottom ribs and the top of your sacrum and it's kind of the small of your back and the part of the low back that also curves forwards.

So now can you bring the touch of your breath into these places and I like to think about the front of my spine and my breath wrapping from the front to the back.

And when I feel the bones of the spine I feel a quietness and that quietness is a steady container around the central column around the spinal cord where of course there's some really important stuff right like your central nervous system can't live without it and that stream of consciousness and fluid and nerve that that runs through the central column is held in this beautiful quiet clear vessel of bone.

And now let's feel the portions of bone that balance the spine.

So you might notice that in the parts of your body where the spine curves forwards in the lumbar spine and in your neck there is softer tissue so you have your belly and of course your abdominals are really important for stability but it's soft tissue it's your your organs and muscle and then in the front of your cervical spine there's something that feels more rigid your trachea your windpipe but it's not it's not really a weight-bearing structure and it's not bone.

But then in the parts of your spine that curve to the back there's bone that balances those curves in the front so if we start at the sacrum we might feel that in the front of the pelvis you have the pubic bones and so your pubic crest kind of creates this kind of a tightness in the spine so your pubic crest kind of creates this bowl-like container for your lower pelvic organs and the pubic bones balance the sacrum front to back.

In the front of your thoracic spine you have your breast bone or your sternum and of course your ribs wrap from the back to the front they're longer in the back and more kind of rounded and luminous in the front and then there's this really amazing beautiful bone your your breast bone your sternum that protects your heart super important protective structure there and then to balance your occipital curve the back of your skull you have all the bones in your face which is so wild for me sometimes to think about I think of my face as this like I don't know mask or something but often I forget that there's bone behind the facial features so right now we're just going to let the facial features sit on the back of your face and right now we're just going to let the facial features soften and you might even want to blow out your lips a couple of times or stick out your tongue and make some crazy sounds puff out your cheeks and squint your eyes but then let your face flesh soften like it's just gonna relax off the bone and see if you can embody and breathe into the bones of your forehead your eye sockets the maxilla which is the bone kind of that forms your upper jaw and behind your cheekbones and feel the quietness of your breath touch the inside surface of your sternum and your ribs and the quietness of your breath pull down and spill into your sacrum and pubic bone so this part of our body that we just kind of scanned through is called the axial skeleton and the axial skeleton similar word is axis so this part of our skeleton is the axis our thoracic body and our vital organs so this is the axial skeleton and this is the axial skeleton and we're looking at our body and our vital organs and we cannot live without our axial skeletons or we can't live very well and sorry i don't know if that was the right choice of words but without the axial skeleton we we have a lot more complications these bones protect our organs bones in your head protect your brain,

Your ribs and your sternum,

Protect your heart and lungs.

Can't live without those guys.

Then the sacrum and the pubic bones hold your lower organs.

They give them stability and base and container.

Really important to be upright and obviously your spine protects your spinal cord.

So we feel in this part of our bony bodies protection.

So as you breathe into your axial skeleton can you breathe into the quality of bone that is clear and clearly protective and defined.

So we have a border and a boundary and a container and allow your organs to rest and to relax.

Feel your brain relax,

Feel your heart and your lungs relax,

Feel all of your belly organs and your pelvis pelvic organs relax and you are held here.

So this is the steadiness and the ease is we don't have to work so hard.

There are these brilliant structures that can keep us aligned and protect what we need to protect.

And our axial skeleton supports and is supported by our appendicular skeleton.

So same root as a root word as appendage.

The appendages,

The appendicular parts of our body are our limbs and connecting our legs and our arms to our torsos we have fairly big and complex joints.

So the hip joints and the sacral iliac joints,

The SI joints are pretty strong and sturdy joints.

The hip joints are very deep and the SI joints are held together with with a lot of stuff.

And I just want you to feel into your pelvis for a moment and you don't need to know the names of things but feel the way that your legs connect to your pelvis and you might move your pelvis a little bit,

You might move your legs a little bit and just notice what that relationship is.

So activity through one leg in an asymmetric way will turn your pelvis.

Activity through both legs in a symmetrical way will give you a different result.

It might cause a tilt like a forwards or backwards tilt whereas an asymmetrical pressure will cause a turn right or left side.

And just kind of yeah just sense that relationship that this is the place where the stability of ground and legs and gravity the the earth moving force of the body meets the spine,

Meets the central axis.

It's a really potent and important place.

In your upper body and your upper limbs you might move your arms around a little bit like a snow angel or make some rotations with your arms and feel how your arms connect to your body through your shoulder joints.

And you have these pretty amazing structures that keep your arms attached to your body.

And in the back you have your shoulder blades,

Your scapula,

And if you open your arms wide like a T and then squeeze your shoulder blades together in the back you might feel how there are really big muscles underneath your shoulder blades and they there the muscle is what holds the back of your shoulder on your body.

And your shoulder blades are meant to slide over your ribs.

They're not meant to get stuck in one place.

And in the front you have your collar bones and your clavicle and so you can feel your collar bones quite easily.

And your collar bones are actually the only bony pathway for your arms really to connect to your spine.

We have the head of the arm bone that seats in this little socket and then that bone has a joint that attaches it to the collar bone and the collar bones attach to your breastbone and then your breastbone attaches to your ribs which then attach to your spine.

So the collar bones have this amazing job of giving skeletal integrity to the arms and all the way to the hands.

And some of us might have experienced moments in our lives or maybe even a regularity in our lives where our collar bones feel very heavy or feel deadened in a certain way.

If we you know slump a lot or feel that our upper bodies are heavy or heads are heavy and this is exacerbated by a lot of cell phone use.

So it's really important to feel the collar bones and breathe into them and feel that the collar can spread and that spreading through the collar bone and and breathing into the sternum and the collar bone isn't the same thing as squeezing your shoulder blades together.

That there doesn't need to be a muscular tension but that your breath can support that opening in that pathway.

And then from the hips and from the shoulders we have these long bones of our limbs and in your thighs you have what are called your femur bones,

Your thigh bones.

Those are the longest bones in your body and they're quite big,

Quite big bones if you're an adult sized person,

Pretty substantial.

And in your arms you have the humerus bones and so both the femur and the humerus are ball and socket at the top.

And I just want you to feel how they can rotate so you can it's called internal and external rotation and if you kind of roll your shoulders forwards and back your whole arm will move and you'll feel the top of your arm bone moving in the shoulder joint.

And if you turn your thigh bones in towards the midline and then out to the sides that's an external and internal rotation in your hip joints and your whole leg will rotate.

And then we have of course our knees and our elbows and the elbows can do quite a lot of things.

They've got a lot of different movement potential because they connect to bones that rotate quite easily.

And the knees on the other hand pretty much just do one thing or two things but two parts of the same one thing which is to straighten and bend.

And we don't really want the knees to do that much else.

We don't really want them to go to the side or to rotate.

It's good that they straighten and they bend.

And so you might just send some breaths into your elbows into your knees and feel that these joints are really important.

They're really important in the translation of the outer external world the earth and then our environment to our internal experience and worlds.

So send some some love into those joints.

And from the knees and the elbows we have two bones then continuing out towards our hands and feet.

And in your arms it's fairly easy to feel that you have your elbow bone so the top of the elbow connects to a bone that then attaches to the little finger side of your hand.

So you might even be able to feel that bone all the way down.

It's called your ulna.

And then you have another bone in your forearm that connects your thumb to your inner elbow and that's called your radius and it radiates around the ulna.

And that's what causes the rotation or the pronation and supination of your palms which is important for doing all the things we do with our hands.

So you feel those cool bones,

The movement potential there.

And then in your legs obviously you have your shin bones those are called your tibias and they're really straight clear bones.

And the bottom of your tibia is your inner ankle bone and then your outer ankle bone is the bottom of what's called the fibula and that's the other foreleg bone.

And you can feel it at the bottom and it's harder to feel as you get closer to your knee because it's buried underneath muscle,

Quite a bit of muscle and fat.

There's a bird that's going crazy in my backyard I don't know if you can hear it.

So we have two bones in our forelegs as well and these two bones also allow pronation and supination in the feet and inversion and eversion.

So if you you know roll to your inner foot or to your outer foot or point and flex your feet that's mobility that is happening in your ankle joint and the ankle joint is the relationship between your two foreleg bones and then another bone called your talus and that's kind of your ankle bone and it's held between your two foreleg bones.

So in the arms and the legs we have the hips and the shoulders so these big sturdy joints and then one bone a larger weight-bearing bone or you know stronger bone the humerus or the femurs and then we have some joints and then we have two bones the two foreleg bones the two forearm bones and then we have many bones so the hands and the feet I think there's I think I could be wrong I think there's 26 bones in the hands and 27 in the feet or something like that 20 something in both and then a lot of joints right like all these tiny little bones and all of the meetings between them and just feel just feel your hands and your feet bones and move them around and maybe look at them and pay attention and gosh they're amazing structures so your feet are really adaptable they can walk over all kinds of different surfaces that's what they're meant to do your hands are really adaptable they can hold all kinds of different things and make different shapes and braid someone's hair and that's what they're meant to do.

So I just want you to feel these really just brilliantly designed structures of many bones for adaptability and gesture attaching to two bones balance rotation movement options attaching to one bone strength sturdiness attaching to the axial body and in our legs we have the parts of our skeletons that connect us to the earth so if you're sitting or standing right now you can just feel the way that your legs provide this amazing base for your spine to rest comfortably over and these structures that move you through your life and through the world and then in our upper limbs and our arms and hands we have the ability to hold and to gesture and to give and to pick up and to manipulate and to drum and eat and do all the things that we need to do with our arms and our hands and feel that there's steadiness and ease in the relationship between the axial and the appendicular skeleton that we have stability and mobility and the balance between them always so there's a lot of sayings or these kind of adages that say something like I felt it in my bones or you know the wisdom is in the bones or something like that and there's this folk wisdom around the bones that we understand the bones as old there are the the things that are left after the flesh decays off of a body and through the bones and through the teeth we can measure the age of something and of course our bones are made of the same minerals that are found in rocks and soil so when we embody and touch into our bones we're also embodying and connecting to the parts of ourselves that are mineral and rock and soil and we remember time and the spaciousness of time that we might feel really pressured and maybe even frantic in our lives at certain moments and feel the years passing by and the urgency of right now and then we also remember that we have a longer history that our structures are made of stuff that came from the stars that have lived through many eras and epochs and will continue even after the consciousness our conscious identities have changed so feel the quietness of your bones and feel their clarity and their calmness feel the way that they protect and contain their steadiness and their ease remember that they're adapting and changing all the time that they respond to pressure feel how they contribute to the movement of our body through their connectivity through the periosteum and the ways that they become the ligamentous tissues feel their amazing power and reserves this calcium and mineral and feel their fluidness just like the earth at the center in the molten core is this constant movement and fluid and then take a moment and offer gratitude to your bones and oftentimes our bones are painful and they hurt and they feel age and if that's the case for you right now just send them love and thank them for the job that they've done and all of the support and stability they've given you and feel your breath you you