Guided Meditation 12.
2.
Gently holding depression,
Connected with lifelong loneliness.
Bring your attention to your physical body in the world.
As you breathe in,
Notice where you can feel your breath moving.
Movement of your muscles,
Movement of the air.
Invite yourself to bring warm regard to your attention,
Gently supporting it to stay with or to return to your breath sensations.
What is the texture of your breath?
If your breath had a color,
What would it be?
Would there be different colors for in-breaths and out-breaths?
Let yourself sit for a few moments,
Feeling into the inner life of your breath.
Now let yourself imagine if you are willing,
That as you breathe in,
You are bringing in an emotion that supports you,
And that as you breathe out,
You are breathing out an emotion that represents your pain,
Your anger,
Depression,
Fear,
Or grief.
As you work with this,
Notice if you are profoundly alone in your experience.
Notice whether shame has some flavor of this experience.
What if you don't have to be quite as alone as you are?
What if you really do belong here on planet Earth?
Let your breathing be an acknowledgement of your emotional self in the larger world.
As you breathe in,
Let the world nourish you with resonance.
Bring your resonating self-witness in to support you.
Let this compassionate inner voice ask you,
Are you exhausted and do you long for a safe place to rest?
Are you angrier than you can bear and have you given up?
Do you need hope,
Balance,
And self-responsibility?
Are you so lonely that your bones creak?
Do you wish to experience even a few seconds of both a feeling of being deeply embedded in a warm,
Loving community,
And simultaneously a feeling of soaring freedom and individuality?
Would you like to be sure that your self-expression would bring you closer to others rather than pushing them away?
Would you like to know that it is possible to both be yourself and be connected to others?
Let your out-breaths carry the way you feel into the world,
Breathing your emotion out.
With your in-breaths,
Let the world,
A kind and warm world,
Respond to you.
Let it share and console your grief with you.
Quietly savor any stirrings that might arise.
Let's move farther into the physical being.
Find the loneliness that lives at the level of the very small beings that comprise you,
Your cells.
If there were longings or dreams or truths that were traveling into your cells,
Or a call to the universe traveling out from your cells,
What would that exchange be like?
Are your cells aching to relax into being truly known?
Or are those words so foreign that they are almost incomprehensible?
Would it be nice if they made sense?
Let your resonating self-witness speak with the lonely cells.
If you don't have a sense of your self-witness,
Bring in someone else as a resonating witness,
Someone you trust.
If there are no people you trust,
Are there any animals?
Is there a tree or a place in nature?
How do your cells respond to this being or this essence?
Do your cells need acknowledgement that they have been alone and bewildered for as long as they can remember?
And do you,
As a whole person,
Need there to be someone bigger than yourself,
Someone warm and dependable that you could lean on when you want and wander away from when you want,
And who would still be there in the same place for you to come back to?
Is there a longing to know what support and intimacy might feel like?
And how about being loved no matter what?
Would it be sweet to have experiences of love that truly have nothing to do with what you've done or haven't done?
Would you enjoy being able to know what unconditional love means?
Would you like to know that you belong utterly,
That you are beloved,
And that you are understood?
As we work with these concepts and talk about them,
Is there a mourning that needs to be acknowledged,
A grief that needs to be made room for?
Have you been alone more than any little social mammal should ever have been alone?
Each and every cell in your body has a tiny bit of the original mother in it from many generations ago,
In the mitochondrial DNA.
If we think about cells in this way,
Each cell in your body is being supported and loved by the long line of mothers that stand behind us.
Now come back to your breathing and see what emotions might be being breathed in and out.
What is your sense of your body as a whole?
Say goodbye for now to this work of acknowledgement and let yourself return to your regular life.
