Welcome.
We offer these meditations freely and your donations make a real difference.
So thank you.
So let's get ourselves comfortable.
It's a very beautiful morning,
Possibly sitting cross-legged or in a chair.
I'm giving ourselves the time and the space to get comfortable if you need to go get cushions.
It can be really nice to have cushions underneath you,
Especially if you're sitting cross-legged on the floor because usually your knees are flying high and by bringing cushions in you can get your hips higher than your knees which the body usually really likes.
So we have half an hour which means you've got plenty of time so it's worth the bother of getting up and getting whatever you need.
Make sure you're warm and then start to settle.
You might take your awareness to your breath as we begin to settle.
Breathing in through your nostrils and out through your nostrils as long as your nose obviously isn't blocked.
And if it is then just gently breathing in and out through the mouth.
And let the tongue come to rest up on the roof of your mouth.
Allowing some selfness,
Softness through the jaw and the teeth.
Notice the sensation around the nose as you breathe.
Sometimes you can feel the temperature difference between the inhale and the exhale.
And the eyes,
You may want to keep the eyes open.
Just soften the gaze so you're not looking straight ahead.
Your gaze is more landscape or you might find naturally your eyelids drop.
And even if that's the case then beneath the eyelids let your gaze soften.
We're in no rush and there's no particular formula we're trying to meet.
We're just creating space for our curiosity and our awareness to notice how things are.
So trying to step out of the paradigm of this is getting it right and this is getting it wrong.
And just gently being okay with whatever is.
Embracing it all.
Notice how the shoulders are.
Let them soften and melt away from the ears.
Creating space for your neck.
And taking awareness down to the sitting bones.
As your awareness drops down into the pelvis,
Noticing what you find.
What you sense.
Maybe a deeper breath can let you drop deeper.
Trusting that whatever your body sort of facilitates,
Whatever experience comes,
It's probably the right experience.
So we don't have to dictate it or shape it to be a certain way.
It's just making time and space to get to know,
To befriend what we find.
You might notice how the legs are.
What you can feel.
If you are sitting across the legs,
You can even bring your hands down to your legs and give them a little squeeze,
A little massage.
You might do that to your feet.
Just helping us and encouraging us to actually be present in the legs,
In the feet.
So our awareness isn't top-hard heavy.
We're not just hanging out in our heads.
But we're aware of sensation and feeling tone.
Right the way down to our toes.
And then resting the hands back in your lap.
Let's feel into our relationship with the earth beneath us.
So beneath your sitting bones and your legs.
Down through the foundation of the building that you may be in.
You get a sense of connection to the soil,
The earth.
And beneath those top layers of soil or sand,
Maybe you can sense the shifting texture as it becomes rock.
This planet is rock.
And at its very heart,
It's on fire.
So maybe you can sense the heat.
Maybe you can take it all the way down into the fire.
Coming up through the pelvis up along the midline of your spine.
Notice as you draw your awareness up through the spine,
What it is that you find.
Dropping the chin down towards the chest,
Staying open through the back of the throat.
Drawing your awareness to the occiput ridge at the back of your head where the skull rests on the vertebrae.
And again,
There's no formula that we're obliged to follow here.
We're just exploring.
So if your experience doesn't match my words,
Then your experience takes priority.
Perhaps you might feel a sense of openness.
And perhaps that openness might spread all the way around the skull,
Up to the crown of your head.
Maybe you can sense your relationship between your physical body and the space around you.
The room that you're in,
Furniture.
Perhaps that can expand to the space outside of the building,
Up above through the treeline,
Up above that,
Through the atmosphere,
Up to the stars,
Way out to the cosmos,
Infinite galaxies.
And notice how it feels if it's available to be in relationship with the earth,
This burning rock,
And in relationship with the cosmos,
Ever expanding.
Can we feel our relationship in both of those directions simultaneously?
Feeling the quality of your breath here,
Maybe still breathing through the nose if that's available.
Finding the nature of your inhale and your outhale.
See if we can start to lengthen that breath.
And letting the inhale draw down into the very centre of your heart.
It's almost as if the inhale were a ribbon winding its way down into the centre of your heart.
And then as you exhale,
Letting the exhale begin at the heart and expand out in all directions.
And we're familiar with the way this practice often goes.
Sometimes we feel really anchored in the practice and able to stay with it,
But usually fairly shortly after the beginning of the practice,
It can be easy to drift off down a rabbit hole or two of distraction.
And so if and when that happens,
The second part of the meditation is noticing that that's happened.
So noticing with a little smile rather than a chest eyes,
There I go,
There I go being human.
Doing what humans do.
And then guide yourself back to the breath.
Bring the awareness back to inhaling into your heart and exhaling from your heart outwards in all directions.
Do we just drop this idea of right or wrong?
We're much bigger than that.
We have capacity to hold it all.
The days when the practice is unavailable.
The days when the practice feels like a life raft and everything in between.
As the breath deepens,
Notice what happens to your connection with your heart as you deliberately create a deeper breath.
The heart can hold all experiences.
The word courage obviously has a French word for heart in it,
But it also has rage.
The heart is not always this soft and silky billowy flower of gentleness.
It's equally the fire,
The rage to create action around injustice and boundaries and speaking up.
It might just be a question of giving it permission,
Giving your heart permission to feel it all rather than channeling it to be a certain way.
When we experience heartbreak,
It is the heart that shares the pain.
Very often the heart feels bruised,
Tender.
It's not always this magnificent lion of heart space.
Perhaps the experiment is to just wonder what's the truth of what I find here in my heart as I breathe.
And can I be with that?
And then letting that breath pattern go,
Taking a moment just to be with what is.
If the eye lids were down,
Just glancing down at the floor and allowing the eyelids to softly open.
Maybe today we can have the courage to really be in our heart,
However that feels.
And let that shape our day.
Namaste.
