The power of ritual and setting intention.
Welcome to a guided meditation for a morning session.
Feel free to take me with you as you go about your morning routine.
For so many of us,
It's different.
Some of us come to the mat or the cushion.
Some of us lace up and head out the door for our moving meditation.
And in the wintertime,
At least where I am now here in the Northern Hemisphere,
It can be a challenge to adapt when the days are shorter and the sun is less available.
Continuing to cultivate ritual and intention is truly a practice of honing our attention into what we hope to experience more than just in one day or a series of days.
And many of us often look back and consider the beginning of our time practicing.
How did we start?
How did we get here?
It becomes second nature.
And if you're just starting a meditation practice,
Be patient.
If you miss a day,
A series of days,
Take the time to start again.
Starting anew on another morning,
Take a nice posture wherever you are and find your breath.
Maybe it's a little tangly this morning.
Maybe you haven't given it much attention.
How can you bring your awareness into the sensations of your body in a way that makes the thoughts and the distractions and the necessities or the perceived necessities of your day fall away?
So for the time that you're meditating,
The time that you're practicing,
Is pure awareness and attention of how you feel.
How is your breath?
How are your thoughts?
Is there a heaviness anywhere?
Can you soften something somewhere?
Maybe your face or your jaw or your shoulders?
And sometimes our body craves the movement for our mind to still.
So if you are finding a moving meditation,
Still connecting or reconnecting with breath,
To find a rhythm to sustain you throughout your practice.
Sometimes it's helpful to count the duration of your breath.
Maybe inhaling for counts of four or five,
Holding at the top and releasing a soft,
Smooth breath out of your mouth or your nose.
So meditation is less about the perfection of finding yourself in stillness or in a lack of distraction or in this idea of what we have in our mind about what a meditation practice looks like.
It's more about what we are able to do with how we feel on any given day.
And once you have a ritual,
Once you have a schedule established for your practice,
It's second nature.
It seems integral.
It's no longer this piece of your life that you're looking to attach to what you already have for a routine,
But it becomes part of your day,
As natural as taking a shower or eating breakfast.
But you have to start somewhere.
There has to be the one day that you choose to begin.
And from there,
It really is the choice to return.
And it might not be the very next day.
It might be many days or even weeks after you begin.
But the attention and the awareness is there.
And so often,
It's interesting to imagine what our lives were like before the incorporation of a meditation practice.
Before yoga,
Before meditation,
Before the spiritual aspect of life,
This reverence for being and attention and awareness.
It's impossible to go back.
And so if there is a missed session or even a pause for a longer period of time,
There's no going back.
Once you have unlocked the sense of awareness that comes from meditation,
It's simply a matter of honing that aspect of being and association with your life that makes every experience powerful,
Inspiring,
And awe-inspiring.
The magnificence of life.
If we were to consider every factor of our existence that came into play to make us who we are,
We would have immense gratitude for simply being alive.
Of course,
Many of us have gone about our lives,
These lives,
And made choices and have found ourselves in a situation that seems insurmountable to shift.
Or it's a situation where we have not yet understood our purpose here.
Thankfully,
Meditation helps us surrender the need to understand everything,
The need to know the map ahead of taking the first step of the journey.
Meditation allows us to come into every moment of our lives with a sense of awe,
A sense of curiosity that may not have been possible if we were going about the tale in our mind about what we need to do or what we could have done or what we want to do.
And it's interesting,
The paradox is that we engage in our lives through the mind's eye,
The third eye,
In many,
Many ways in our life.
We imagine a scenario and then work toward a goal to make it accomplished,
To accomplish what we perceive in our mind.
This is called visualization.
An exercise in visualization meditation might be coming to a mat or your cushion or out on a run or a walk in nature and imagining in your mind where you'd like to be.
Maybe it's a test coming up that you have to study hard for and you imagine yourself passing and succeeding and retaining the information for this test.
And each night before you go to bed,
You offer a token of gratitude for the scenario that you've created in your mind and this attention that you've brought toward this goal and you work diligently toward it every day.
So keeping our most important goals top of mind is a key way meditation can assist us in realizing the visualization we have for ourselves.
Of course,
It won't be applicable to every situation in our life.
There are times when the lesson must be learned and we are not wholly capable of just imagining ourselves out of a situation.
And for many of us,
Many of us who are more inclined to the subliminal realms or the metaphysical side of life,
We're very in touch with our spiritual side.
It becomes more important to ground this energy and to make the imagination tangible in the material world with physical action.
This is where a moving meditation might be helpful,
A run for example,
Your feet connecting with the earth after each step.
Moment by moment,
You are grounding yourself.
So in many ways,
Sitting is less helpful for those of us who are already so in our mind that we need to come into our body.
Using yoga practice can reinvigorate the parts of ourselves that are often lost when we are stuck in our head.
So there's no one way to accomplish meditation,
Which for many of us does conjure up an image of a man in a white cloak sitting stoically on a cushion with beads wrapped around his wrist and taking the beads through his hands,
He sings his mantra.
Of course,
That's all well and good and quite inspiring,
But for many of us,
The reality is a moving meditation is more appropriate.
Sometimes it's a less vigorous practice required for our body to encourage stillness in the mind.
And one of my favorite ways to drop away from an overactive mind or anxiety is to come onto my back on the floor,
Simply lie face up,
Palms up,
Relax my body completely,
Close my eyes,
Left hand over my heart,
Right hand over my belly and breathe.
So this act of quite literally dropping the weight off our shoulders,
We're no longer allowing gravity to weigh us down,
The burdens of our life are no longer weighing us down,
Weighing heavy on our shoulders,
Just lying flat on our back and just laying out feet wide,
Arms wide,
Maybe arms overhead.
Try it.
I actually,
If you're not already running or moving or doing something where it would be quite unfeasible to practice this and perhaps later in your day,
It will be more appropriate.
But if you're just listening to this as a true beginner,
Purely with a sense of curiosity,
I truly invite you to just try this lying down on your back on the ground and breathe.
Today therefore,
As long as it takes to truly feel your body and your breath,
And there's no longer the distraction of what you were just thinking about,
And it's just you and your body and a profound sense of awareness,
How do you really feel today?
There have been times when overcome with emotion,
I will allow myself to cry.
If that's where you're at,
Then let the tears flow.
Sometimes anger will appear as a clenched jaw or knitted brow.
Try to relax your face,
Your jaw,
Your shoulders,
Your fingers,
Your wrists,
Your shoulders.
Come back to your neck.
Are you holding any tension in your upper back?
Can you soften?
So moment by moment,
And day by day,
Our practice will unfold.
And the way you choose to arrive is completely up to you.
Maybe these first few moments of cultivating ritual could just be a moment of gratitude as you wake up in your bed,
Alive and full of life and possibility.
Can you close your eyes and say a brief prayer,
It doesn't have to be anything profound,
Just simply acknowledging that you have been given the gift of life.
May you go forth in this day and be more aware of the sound of the birds and shining sun on your face.
May you feel everything it is to be alive in your body.
May you be kind to everyone that you meet,
Including yourself.
You show yourself as much kindness as you do unto others.
May you fulfill whatever it is your heart desires.
May you realize that it doesn't take much to make the world a better place.
The light in me sees and honors the light in you.
Namaste.
