Before we begin,
Just let everything pause,
Not in a forced way,
No need to try.
Simply allow yourself to soften,
To arrive gently,
As if you were stepping out of a long day and into a place that has been waiting for you all along.
There is nowhere to get to,
Nothing to figure out.
All that matters is that you're here,
And that you are ready to remember.
Let your breath come and go like the tide.
Let the shoulders drop,
The jaw loosen,
The muscles of the face smooth out like quiet water.
There's no need to be someone right now,
Just presence,
Just breath,
Just being.
Now imagine yourself walking,
Slowly,
Barefoot,
Along the edge of a river at dusk.
The air is warm,
Just a little cool in the shade,
And the sky is dressed in that soft golden blue light that only exists in the hour when day begins to melt into night.
The earth beneath your feet is soft and living,
And each step you take makes a sound so quiet it almost belongs to the wind.
To your right,
The river flows,
Smooth and alive,
Moving with a rhythm older than thought.
You hear the water trickling over stone,
Weaving through roots,
Brushing past fallen leaves.
You feel the pull of it not as something outside you,
But as something familiar,
Like the rhythm of your own body,
Remembering where it came from.
You pause by the water's edge and crouch down,
Touching the surface with your fingertips.
It's cool,
Gentle,
Flowing,
Clear enough to see the smooth,
Rounded stones beneath.
Let your eyes drift to the stones beneath the surface,
Resting in the clarity of the water,
Ancient,
Unmoving,
Shaped by time yet untouched by hurry.
And now begin to count them,
Not with the mind,
But with your presence,
As if each stone were a step leading you not forward,
But inward.
With each one,
You are gently sinking deeper into your own being,
Not falling,
Not fading,
But relaxing into what you truly are.
One,
A small gray stone,
Half buried in sand,
Perfectly still.
Two,
A smooth oval one,
Greenish,
Catching a bit of light from the sky.
Three,
Darker,
Rounder,
Like the shape of an old memory.
Four,
Lighter,
Almost white,
Almost glowing.
Five,
And with this fifth stone,
Something inside you opens,
A doorway,
Not to another place,
But to a deeper layer of presence.
You're still here,
Sitting by the river,
But the world feels wider now,
Slower,
Softer.
Thought has begun to quiet,
The air feels thicker,
Fuller,
More sacred.
Time is no longer rushing forward,
It's unfolding like a petal in the sun.
You have stepped beneath the surface of ordinary awareness,
And the current is beginning to carry you.
There's a tale that has been whispered through the leaves of trees,
Carried in the bones of rivers,
Encoded in the quiet gaze of animals and the sigh of fire.
It says that you,
Child of stars and soil,
Were never truly apart from anything.
Not the sky,
Not the wind,
Not the stranger on the path,
Not the sorrow,
Not the joy.
But long ago,
When the world became too loud,
You forgot.
Not out of failure,
But survival.
You built a shell of thought around you.
You learned to say,
This is me,
And point to a name,
A role,
A body,
And to say,
That is not me,
And point to everything else.
And so the illusion began,
That you are in here and life is out there.
That you are a part,
A fragment,
A visitor passing through a world that does not belong to you.
Yet,
All along,
Life has tried to remind you.
In the way the sun spills across your face in the morning and doesn't ask who you are.
In the way your breath returns to you without condition.
In the way music makes you weep without touching your body.
In the way silence holds everything without resistance.
These are not accidents,
They are invitations.
Now let go just a little more.
Feel yourself softening into something wider.
Deeper.
As if your edges are beginning to blur.
As if the boundary between your skin and the air is no longer so solid.
As if the concept of inside and outside were just words,
Useful ones perhaps,
But no longer true.
Imagine yourself now as water,
Not held in a cup,
Not flowing in a pipe,
But as a wide river winding through land that knows you.
You move through roots and rock.
You rise into mist.
You fall as rain.
You are not on the earth.
You are the earth,
Momentarily moving as a human being.
Let this image fill you.
Let it replace the story of the separate self.
You are not on the earth.
You are the earth,
Momentarily moving as a human being.
There is no border to what you are.
The thoughts may continue to narrate a little you,
But beneath them,
Something more ancient is stirring,
A remembering,
Not of an identity,
But of a presence.
The same presence that stirs in birdsong.
The same that lives in the stillness between two waves.
Bring your attention now to the space around you,
Not the objects in the room,
Not the labels your mind reaches for,
But the raw presence,
The aliveness that everything is emerges from.
Can you feel it?
That field is not out there.
It is you.
The body is not inside you.
You are the space in which the body is appearing.
The thoughts are not your own.
They are ripples moving across a deeper lake.
As you sit here,
Breathing,
Witnessing,
Feeling,
There is no more need to define yourself.
Let your history fall away like old skin.
Let the opinions,
The memories,
The questions all dissolve like mist at dawn.
What remains is the real,
The unnameable.
You are not the one breathing.
You are the breath itself.
And now from this stillness,
See if you can hear the voice of the earth,
Not in words,
But in knowing you were never outside.
You were never broken.
You were never alone.
What you seek is not ahead of you.
It is beneath you,
Around you,
Through you,
It is you.
The leaf does not wonder if it belongs to the tree.
The flame does not doubt it is fire.
Why should you wonder who you are?
Breathe this in.
Let it move through your blood.
Let it reach all the forgotten corners.
You'll open your eyes.
You'll return to movement,
To form,
To roles and names and tasks.
But something will be different now.
You will move through the world knowing that it moves through you.
You will walk as the sky walks,
Wide,
Open,
Effortless.
You will listen with the ears of the forest and speak with the silence of the stars.
You will touch and know that what you touch is you,
Not the idea of you,
But the essence.
So come back slowly now.
Wiggle your fingers,
Move your jaw.
Carry this space with you,
Not like a memory,
But like a rhythm under your breath.
You are not a drop in the ocean.
You are the ocean,
Dreaming it was a drop,
And now you have remembered.
