Gently lie down and settle into your space,
Taking time to make sure you are comfortable.
Maybe place a pillow under your head and one under your knees to support your back.
We drape a blanket on top of you to keep your body warm as you relax into this meditation.
Settle in and allow your body to be held by the gravity of the earth.
Feel your body breathing in and out.
As you breathe in,
Feel your body expand toward the sky.
And as you breathe out,
Feel your body release into the earth.
Breathe in,
Expanding toward the sky and out,
Releasing toward the earth.
Feel your body's connection to both sky and earth.
Feel what it's like to be in this moment,
A body breathing,
Embodied consciousness,
Consciousness within a nervous system.
As you breathe in and out,
Allow your body to rest into itself,
Held by the earth's gravity,
Tendons,
Ligaments,
And bone,
Nestled into muscle.
Feel draped over bone,
Skin draped over muscle.
Allow your body to relax as you breathe in,
Expanding toward the sky and out,
Releasing toward the earth.
Settle into the miracle of your working body,
Skeleton animated by a beating heart and breath,
By neuronal connections in the brain.
Settle into your whole body and bring your awareness to your feet,
To all the little ligaments,
Tendons,
Muscles,
And bones that support your whole body as you walk through the day.
Breathe into your ankles,
Lower legs,
And shins.
Feel how your shins connect to your knee joints,
Knee joints to thighs,
Thighs to hips.
Feel your pelvic bowl and hip bones,
The soft part of your abdomen where your digestive organs are housed,
Your liver and kidneys.
Bring your awareness to your pubic bone and sacrum.
Sense into the length of your entire spine,
From your tailbone all the way up to the base of your skull.
See if you can feel into each and every vertebrae along your spine.
Sense into your rib cage,
Noticing how it wraps from your spine around your body to your sternum,
Protecting your heart and lungs.
Feel your heart beating and your lungs breathing.
Feel your heart and lungs working together to carry oxygen to every part of you,
Oxygen and nutrients flowing with blood made deep in the marrow of your bones.
Sense into your collarbones,
Feeling how they spread from the center of your chest outward to your shoulders.
And feel how your shoulders connect your arms to your torso,
Moving your awareness down your upper arms and to your elbows,
Down your forearms to your wrists.
Sense into all the ligaments,
Bones and muscles,
Tendons that make up your hands.
Feel into the complexity of your hands that type and love and caress and create with so little effort or thought.
Move your awareness from your fingertips back up your arms,
Back to your shoulders,
To your neck.
Feel into your neck and throat.
Feel into how your neck connects to your skull and sense into the space inside your skull.
Feel your brain resting all 86 billion neurons.
If you counted back 86 billion seconds in time,
You would arrive at 705 BCE.
See if you can even fathom the 86 billion neurons firing in your brain.
Like the 100 billion stars in the Milky Way,
We can see from our vantage point on Earth.
Feel your body breathing,
Expanding in towards the sky,
Breathing out,
Releasing down toward the Earth.
See if you can move your breath up and down the length of your spine as you breathe in and out.
Breathe in,
Breathe out and imagine all the breaths breathed before you that allowed you to arrive in this moment.
All the breaths breathed by your parents and your grandparents and their parents on back through generations and time.
Imagine all the breaths,
All the humans who yearned and struggled and loved and grieved,
Hungered and created,
All the breaths of our ancestors and every lived experience that brought you to this experience now.
Every breath to the earliest humans who came into existence some 200,
000 years ago and back further to common ancestors,
To the ancestors of our ancestors,
Further and further back in time to when life first emerged on this planet.
People sold organisms 3.
8 billion years ago and you could go further back still,
Further before Earth,
Before time,
Elements like carbon forming deep inside the bellies of stars,
Our planet,
Our solar system,
Born of a supernova and from that to the Earth coming into formation,
To the first single-celled organisms,
To complex cells 2 billion years ago and complex animals 55 million years ago,
To mammals 200 million years ago and the first primates 55 million years ago,
To the first humans 200,
000 years ago.
Just a few,
Just a couple of us in eastern and southern Africa 200,
000 years ago,
To the 8 billion of us now populating the entire Earth like bacteria,
Populates a petri dish through Paleolithic time and Neolithic time and ancient history,
The development of writing,
Migrations and imperialism and wars and agriculture and worship and art,
To the moment you were conceived a single cell made of two rapidly dividing into a multi-celled organism,
Then a fetus with an unformed spine like a tail,
Webbed hands and feet,
Your heart first a single tube like the heart of a fish,
Then two-chambered like a frog's,
Three-chambered like the heart of a snake,
Developing into the four-chambered heart of a mammal,
The chambers sealing off the moment of birth,
Wailing with the first breath of air as if all 3.
8 billion years of human evolution was replicated within nine months in the womb to the rhythm of your mother's beating heart and think back to all the moments from then,
All the moments in your life that brought you to this moment now,
Consciousness inside a human body breathing,
Expanding toward the sky,
Releasing into the Earth with lungs that have branches like trees,
Blood flowing through veins and capillaries like water flows through rivers and tributaries,
Neurons firing in the brain like lightning in the sky,
Feel the Earth below you,
Feel yourself belonging to this planet,
This place that supports and sustains you,
Nourishes and feeds you,
Offers you a place to rest no matter how you are feeling or what you are going through,
A part of the rhythm of all things,
Feel yourself belonging to this moment,
Consciousness inside a nervous system,
Inside a body,
Tendons,
Ligaments and bone nestled into muscle,
Muscle draped over bone,
Skin draped over muscle,
Heart and lungs,
Your animated skeleton,
Earth's wisdom and life's wisdom inside of you,
Your mind,
Your mind and soul.
We will end this meditation with a quote by Thich Nhat Hanh,
When we say the Earth has created life,
We know it's only possible because she contains within herself the whole cosmos.
Just as the earth is not only the earth,
So too are we not only human.
We have the earth and the whole cosmos within us.
We are made of the Sun.
We are made of stars.
You
