Hi,
It's Julie Potichur for the Balanced Mind Meditation Center.
Okay,
Let's start by finding our comfortable seat in meditation.
So really feeling your sit bones on whatever is supporting you.
Maybe rocking back and forth,
Getting centered and settled.
And you'd like your spine to be erect but not rigid.
I like the Roshi Joan Halifax image of really being firm in the back and soft and open in the front.
And then allow your eyes to close either fully or just a gentle downward gaze and we're going to take three nourishing breaths together.
In for four and out for six.
Letting this last one out with a sigh.
Now allowing your breath to find its natural rhythm.
Relaxing your eyebrows and your eyes.
Releasing your jaws.
Relaxing the inside of your mouth.
And when you close your lips,
Allowing your teeth to remain parted.
Contriving a slight smile to the outside corners of your lips.
And then dropping that smile down into your throat,
Your neck,
Softening.
Letting your shoulder blades move down your back,
Leaving your chest nice and open as you drop your awareness into your heart center.
Taking a few beats here.
Now letting your abs go.
Releasing your hips into what is supporting you,
Allowing relaxation to flow down your legs to your feet,
Down your shoulders to your fingertips,
And then softening your hands.
You may want to place a hand or hands where you find it soothing,
Which might be on your heart or your belly,
Or cradling your face,
Or hugging your arms,
Or even holding one hand in the other,
But this soothing supportive touch is a gentle reminder that you're giving yourself mothering right now.
Allowing that delicious cascade of feel good hormones,
Oxytocin and endorphins,
To calm our nervous system.
When you're ready,
Releasing and relaxing your hands to your lap.
And resting your awareness on your breathing in and your breathing out.
Finding your breath where you notice it most easily.
It's really cold in the room that I'm in,
So I'm noticing my in-breath at the tip of my nostrils is so much cooler than my out-breath.
You might notice it in your chest or your belly,
But take a couple good breath cycles of really feeling where your body is breathing.
Noticing the gap before your in-breath,
Skating the breath upwards,
Noticing the gap before your out-breath,
Skating the breath downwards.
Now imagine breathing in and out through your heart.
Imagining a golden healing light coming in on your in-breath and going out on your out-breath.
Now imagining your whole body breathing like you're permeable.
Breathing through all the pores of your skin,
This golden healing light.
So that on your exhale you're actually encapsulating yourself in this healing orb.
If you'd like to choose a word for your in-breath and for your out-breath that would supercharge this healing orb,
You might want to breathe in love or hope or peace or patience or healing or ease and you might want to breathe out something similarly gorgeous.
Imagine in,
Compassion out,
Peace in,
Peace out.
Now imagining that the membrane of your orb is permeable.
So your exhale is really reaching vast areas of time and space.
Your healing light and compassionate word is mixing and mingling with everyone else's light and energy and love.
And this miraculous interconnectedness extends to plants and animals,
Not only humans.
So that our good energy is mixed and mingled with all sentient beings and nature.
So imagining yourself free from your body to flow into the cosmic experience of love in the universe.
Still breathing in for yourself and breathing out for others.
And now taking in the words of this gorgeous poem by Denise Levertov called Sojourns in the Parallel World.
Staying in your meditation and just letting these words roll through your mind.
We live our lives of human passions,
Cruelties,
Dreams,
Concepts,
Crimes and the exercise of virtue in and beside a world devoid of our preoccupations.
Free from apprehension,
Though affected certainly by our actions.
A world parallel to our own,
Though overlapping.
We call it nature,
Only reluctantly admitting ourselves to be nature too.
Whenever we lose track of our own obsessions,
Our self-concerns,
Because we drift for a minute,
An hour even of pure,
Almost pure response to that insouciant life.
Cloud,
Bird,
Fox,
The flow of light,
The dancing pilgrimage of water,
Vast stillness of spellbound ephemera on a lit windowpane,
Animal voices,
Mineral hum,
Wind conversing with rain,
Ocean with rock,
Stuttering of fire to coal.
Then something tethered in us,
Hobbled like a donkey on its patch of gnawed grass and thistles breaks free.
No one discovers just where we've been when we're caught up again in our own sphere,
Where we must return indeed to evolve our destinies.
But we have changed a little.
God Sojourns in the Parallel World by Denise Levertov.
And now,
Wiggling our fingers and wiggling our toes,
And when you hear the sound of the chimes listening all the way till the end,
Before coming back,
Gently opening your eyes and coming back into this space.
Thanks so much for listening.
I'm Julie Potichur with Balanced Mind Meditation.
