Hi,
It's Julie Potichur for the Balanced Mind Meditation Center.
Let's take our arms with our in-breath up,
As long as it's comfortable for you.
And then on the exhale,
The arms come down.
Inhale up.
Exhale down.
Inhale up.
Exhale down.
Now just the shoulders up,
Back,
And down.
Up,
Back,
And down.
Let your arms hang heavy at your sides.
Up,
Back,
And down with your shoulders.
And now go forward with your shoulders and down.
Forward and down.
Just rolling them gently in the joint.
Now this last one,
We're going to go up and we're going to go back and we're going to let our shoulder blades go down our back so that our chest is nice and open.
Putting our hands in our lap.
Closing our eyes.
Breathing in for four and out for six.
Three times.
Last one.
And then we're going to go out with a sigh.
Releasing,
Releasing,
Releasing.
Good.
Breath is easy and natural.
Let's count seven breath cycles.
Letting go of the counting and just opening up your ears and hearing anything that you can hear in your environment.
Your breath's easy.
You're just noticing if you can hear any birds or cars.
Anything other than my voice in your environment.
Now,
Relaxing your forehead and sending love to your eyes.
These eyes that have served you all the years of your life so far.
Sometimes they need correction.
Sometimes they don't work as well as they always worked or did when you were young.
But boy oh boy,
What a function these eyes perform.
Just bathing your eyes in love.
Relaxing your face and giving your jaws some love.
Relaxing unhinging your jaw.
Thinking about how much tension gets stored in your face during the day,
But what a job your jaws do.
Macerating your food.
Assisting you in talking.
Your tongue in your mouth.
Using it at the root.
Really pouring some appreciation and love on your mouth.
Letting that appreciation and love pour down your throat,
Your vocal cords.
Enabling you to talk and sing and your windpipe to breathe.
All those systems working together in your subconscious like a symphony.
We need to remember our ears before we get too far down our neck.
Thanks to the ears for the hearing.
Now let's relax our shoulders again and drop down into our heart.
Drop down into our body and our organs.
Thinking about all of the functions that are magnificently performed in sync without our ever having to orchestrate it.
Let's spend a long time here on our heart.
This pump of life.
So sensitive and so unique.
A heart and mind.
You might want to place a hand or hands on your heart.
Special appreciation and love.
Dropping down into your belly.
Letting your abs relax.
And thinking your digestive system.
Even though sometimes it's a horrible pain.
But it does enable you to eat and get fuel.
Thank you.
Letting your hips release into what is supporting you and really feeling the support.
Whether you're on a chair or in a bed or on a couch,
Just relaxing the hips.
Releasing the hips.
Giving love to your hip joints.
Letting relaxation go down your thighs.
Concentrating for a few moments on your knees and your knee joints.
All the ways they bend.
And can be replaced which is a bionic miracle.
Thank you for the knees.
Moving now to your calves.
Softening and relaxing your calves.
And now to your ankles.
Giving love to your ankles.
Moving now down to your feet and just bathing both feet in love.
All the bones and the joints.
Those of us who have been able to ambulate all these years.
Our poor feet have put up with so much impact.
Wishing the feet for working as they do.
Keeping us upright.
Just sending love into our feet.
You might feel a tingling or a numbness when you concentrate your awareness on your feet.
If your feet are on the floor,
You can feel your feet on the floor grounding.
I'm sitting cross-legged so I feel my feet on my opposite thighs.
Feeling the bottoms of my feet.
And then move your awareness to both of your shoulders and just allow relaxation to flow down from your shoulders to your fingertips.
Through your upper arms and your elbows,
Your lower arms,
Your wrists,
Your hands.
And then feel your hands from the inside out.
Notice the temperature of your hands whether they're cool or warm.
Whether they're kind of clammy or dry.
Whether one hand feels heavier than the other.
And now seeing your body breathing as a whole.
Giving love and appreciation to your whole body.
Breathing in love.
Seeing your breath extend out through your skin from your whole body.
Like an energy field coming off of your entire body.
As you breathe out love as well.
So you're breathing in love and you're breathing out love.
You're radiating love.
This love is mingling with all of the particles of the universe.
It's catching each other's love.
Just being love.
Love in and love out.
Sending love to any sounds you hear in the environment.
I keep hearing helicopters.
Sending love there.
For airplanes.
Nowhere to go and nothing to do if your mind wanders.
Just coming back to you being love.
Taking in love.
Putting out love.
I'd like you to take in this poem for peace for Israel written by Rabbi Jordan Braunig.
Just allow it to roll around through your mind.
It is possible to pray for peace.
Our prayer life need not know our boundaries.
No green lines,
No dashes,
No subtle demarcations.
Our longings can transcend our political ideologies.
Cut across our keen analysis.
Earnestness cast out of our public discourse still has a place in the language of our hearts.
We have the capacity to pray for the old couple crouched in their stairwell in Ashkelon and the terrified child in his pajamas in Gaza.
We can spread out prayer like a tattered shawl,
Like a billowing canopy,
Like a sparkling firmament over the tired shoulders of these and across the narrow frames of those.
We are not naive,
Not cowards,
Nor traitors to pray for peace.
We are told to get in line,
To stand with them or to stand with the other,
But we pray to a Holy One who resides in the space between,
Diminished by their missiles,
Laid low by their rockets,
Exhausted but still listening for our prayers.
A prayer for peace.
Wiggling your fingers and your toes and when you hear the sound of the chimes coming back to this space.
Thank you for listening.
It's Julie Potichur from the Balanced Mind Meditation Center.
