You are a sacred space.
Do not enter your own sanctuary wielding weapons.
Go inward to listen,
Not to command.
Prepare yourself for ceremony,
Not for war.
Your soul is calling you down into your body and you are not being asked to battle,
But to bow.
Find a way to sit tall or lean back or lie down.
Set yourself up in a way that your spine can elongate and all the kinks in the cord can unravel.
Untangle themselves organically,
Even effortlessly,
So you can feel your coherence once again.
Bring your attention to your breath.
Not to change or control your breath,
But to remember your breath.
To remember that you are so much more than a mind thinking,
That you're a body breathing with a nervous system sensing,
A heart longing,
Aching,
Breaking open to the beauty and the terror of this life.
Feel the way your inhales stretch and expand you to your edges and follow your exhales as they guide you even deeper down and in,
Reacquainting you with the center of your center of the center.
Stay with yourself through these eternal fluctuations,
Breath rising and falling,
Filling yourself up just to be emptied once again.
Let your breath remind you of how temporary this all is,
How precious it is to be alive,
To be here now.
And on the days it's difficult and painful,
The breath,
It gives a reference point that it's not forever because nothing is forever,
It's actually quite the opposite.
Everything is always shifting,
Transforming,
Becoming something else.
Coax your inhales a little deeper,
Steward your exhales even longer,
All the way to empty.
And on the days and the moments when it's beautiful,
When life is exquisite,
Let your breath remind you to really lean in,
To take it all in because that too will shift,
This too will become something else again,
Endlessly becoming something else.
Light and then dark,
Inhalations followed by exhalations,
Long disorienting nights that appear they might never end,
Only to be proven wrong yet again by the dawn light and the innocence and the hope that comes with the sun that always rises.
Breathe in,
Breathe out,
And keep turning your attention inward,
But bring with you the teachings encoded in our outer world,
The earth,
The moon,
The stars.
They offer every medicine the worried mind needs.
Give yourself to the generosity of your lungs as they repeat the teachings with each cycle of breath,
Patiently,
Reverently,
And even when we've completely forgotten to pay attention to their sermon at all,
The breath is always here to remind us that we are alive,
The gift it is to have a life at all.
And so it keeps going,
Something like this,
Meditation,
Contemplative practice,
An ongoing process of forgetting and then remembering,
Of getting distracted but coming back.
And that's really the heart of it,
A continual commitment to come back to the rhythm of the breath,
To the beat of your heart,
That steady rhythm that plays eternally in your chest,
The feeling of your feet on the ground,
And the gentle yet ever-present pull,
Just like the one that guides the flowers and summons the trees,
Like an invisible cord at the crown of your head,
Guiding you into the space above you,
Towards the sky above you,
This subtle yet persistent call to rise towards whatever it is that you call sacred.
You really can trust in this innate process that longs to happen,
That is already happening in and through you,
And you can support it,
You can facilitate it,
Through your eternal willingness to journey inward and turn away from nothing that you find.
The path of the heart is not terrain we traverse just once,
It is a perpetual pilgrimage,
A daily devotion,
A forever kind of practice.
