Coming into your stillness.
Stepping out of the busy mind.
Stepping into this body,
Into this present moment.
Can the toes relax?
Can the legs be heavy?
Can the belly come into its fullness?
Can the arms be heavy?
And the heaviness of the arms encouraging this openness in the shoulders and in the chest.
Surrendering the weight of the arms.
So that the shoulders can relax.
So that the shoulders can melt.
Can the heart melt?
Surrendering the weight of the head to the support of the ground.
Letting the teeth fall away from one another so that the jaw can relax.
Allowing the tongue to be heavy in the mouth.
The lips to soften and separate.
The skin and the muscles of the lower half of the face to sag,
To droop.
Your eyes resting back into the sockets.
Forehead smooth.
The temples relaxed.
The mind.
Giving permission to the busy mind to relax.
And without getting into any battle with the thoughts,
Without trying to stop them.
Can you simply try to tune your awareness towards the breath?
To the breath at the belly.
Feeling into this idea that the belly is a body of water.
That the breath is the current that causes the rises and falls and the ebbs and flows of the breath in the belly.
The mind will have its thoughts and opinions.
We don't have to stop them.
We also don't need to get into them.
Can we stay with this moment to moment unfolding of the breath in the belly?
Just this breath that's happening right now.
Feeling,
Sensing,
Visualising the belly as a body of water.
With soft rises and falls.
With its ebbs and flows.
Feeling into with a deep curiosity,
Where does the in-breath begin?
How does it feel as it reaches its fullness?
And then where does it go?
How does the out-breath unfold and how does it feel?
Seeing if it's possible to be really aware of the breath,
The moment to moment unfolding of the breath without thinking anything about it.
Can you really focus your awareness on the breath of the belly?
It could be as if this rhythm of the breath and this body of water that is the belly,
The movement of this body of water lulls you.
Can you allow your awareness to become so absorbed by the breath,
By the movement of the breath and the body,
That it's almost as if you're floating within this body of water.
Being lulled back and forth by the soft undulations of the breath,
By these waves of breath.
As if the breath rocked the whole of the body,
Soothed the whole of the body,
Soothed the mind.
Maybe you can feel into the sense that the whole of the body is breathing in and that the whole of the body is breathing out.
A poem called Clearing by Martha Posselthwaite.
Do not try to save the whole world or do anything grandiose.
Instead,
Create a clearing in the dense forest of your life and wait there patiently until the song that is your life falls into your own cupped hands and you recognize and greet it.
Only then will you know how to give yourself to this world so worth of rescue.
Coming into our own being.
As best we can,
Stepping out of the denseness of thought that come like a veil between us and the present moment.
Between us and our life.
Between us and our own sense of being.
Creating that clearing where we can meet ourselves.
Receive ourselves.
From there we're able to respond to ourselves.
We respond to this life from a position of responsibility.
Taking responsibility for ourselves.
From this place of spaciousness.
We can respond rather than react to the things that seem to happen to us.
Just the breath in the belly.
We might find we have to step again and again and again out of the mind.
The dialogue we have with our mind.
Coming back into our belly.
To the breath.
Which is this amazing portal into the present moment.
How is the breath unfurling right now?
Where is your awareness right now?
You might like to think about reanimating the body.
If you want to continue to rest.
Continue to rest.
If you feel like you're going to go back to movement now,
You can start off by taking an extra deep breath into the belly.
Pausing for a moment with the breath inside the belly.
And then exhaling,
Letting the breath fall out of the mouth with a sigh.
We can take another deep breath in.
This time we can breathe up into the belly and into the chest.
Breathing in a little more.
Taking a pause.
And when you're ready,
Letting the breath fall out of the mouth with a sigh.
Letting go.
Letting go.
And then again the belly,
The chest.
And this time up into the shoulders.
Breathing in a little more.
Still a little more.
Pausing for a moment with that fullness.
And then letting go.
The breath falling out of the mouth with a sigh.
Keeping this delicate inner awareness as you perhaps begin to wiggle the fingers and the toes.
Perhaps you begin to roll the head from side to side.
Maybe nice to massage the face.
Feeling into which movements your body would like to do as it comes back to movement.
