Hello and welcome.
The following is a guided meditation by Renee Seals,
A somatic movement educator,
Energy worker,
And astrologer.
This meditation is intended to help support your embodied meditation practice.
If in the recording you are prompted to do something that doesn't feel good for your body,
Please adapt and modify to make it work for you.
Please also note that the content of this meditation sometimes explores deep and subtle states and memories,
And sometimes guided visualizations.
You are encouraged to work with discernment as you practice with them.
If any of the guidance Renee offers feels too activating or uncomfortable,
Please listen to your body's knowing and pause the recording until a later time if you wish to return to it.
These guided meditations range anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes and do not require any supplementary equipment to participate.
We hope you enjoy.
Begin with your eyes closed.
Let your eyeballs relax.
Let your face relax.
Take a number of deep breaths in through your nose and exhale out your mouth.
With every inhale you can feel the sensation and the passage of your breath,
The quality of filling up,
Expanding,
And receiving,
The fullness of the inhale.
And with every exhale as you sigh out,
Feel the release,
The detoxification,
Detoxification of the exhale where the body is letting go,
And emptiness.
I'll invite you to work with a loosely controlled but conscious breathing.
And basically this breathing style is listening to your breath.
So if you breathe through your nose and it's an interesting sensation where the back of your tongue,
The root of your tongue,
Kind of gets a little bit broader and the upper palate or your soft palate domes a little bit and then the sound of your breath takes on a slight wind or ocean quality.
And it's like the idea of Ujjayi breath.
If you know Ujjayi Pranayama,
This is just a little bit of that idea.
It's not the whole thing but you can kind of barely hear the sound of your own breath.
And then the invitation is to feel the completion of the inhale and exhale and to pause in those moments.
Not for very long,
Maybe just a beat,
Just a second.
That you breathe and you pause at the top of your inhale just a moment.
Feel that pause and then as you exhale you exhale all your breath out and pause at the base of your exhale and you feel that.
So if you lose that pattern,
No problem.
You can come back to it if you remember and if possible that's the style of breath that I invite you to practice while we bring our attention now into the body.
So we'll start today right at the mid-center and if you can take your hands and bring them to your belly button.
Actually take one hand to your belly button and then take one hand to your back at the corresponding place.
So right at the top of your lumbar curve and this waist section,
Just notice the front and the back body.
And with your back hand you can probably feel the bony posterior spine,
The part of your spine that sticks out to the surface of the skin.
Now the back of your spine is actually a couple of inches behind the front of your spine and you might even want to pause this recording right now and go look at a picture of a vertebra or maybe you know it in your head but the back part of the spine is this really interesting,
Really beautiful weird shape that sticks out at the back and the front of the spine is where we have the vertebral bodies.
So these are the more circular structures that have discs between them and that's the weight-bearing part of your spine.
So I want you to imagine right now where the front of your spine is and that is in this part of your body it's fairly central so it's pretty much between your front hand and your back hand.
So can you bring your attention to the front of your spine?
And in order to do that you're going to have to feel all of the surrounding stuff.
And then when you've found it I want you to notice if you're in a shape where the front or the back part of your body is more contracted or condensed than the other side.
So some of us have postural habits where we like slump our belly back or push from our back body towards our front body and I would like you to find what feels balanced between the front and the back and let your weight carry through the center of your body.
And if you're seated then you can connect this place in your body down to your pelvic floor and feel that your head and your heart are balanced in alignment if you're seated or standing.
And if you're lying down on your back then I would suggest that you bend your knees and have your feet about hips width apart if that's possible.
It allows your pelvis to tilt a little so you might more easily feel that alignment or you can place some pillows under your knees so you have a little bit of a bend.
So now we're just going to start to trace a figure eight and from the center point from the center of your body front of your spine I want you to imagine circling forwards towards your belly button and then over to your left and then around kind of the inner side waist and into your back and then forwards to the front of your spine and around and over to the right forwards and circling around into the back body on the right side and then forwards and into the center of the body.
And you're just going to continue this in your own time with your own pacing feeling the figure eight pattern at this very central point in your body circling all the way around the circumference of your midsection and coalescing right at the center.
If you're standing or sitting you might notice what this does in your sense of balance or in your sense of posture and how you might feel that this brings you into a very slight movement.
If you're practicing shapes,
Yoga poses or just free movement you can let this really inform you shape that you're making.
So then from here we're going to travel down into the basin of the pelvis and if you're in a position where you can easily touch your own body I invite you to now bring your hands up and cup your sacrum at the back and the front of your pelvis and then we'll do the same thing.
So here the central most point is just above the dome of the pelvic floor so kind of at the in the deep pelvis we're imagining this kind of a position where you can easily touch your own body.
I invite you to now bring your hands down to cup your sacrum at the back and the front of your pelvis and then we'll do the same thing.
So here the central most point is just above the dome of the pelvic floor so kind of at the in the deep pelvis we're imagining this flow.
So starting at the second the center we're just going to trace in a half circle forwards into the inner left kind of hip area and around through the circumference of the hip crest and then we'll scoop up just beside the tailbone into the center of the pelvis and then move around and to the right and feel the inner surface of the pelvis on the right moving to the back and you'll kind of at the sit bone is where that arc will start to turn towards the center and cross the center of the pelvic floor and then over to the left again.
So again I'm just going to say go ahead at your own pace and allow this figure eight to move through your pelvis and for me when I visualize this and bring my attention into these places my body moves a little bit even if I'm otherwise fairly still and I really want you to allow that if it's happening to allow the movement the inner exploration but don't force it.
So we're using our imagination our felt sense of awareness and our breath and we're making a figure eight pattern through the pelvis and as you bring awareness to one side and then to the other you might notice how this brings more awareness into your feet or into your legs and again maybe how it inspires movement.
And then from here we're going to travel down to our knees and I'm in a cross-leg position right now I'm going to stay in that position just bring my hands to my knees if you're standing you can feel your knee joints if you're lying down again just feel your knee joints maybe have a pillow under them for support moving around notice your knees and we'll do exactly the same thing so if you're moving just find stillness for a moment and feel the midpoint between your left and your right knees that is directly underneath your pelvic floor and if you're in a different shape like if you're seated like me then I want you to feel how your knees in whatever position you are feel how your knees are a meeting of your thigh bone and your shin bone and notice the ways that these bones spiral and meet one another and in your mind's eye trace a figure eight around the bony joints and see where they intersect and see that the intersecting point is an alignment to your pelvic floor so if you're seated then the pelvic floor would be facing that intersecting point or if you're lying down and if you're standing then it would be just below this is also really fun to do in like headstand or something okay so now we're just going to feel the same thing with our knees and starting at the center point imagine kind of a circling forwards and out and around and then back and forwards into the other side and for me when I do this it often brings awareness to maybe increased tension at the inner or outer knee or the way that I might habitually stand with more weight on one side so as you move and feel through the figure eight notice what arises you might be like wow that thing feels really familiar that other thing feels really different just ways to notice okay and then from here we're going to travel down to our feet and this is with the feet it's really great to have the soles of your feet on the floor if you're seated and you want to stay seated you might want to do baddha konasana which is our butterfly pose so we bring the soles of your feet together to touch and if you're lying down you can do that too it's pretty comfortable you might want to prop your knees and we're going to start here by feeling again kind of the the center point and here I just want to invite you to feel the center point of your ankles in your ankle joints so the way the center of your ankles comes into the center of your heel and then on the left side from the center of your foot feel into your left big toe we're going to do two figure eights on this one and then from your left big toe feel around through the toe tips on the left side into the outer left foot and then into the left heel and then from your left heel through the arch of your left foot and over into your right big toe and then from the right big toe feel around into the toe tips on the right side and outer edge of the right foot and your right heel and through the arch of your right foot and into the left big toe so you're having this kind of figure eight dance with your feet and if you're standing again you might notice that this actually brings you into a little bit of a figure eight movement if you're seated again you can feel this between the soles of your feet or you might want to lean back and rest your feet and then you can feel the center of your feet and lean back and rest on your hands and bring the soles of your feet onto the ground and this is a really interesting thing to do in any shape where your feet are on the floor especially asymmetric shapes so if you're doing like a warrior pose or something it can be really interesting to feel how do i embody the relationship of my right and left sides through my feet in this more circumference way where do they find the midpoint and just allow yourself to explore the figure eight so you can roll your weight and feel the way that one side relates to the other so now we're going to connect our lower bodies from the feet to the knees to the pelvis to the waist and you can kind of play around with this but you might start in one place and your attention or your awareness could travel to another place so feel the continuity feel the connection between your waist or your navel center and your feet and allow for an exploration of that figure eight through your entire lower body so as you bring awareness into the front body and circle around can you feel the front body all the way through your left leg all the way through the left lower half of your body and then circle back and find that midpoint and the central point and then over into the right side we're feeling the right and the left sides both being full and connected into the center sometimes i do this meditation when i'm lying down in corpse pose and it feels a little bit like a bath like an internal bath of just directing energetic awareness through tissues non-discriminating just the volume of space that's in your body so now from here what i want you to do is feel how the center point of this figure eight comes right into the front of your spine and i want you to rest there rest in the front of your spine and rest in the central axis through your lower body all the way down through the center of your spine through the center of the pelvis and between your legs and extending past your feet and now draw that center point up along the front of your spine through your central body and we're just going to go all the way up we'll feel the space between the heart and the spine we'll feel the space at the front of the spine and the where the collar bones are it's kind of an interesting place between the collar bones and the front of the spine there where your voice is the where your voice rests and we'll feel the front of the spine all the way up the top of your spine is actually behind your nose basically so if you stuck your finger in your mouth you could touch the front of the top of your spine um don't do that unless you really want to but so we're going to bring our attention all the way up to the front of the top of the spine and now we're going to start here at the head and in the space of the the wisdom center and you might even just bring your fingertip right to the top of the bridge of your nose so just below where your eyebrows meet and feel a very gentle touch kind of coming back and you can imagine the two hemispheres of your brain and the place where they meet in the middle is called the corpus colossum it's this cool membrane that um it like you know fires information between right side and left and so that's the central point of our figure eight here and we're going to start right at the center and then we'll direct our energy forwards around the left front brain feel it sweep over the left eye over to the left side the left ear into the left back brain towards the center and then over to the right and then around the right side and into the right back brain and into the center so now you're imagining this figure eight kind of swooping around left side and right side uniting in the center and when i do this i i really like i feel this like weird kind of i don't even know how to describe it it's just an enhanced sensation in the ways that i'm imagining the movement and sometimes my eyes even follow it so you might notice that so the left and the right sides of the brain this kind of figure eight through your skull and then we're going to bring that down into the shoulder area and the collarbones and you can even touch this area too so if you find the place where your collarbones come together it's called the sternal notch and your collarbones branch out they connect to your shoulder bones and in your inner body this is if we were to look inside this would also be the top of your lungs so from here again imagining the front of the spine and we're going to circle our awareness forwards and around to the side and into the center and then around to the other side and into the back and into the center you might feel movement from the center into your left collarbone and out from the inner collarbone to the outer collarbone and then from the outer shoulder blade in towards your spine and then around from the inner right to the outer right collarbone and then around and from the back of the right shoulder blade into the back of the spine and you might feel this with your breath so as you breathe you feel the left lung expanding and moving out into the circumference of the left ribs and as you exhale it comes back to the center and then as you inhale you feel the right lung expanding and swirling and scooping out into the container of the right ribs and then as you exhale back to the center okay so now we'll unite the the head and the chest area and I want you to kind of go back to that first place in the skull and feel the center area and imagine the figure eights and feel how they're mirrored in your chest and let that continue all the way down through your arms and then exhale back to the center and then exhale back to the center and then exhale back to the center and let that continue all the way down through your arms and your torso into the meeting point at your navel so you feel this kind of just general figure eight in your upper body movement from the center swooping out into the left into the back body into the center into the right the back body in the center and coalescing at the central point at sushumna and now we'll add the lower body again and the invitation right now is to feel the whole body in this kind of figure eight pattern but the upper and the lower body uniting at the waist so uniting at the navel area they're coming together there and it's not differentiated or separated but that's where the energies are merging and we're imagining this this just figure eight through the three dimensionality of our forms so from the very center point feeling the circumference and the fullness of the left side and the front and in the side and in the back and then moving to the center and feeling the fullness in the right in the front in the side and in the back and coming back to the center so you
