Centering With Intention

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.

Hello and welcome.

This is Renee.

Thanks for joining me for this meditation.

This is a somatic meditation,

So we'll be working with our bodies and we'll be working with a lot of visualization and imagination,

Imagery.

If you get lost,

It's fine.

I definitely want people to be comfortable when they do my meditations.

So if comfort for you is sitting in a cross-leg seat without any support behind your back,

That's great.

If comfort for you is lying on your back with cushions under your knees and under your head,

That's excellent.

Please feel free to move around,

To take a walk,

To listen to this meditation while you're in transit.

It can be a nice way to kind of stay with yourself through the sensory overwhelm of the world.

So we'll begin and in this beginning let's close or soften the eyes and feel that the corners and the edges of your eyes are getting just more relaxed and your vision can blur a little bit.

There's a feeling that you're not focusing on anything and that whatever you're seeing is delivered to you so you don't have to reach out with your eyes to see anything.

Then invite your breath and feel the inhale and notice how with that invitation the breath will change.

So however you were breathing a moment ago,

The minute that you bring the breath,

The moment ago,

The minute that you bring awareness to it,

Usually the body kind of lights up.

Yay!

And inhale and draws it in.

When we exhale it's more of the natural state of our body and to inhale we actually have to use muscle and this is an involuntary reflex.

It's nothing that we have to remember to do but it is an activity and as you inhale you're participating in the very simple commonality that any living thing on earth also participates in,

Receiving the nourishment of the space and the air around you.

And so as you inhale can you create a sense of receptivity in your body and a softness and a welcoming of your breath and sometimes when we bring attention to our breath there's the idea that we should breathe really deep or really full and that those breaths are better and there's not really any right way to breathe.

There's not a better breath but there's a different way to breathe but there's a different quality of breath when you allow it into your being and kind of greet it with softness.

And if you've listened to my meditations you've heard this many times,

This metaphor,

But I love it so much so I always say it,

You can think of your breath like water breathing and you can think of it as a water breath and so it's that place on the beach where the tide is kind of rolling in and rolling out and as it rolls in and rolls out you see the sand becoming saturated and the water just moves around those gazillions of little grains of sand and you can see the water coming into the substance of the sand and that's the quality of this breath.

How can you let your inhales permeate into every single tissue?

Not just your lungs and not just your ribs or back or chest but all the way up into your face and into your brain and all the way down into your toes and the soles of your feet,

Your hands and your tips and your tips of your fingers,

Into your back,

Into your belly,

Into your pelvis.

So as you invite your breath in and as you soften to receive it let's just start to give acknowledgement to any emotional qualities that are present.

There is so much going on in the world right now and we're all witness to it.

We live in an age of digital immediacy,

We're getting updates constantly and everywhere around us there are screens and news and maybe you live somewhere where this isn't your life.

It's definitely not where I live and I know not where a lot of people live.

Humanity has gone through so many different ages and this is the one that we're here for and there's a lot that's going on that seems really far beyond any capacity to make sense of.

In your personal lives as well I'm sure that there's plenty to think about and to give attention to and to feel.

So can you locate your feelings right now?

This is currently in this moment and this is in the last couple of days and this is in the immediate future of activities that you know you're going to do or people you know you're going to see and any feelings that are present.

And when I say feelings I mean emotional feelings but I also mean the somatic experience of them.

And as you explore this now notice if when I say feelings you go into thinking and you go into the story about the feelings and you start to imagine the people and tell yourself whatever you're telling yourself.

For now let's just stay with the sensation and so the story will come up.

You'll know what you're thinking about and what you're locating as a feeling but see if you can find the place in your body where it resides.

For me there's some kind of consistency often between different feelings.

I tend to feel the quicker more restless agitated excited nervous feelings kind of right around my solar plexus and they have an upward moving feeling.

And I tend to feel the more reflexive and they have an upward moving feeling.

So I get kind of giddy and oftentimes my breath becomes more shallow and it feels like I can pretty much vacate my lower body and get all up in my chest and head.

And that feels in contrast to feelings I have when I'm fearful.

When I'm fearful I notice that sensation registers a little bit lower down and it often results in a tightening of my pelvic floor.

And this is an animal response it's what pretty much every animal does is tuck their tail when they get fear afraid of something.

Feelings of love tend to have kind of a warm soft like oozing feeling my whole body kind of relaxes.

So where are your feelings today?

And if it's comfortable and if it's possible for you I'm going to invite you just to bring your hands and your touch and your attention to them.

And we want to be really present with all the different parts of ourselves and sometimes we identify ourselves in the singular most of the time we say I.

But in reality we're very complex beings and we're made up of a lot of different parts and maybe you want to think of this as different ages or different personas or different family members and their perceptions and habits that take up residence in your being.

When you recognize some part of yourself greet it and greet it without preference the parts that are more unfavorable just as loving and you know with as much acknowledgement as the parts that are easier.

So as you locate your emotions as you bring your touch as you bring your breath we're gonna imagine that the body is like the ocean and you might feel the container of your skin like the bowl of the ocean so the kind of crust of the earth as it encompasses and rises around the body of the water and so as you breathe now can you just let the feelings and the acknowledgments and the movement of your breath become the same thing and so the inhale can move in and spread into these feelings and then the acknowledgement and the feeling of the breath can just kind of allow them to dissipate from wherever they happen to be locationally and spread them or those sensations out into the rest of the body and if you are working with uncomfortable feelings and you hear this and you're like no I don't want that uncomfortable feeling to be everywhere in my body what I want to say is is that our consciousness gathers around distress this is a normal thing our bodies do it when they build scar tissue or scabs our brains do it when we locate problems consciousness gathers around distress and it's very easy to let the distress points become these kind of vortexes and as you invite disperse dispersing energy to come in to them you're not infecting the rest of your body with negativity you're actually releasing that negativity from its anchor and all energy is the same at its most basic all energy is just that as the feelings get released from their anchor they'll naturally just morph into something else and you'll find that in those spots where you felt them being released from their anchor spots where you felt them before maybe there's a little more space or there's a little bit of some other kind of feeling or other kind of quality so we'll take the next minute or so and why don't you just imagine that some part of your body is the sand and the rest of your body is the ocean and so you can feel some layer some crest of skin some surface and as you inhale you can feel the swell of a tide and as you exhale you can feel the rocking or the movement of a current and investigate for yourself the balance between stability and movement which parts of yourself right now have more of a containing feeling more of a stabilizing feeling which parts of yourself really respond to the movement of your breath and they just let go feel their relationship and this might be very simple the bones are stable the skin is a container as you breathe the organs are squishy they respond there's movement through the fluids of the bodies into the muscles and you can feel that and this might be a lot more abstract and who knows where you're finding these sensations so there's no right way so okay so now let's um let's leave this for a moment and what i'd like you to do is travel in your awareness to what you feel as your own center so it's going to be different for different people so some people will feel their center is their spine or the space right in front of their spine kind of a vertical center maybe extending all the way up through the crown and all the way down through the pelvic floor and into the ground some of you might feel your center as kind of a location maybe around your navel or around your heart or who knows where maybe you feel it somewhere on the left side or the right side or somewhere even out of your body potentially but i'd like you to feel what your own center is and the center is just like the sun in the solar system so you can imagine that this is the place of the greatest stillness and the greatest weight it might be the space in the body where there's the most quiet and everything else is kind of swirling around gathering in and orienting too okay so then when you've located your center i'd like you to bring in that last bit of visualization that we were doing and again feel kind of the movement of emotions and a fluid quality through your body and a containing quality through your body so we have three places to locate there's the center there's the container and then there's all the content that's moving and i'll give a couple of minutes with that i'm just going to keep talking about it i know it can be a little bit of a mind trick to do these visualizations and to sustain somatic awareness so meditation is sustained attention and it's noticing when we kind of drift off and start doing something else and then coming back to whatever our point of attention is so right now so right now the point of attention is in whatever you feel as your own center and the balance between how you feel your own center and how you feel a container where does your energy stop how do you know the periphery of your own space or your own body and the center doesn't have to be equidistant from every point of your container at all okay but it's a location it's an anchor so what i'd like to offer right now is that the center is your truth and in this space that might feel the most quiet that has a collecting kind of sensation to it there's the very clear truth of who you are and this is beyond words it's a feeling and it's a quality and it's a very deep knowing there's no way to describe it it simply is and only you know it for you but all of your cells know it as well and so it's this kind of magic that your body knows itself that all of your cells know themselves to be part of you to be part of your tissues your body and so it's a very deep knowing to be part of you to be part of your tissues your body there's a lot of science right now talking about dark matter and empty space and we know that there's no such thing as solid and so if you consider that for your body and you consider okay i'm just this collection of particles and there's a lot of space between them why do i not just drift off and become everything else around me somehow your cells know that they're you and other organisms are like this as well sea sponges there have been these experiments with sea sponges where they put them in a blender and then the sea sponges know they find their original group they go back and reform so as you feel your own center you feel right into the very innate and most powerful resonance of your being and as you feel your container you're simply feeling what you are not and it's not that you can't know on some level that you're part of everything and that you exist in everyone but for now being in the body that you're in you're feeling what you're not you're feeling the edge of your own awareness and we'll just let our attention move back and forth between the center and the container and as your attention moves back and forth and you might do this with your breath as you inhale feel your container as you exhale feel your center or something like this as you kind of create that movement and feel it in your body and imagine it all of the stuff in between is getting saturated with your knowing of you and so this quality of the center this very core identity that's beyond words and the quality of the container the knowing of your own limits and boundaries and how far you can extend what you can control this is all inside your container you can have some impact on your internal environment very little in the external world and then everything in between is just getting saturated and washed with this awareness of your center and your container and now what i'd like you to do is kind of bring your awareness to the center of your body and what you want to do is kind of bring back your emotional qualities and so whatever came up for you those stories those people memories and we've been working together for about 20 minutes so maybe they're different sensations now and that's fine what i'm going to invite you to notice now is when you feel those qualities what are the thoughts that come up how are you compelled to move what are the actions or the instincts that you want to reach for and for me i'm such a kinesthetic and somatic learner that i pretty much always understand things first through movement or through sensation so i'm just going to describe that experience and maybe it will help inform any other experiences or be interesting for you in that way so for me if i focus in on a particular feeling and i'm not going to name the story i'll just name the quality and the quality is defensiveness and the quality is defensiveness so i can feel that in my body and i can feel the way that my chest when i when i notice that feeling and i kind of call up the situation my chest has a layer of rigidity in the front and i i feel like my breath can't saturate that space anymore and i feel kind of a hardening that goes all the way up my back body and lodges in my jaw and kind of the base of my skull and so there's a defensiveness there's a readiness to defend and a belief that i have something to defend okay so the invitation now um for me for anyone so you find these feelings you notice their somatic effect is to feel like well what is the instinct of this how do i want to move with that emotion and then to make a relationship from that sensation to your center so whatever the sensation is so i'm gonna focus on my own and what i feel is a kind of grounded quality so when i go into the sensation of defensiveness i i get into my head i get into the story and i get into a kind of posturing and i don't leave it necessarily but then i look for my center how i feel my center and i try and make a relationship between the emotional sensation and the center sensation and the image that i have is that the emotional sensation used to be metallic and then it becomes more of like a soft wood so it's still it's still resistant but it's not as reflective it's not as impermeable and then we'll do the same thing with the container so you might just need to take a couple clearing breaths kind of get back into a neutral space and then send your awareness out into your container so into the periphery or the parameter that you feel and this again it could be your skin or it could feel more like your aura and the space around you so now when i notice is that when i go to recall the emotion i don't even need to anymore like the container is doing that job of defensiveness and when i go and look for the emotion the only way i can actually find the sensation again is to let my container go but i don't want to do that i'm just gonna stay with the container and feel the place where my defensiveness used to be and then also make the relationship to my center and now i feel so resourced and it feels like kind of a really simple almost too simple kind of thing when i imagine what's this situation and how is this going to affect it but i feel in my body that i'm more protected that i know my own energetic space that i feel held in that space and that i also know the source of my own power and that's the center that's this unnameable quality that allows me to know myself so this is a meditation in some ways similar to the the last meditation i offered for aquarius different ways to resource the parts of our beings that tend to get distracted and dissociated and dysfunctional and with current events in the world there are many of us who are very sensitive who are feeling really compelled to action and with current events in personal lives there's always the opportunity to kind of spin out for whatever reason many of us want to be clear with our intention i would say probably most of us we want to feel that we're effective in our actions and getting clear with our intention is a fairly or can be a fairly simple process that's not so much a mental process of understanding what steps to take next it's more of a sensory experience like we just had of knowing what the energetic effect of something is so i'd like to invite this process for anything that you're thinking about doing and particularly things that you're thinking about doing in response to your emotional landscape for a lot of people it's not clear right now what the most effective action or decisions will be and for many of us that's a really uncomfortable place to hang out for very long not knowing and often we reach for what makes the most sense what makes the most sense to our brains or what makes the most sense when our friends you know give us their opinion or something we are very intuitive beings all of us and we all have access to our own truth and this kind of practice is one way that you can access that and that's the most effective way to do it is one way that you can access that so if you're wondering about an action to take or where your intention is my invitation is is to do this process to go in to find whoever is there to find the emotional influences the psychic influences the residue of relationships that permeating and coloring your experience to find your own center and to feel your container and then to add in these scenarios and to notice how they make you feel that first of all is is like the first bit of information how do i actually feel about this and you know it in your body before you know it in your mind and your mind has a capacity to convince you of all kinds of things so trust your body first and then connect those feelings or connect those impulses to your center and to your container and you'll find resource you'll find support you'll find more knowing and clarity when you do this and it might not give you the step-by-step game plan of what to do next but it will give you a little bit of a technique for when you consider what those steps are you can just bring them in how would i feel if i did this okay so i take a deep bow both hands together to your inner wisdom and the great teacher that resides in you right at your center and i honor that wisdom and send you so much love and thank you for doing these practices and these meditations wishing you all the best in your life please share these meditations if they're helpful for you and thank you for your donations to support these meditations if you'd like to support them and help others receive them in the world for free you can easily donate at the website embodiedastrology.

Com thank you blessings and love for now you you