Welcome.
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So thank you.
Let's begin by taking a bit of time to settle.
So you want to be sitting,
Ideally,
Or lying on your back,
But ideally sitting with your spine straight.
One way or another.
So your heart is directly above your hips,
Your pelvis.
And your skull is directly above your heart.
And very often that requires sitting on pillows.
It's not uncommon to sit in a chair rather than down on the floor.
Take your time to find the right position for you today.
Enjoying a moment of silence as you settle.
Perhaps you tune your awareness of your mind to the Perhaps you tune your awareness to your breath.
Noticing how it feels to take an in-breath and an out-breath.
You might find your tongue naturally rests up on the roof of your mouth.
Breathing through the nose.
If that's not available to you,
Then breathing through your mouth but just with your teeth and your lips gently apart.
A moment to notice the sensation of the in-breath through the nostrils.
And the sensation of the out-breath through the nostrils.
How does that feel on the skin around your nose?
Perhaps the lips soften to an almost smile.
You might be aware as that softening across the lips happens that that can spread down into your face,
Around your ears,
Even the scalp.
You might start to move down the neck,
Across the shoulders,
Down through the spine.
That softness making its way through the organs of the torso,
Liver,
Kidneys,
Digestion.
Dropping into the pelvis and all that is held within the pelvic bowl.
Becoming aware of the floor beneath you and the points of your body that connect to the floor beneath you.
And letting them become heavy.
So your lower body starts to feel like the weight of a sack of potatoes as you're really landing.
And even if perhaps we live somewhere that's built up,
Not too far away from where your body is sitting,
If you travel down with your awareness,
You can start to sense the earth beneath.
So your lower body starts to feel like the weight of a sack of potatoes as you're really landing.
And first the layers of earth as soil.
Pretty soon they become rock.
And eventually the rock becomes fire.
Sensing your relationship to that rock on fire.
And with your next inhale,
Allowing your awareness to move to the channel of the spine as you sit tall in your chosen position.
There's a sensation of light and openness as if the spine were a pillar.
A pillar of light.
This pillar of light is your midline,
Your primal streak.
It's been present there right from the beginning.
It'll be with you right till the end.
Coming all the way up through the neck where it joins the skull,
That ridge at the back of your head,
The occiput.
Bring your awareness there.
Perhaps you can sense quite a dynamic sense of expansion,
Openness.
The theme we're working with this month is presence.
For me that sequence of connecting to rock,
Coming to the pillar of the primal streak,
Finding the openness of the occiput.
That's how I find presence.
Is it true for you?
And bringing your hands together at your heart center,
Pressing the palms into one another.
So we start to activate our heart space.
Palms resting at your heart,
Thumbs in towards your chest.
And drawing the in-breath down into the heart space.
And allowing the out-breath to come from the center of your heart out in all directions.
And by now the breath may have slowed down.
Naturally you might start to move to an ujjayi breath.
Which means you're breathing through the nose.
There's a gentle contraction in the throat allowing you to sense the movement of breath up and through,
Down and through the throat.
It may even be audible,
You might hear it like a gentle snore.
In-breath travelling to the center of the heart.
Out-breath travelling out in all directions from the heart.
And it may be that your hands start to feel heat.
They start to charge.
If that is true for you,
Maybe place your hands anywhere on your body that feels like it would be a comfort.
Perhaps the hands are an extension of the heart energy.
So we can choose to bring that heart energy around the body.
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Deep slow in-breath to the center of your heart.
Deep slow exhale out in all directions from the center of your heart.
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And then if there's anywhere on your body that feels like it would gratefully receive a little boost.
And your hands feel hot and charged.
Bringing your hands to that place.
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And then from the center of the heart out in all directions.
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