A warm welcome to you.
If your emotions have felt harder to steady lately.
And your mind keeps snagging on what's wrong instead of what's working.
This practice is for you.
Changing hormones can turn up the volume on our negativity bias.
Mood swings,
Tears,
Rage,
Self-doubt,
Fatigue,
Pain,
Cognitive changes.
Moments the mind was always prone to dwell on can start to feel louder and harder to shake during this stage of life.
This is exactly why growing the good matters so much right now.
Not rose-coloured glasses.
Not ignoring what's genuinely hard.
Just training your attention to notice and savour positive experiences so they have a greater chance of being remembered and integrated.
In so doing,
Increasing your baseline of well-being,
Confidence and self-trust.
Today's practice is an invitation to turn your attention toward the good.
Within yourself.
Within your relationships and your life more broadly.
We'll spend time with all three,
So that by the end appreciation feels less like a single moment and more like a wider lens.
So before you close down your eyes,
Take a gentle look around the space you're in.
And for a moment,
See if you can open to the goodness here.
It's so easy for the mind to notice the imperfections,
The mess.
The cracked paint.
The floor that needs a vacuum,
The stuff that belongs in other rooms.
But just for now,
Can you let your eyes soften and scan your space with a willingness to notice what is already supportive?
Already enough.
Already quietly good.
Is the temperature just right?
Is there light streaming in through a window?
Is there a blanket?
A photo that warms your heart.
Just sensing into the goodness of the room that is holding you.
And from here closing your eyes or having a steady gaze.
As we begin by noticing that awareness can be guided.
So often our awareness lives in the mind.
Replaying,
Ruminating,
Analysing,
Judging.
But here in this moment,
There's nothing to solve.
Nothing to troubleshoot or work through.
We're safe to guide our awareness toward sensation.
So rubbing your hands together.
Slowly,
Quickly,
However you like.
Feeling the warmth.
The friction.
Being with the direct experience of sensation within your hands.
Now if it feels okay for you,
Resting your hands on your lower belly.
Feeling the contact of hands on clothing.
The subtle movement of the belly beneath the hands as breath flows in and out.
Noticing also the spaces.
The space between each of your fingers.
The space between the palms and the body.
The quiet spaciousness within this moment you have carved out for yourself.
And now inviting your awareness to travel a little deeper.
Beneath the skin.
Imagining the intelligence of your body quietly at work.
Your stomach digesting.
The intestines absorbing nutrients.
The liver,
Processing and filtering.
Your kidneys balancing and cleansing.
Your ovaries and adrenal glands recalibrating.
Finding a new hormonal rhythm.
The body regulating in countless unseen ways.
An orchestra of life unfolding beneath your hands without your effort.
Sure,
Some of this feels scary,
Inconvenient and perhaps even painful.
But here in this moment as your hands rest on your lower belly.
Can you trust a little more in your changing body?
Can you feel grateful for all the ways this body has supported you in the past?
For the ways it will support you in the future.
As your hands rest here in reverence for this incredible body.
Perhaps they can also guide you to your inherent goodness.
As you allow simple acts from this week that reveal your basic goodness to emerge.
Perhaps you listened fully to a friend.
Cooked for someone you love.
Checked in on your parents or siblings.
Smiled at a stranger.
Offered patience when it would have been easier not to.
Held it together when you are having a hard day.
Mustered up the energy to care for others when you were running on empty.
These moments don't need to be dramatic.
Small gestures are enough.
Let memories or recollections weave into your practice like sunlight through a window.
Breathing these memories deep into your belly.
Letting them land.
Letting them matter.
Now let's turn this around as you bring to mind some goodness that's come to you from someone else.
A time when someone asked you about your day and really meant it.
A time when someone followed up on something that mattered to you.
Let yourself really receive one of these moments.
Notice how it feels to be thought of.
To be followed up on,
To matter to someone.
In an ordinary,
Unremarkable way.
Breathing this into your belly too.
Letting it land.
Midlife is a reckoning.
A time when many of the habits that no longer serve us get stripped away.
Sometimes delicately,
Sometimes frantically.
Sometimes from choice.
Sometimes from necessity.
It's a time where we feel called to speak from the heart.
To show up more authentically.
And to stop shape shifting to make others feel comfortable.
And of course it can feel messy.
But there's often also a sense of relief.
Of freedom.
So here in this moment.
Breathing into this feeling of spaciousness,
Of possibility.
And now allowing one gift that has emerged from this time to rise into your awareness.
A gift from midlife.
Letting yourself really take this in.
This too belongs in the picture.
Not despite the hard parts of this season,
But alongside them.
And if turning your awareness toward your inherent goodness feels difficult today,
That's okay too.
Trust that even if no specific memories or images came to mind.
This practice was still worth it.
Things are shifting under the surface.
Simply by pressing play on this audio today.
You have sent a message to your nervous system that you matter.
Returning to the sensations of your hands meeting the lower belly.
Breath rising and falling.
And now one more widening of your awareness.
As you bring to mind something good that exists beyond you entirely.
Nothing you made happen,
Nothing you earned.
A friendship that's lasted decades.
A body of knowledge you've absorbed just by living this long.
The people who have shaped you.
Most of whom will never know how much.
Letting yourself rest in the truth that goodness doesn't only arrive through effort.
Some of it was simply given.
Growing day by day,
Bit by bit.
Here in this moment reorientating your awareness toward what is good,
True and already here.
Creating a new baseline of strength and stability.
Feeling your body as it sits or lies here.
The surface beneath you.
The sounds in your environment.
Opening your eyes when you're ready.
May you carry what you have cultivated into the rest of your day.
And your journey through midlife.
You might like to save this practice and come back to it anytime you need.
