Nature Attunement Meditation

Why is time spent in nature so revitalizing and nourishing? Why does it make us feel so alive? Is there more to it than just taking a break and getting away from it all? My sense is that nature is like a tuning fork fork that attunes us to our life force, to our very being. Nature is like a mirror that reflects back to us the qualities that make up our bodies, minds, emotions and spirit. Depending on the kind of work we do and how we spend our time, we may become disconnected from those qualities and life can become somewhat dry and flat. Time spent in nature wakes us up, makes us feel more alive.

The Nature Attunement Meditation is meant to bring much of the benefit of time spent in nature to us wherever we may be. This meditation focuses on the earth itself, creating an experience of grounding and strengthening. Water, sun and moon light, and plants also play a part in the meditation, as we attune to the essential elements that make up our lives and imbibe the energy and life of the vegetation of the earth.

This meditation is quite different from any of the previous ones on the podcast. It was a new experience for me to create it and I really enjoyed it. It will be interesting to hear how some of you respond to it.

Discovering "aliveness" in the breath

When we observe the process of breathing, really observe it, even for a moment, a very profound meditation happens. I recently received a newsletter from the Advaita Fellowship (Wayne Liquorman), and am quoting from it below, as it is such a beautiful understanding of the gifts that observing the breath can bring.

"This aliveness we are talking about is worth investigating. It is here, in this moment. It is as close to you as your breath. In fact, your breath IS this Livingness. You do not have to remember to breathe. Your breath is literally breathing you. Stop reading the words on this page for a moment and investigate this phenomenon of breathing....

(If you did not stop, but simply read on to this sentence, I fully understand...you are a lot like me....however there REALLY is something to be seen in the stopping for a moment even if you are an "advanced" student and have examined your breath many times previously.)

Perhaps you were able to see the way in which your breath "just happens." You breathe even when you forget to breathe. There is a force here that operates independent of your decisions and intentions... It is this Life that is living you even to the extent that you falsely believe yourself to be living IT."

Guided Chakra Meditation

Our attention is like a beam of energy. When we direct our awareness to some area of the body, it brings energy to it. Our new podcast episode, Chakra Meditation, uses this principle to enliven the chakras, creating a better flow of energy throughout the body. (If you are not familiar with the chakras, or "energy centers" of the body, you can read about them here.)

As you listen to this chakra meditation, you may notice differences in how you feel as you focus on the different chakras. It may be that emotions come up, especially at the lower chakras and heart chakra, or that you notice subtle shifts in energy. Just be aware of how you feel, not trying to change or manipulate anything. Simply having your awareness on the chakra will wake up the intelligence in that chakra so that automatically things will shift in the direction of greater balance.

You may find that some chakras are easier for you to focus on. Some may seem very faint or slip away from your attention and others may be sensed more easily. If you continue to use this meditation, your experience of the chakras will become more clear over time. If you don't notice anything in particular with you attention on the chakras, doesn't matter. You will still be getting the benefit of the meditation.

Using this meditation regularly should help to bring balance to life, as each chakra is associated with different parts of the body and aspects of living. Let me know how it works for you!

-- Thanks to Barry Stevens for the beautiful chakra image on this post.

Gratitude

This morning I spoke with a man who called from London (UK) to express his gratitude for my guided meditations.  Our local meditation group had just left and I was already feeling quite mellow, but the phone call brought me to a deep state of love and gratitude that has remained with me all day.  I was so deeply touched as he related how much our podcast and CDs have helped him.  As he spoke, I felt such gratitude that this is happening in my life, that in some mysterious way people receive the same grace from me that I have received from so many teachers and others through the years.  It could just as easily have been me thanking him for how much he has enriched my life. When I sit with my meditation group or to record a meditation, I enter into a meditative state and speak from that place.  It seems that those who resonate with my meditations are somehow brought into that state with me.  Today on the phone, it felt as if the gratitude my caller was expressing was my own.  What a gift to be brought into that state of gratitude!  Gratitude is said to be the "highest" possible emotion we can experience.  To me, it is an experience of love -- not the emotion of love but of the very essence of life itself.  There's no way to describe or understand intellectually what gratitude is, but when we have the good fortune to feel it, it's good to dwell in it and allow it to nourish our spirits.

Meditation: Life without Endings

I just finished watching a mini-series on DVD. It was one of those that has a cliff-hanger at the end of almost every episode. I couldn't wait to to find out what happened next and, of course, I wanted to know what would happen in the end. But this series didn't really end the story. There was no knowing "how it all turned out". Obviously the last episode was made without the producers realizing it would be the last. Otherwise, the loose ends would have been tied up and the characters would have lived happily, or not so happily, ever after. At first this really bothered me. I didn't like the feeling of everything being up in the air. But when I thought about it, I realized that this is how life actually is -- a series of events, some favorable, some unfavorable, with no end. Something about that feeling of being left up in the air felt so unsettling, and yet so alive. The end of anything is a stopping point -- the end of movement. Everything must end for something new to emerge, but when we hold on to endings from the past or are fixed on how things will end in the future, we stop the natural flow of life. We stop the aliveness.

Meditation can help us give up our attachment to endings. Letting go of outcomes, letting go of having certain experiences and not having others, letting go of the attempt to make it "turn out right", allows us to experience the aliveness that is present moment to moment.