Gently close your eyes..

As we begin to meditate now, don’t try to do anything or change anything. Just feel. Accept. Let go to the sensations in your body. Surrender to them. Use your somatic awareness to access your inner experience. 

Start observing your breath, just listen, just feel. Be the observer not the doer. Where do you feel it flow in you?  Where do you feel it most? What moves when you breathe and maybe even more importantly what doesn't move when you breathe? Can you bring your attention with loving curiosity to what isn't moving in your body when you breathe? 

Good breathing is essential to vibrant health. Vibrant health is not just the absence of illness but a connection to all the energy in our bodies. So can you sense the areas where you may be guarding yourself and see if you can let go of the tensions that are preventing natural breathing. Allow yourself to breathe. 

Create a closeness to your body that you might not normally have time for.

These classes are to help us be in touch with our whole self.  To feel more like a whole person. This isn’t an abstract idea but involves the entirety of our functioning. Awareness of self is being aware of what is going on within us as well as around us. It is different from an intellectual knowing. It is a felt experience in our body. A felt sense. We often live in our heads with very little conscious awareness of what is going on below our neck. We are not aware that we hold our breath, or that we are breathing shallowly.

So now bring your awareness to the room that you are in. Notice that as well as the content of the room, there is space in this room. Notice the space around you. Notice how you are in space. Notice the space in your body. Notice the space in your mind. 

What sounds can you hear? You may hear some birds singing, cars in the distance or people talking. For there to be sound there also has to be silence. Notice the silence in your mind and your body

Your experience right now involves movement. The movement of your breath, your heart and all the bodily sensations that you can feel but there is also stillness. Movement can only happen in the context of stillness.

Feel the stillness and the space and the silence that is always with you and within you.

When we are caught up in the circumstances of our lives, we are likely to get caught in fight/ flight/ and freeze. 

When we connect to the space and stillness and silence of our being, our nervous system can relax into balance. It can let go into being. It is here that we can heal. It is here that we can retrain our reactions to life. It is here that we can learn to regulate our emotions.

It is here that we can get in touch with our body’s wisdom . The body can teach us and be an ally.

What is in and out of balance? What we are resisting, what we are attached to, what do we have conflicts with. What are we denying and what are we suppressing? We learn to suppress our emotions from a young age to fit into our family life and school life and this may be successful in the thinking mind but the body can't suppress emotions. 

We will keep experiencing symptoms of stress and illness until we address the cause, learn to evolve and awaken from what it is we need to face.

We do not find peace by trying to manage all the circumstances of our lives but by realising and getting to know who we are at a deeper level.