Grounding Meditation
A simple exercise for becoming more grounded and nurturing your connection with your physicality.
- Begin by sitting quietly, closing your eyes, and taking a few slow, deep breaths.
- Focus your awareness on your t’an t’ien, a point about 2 inches below your navel and 1½ inches inside your body (a focal point for life energy, or chi).
Explore this area with mindful attention, noticing how it feels. - Direct your breath into this area, expanding it when you inhale and contracting it when you exhale.
Consciously and deliberately breathe into your t’an t’ien for five minutes or more, allowing your awareness and your energy to concentrate there. - Continuing to breathe with your t’an t’ien, imagine that you’re a tree with roots that go deep into the earth.
Both feel and visualise these roots originating in the t’an t’ien and growing down through the base of your spine into the ground, spreading through the soil as far down as you can imagine. - Feel and visualise these roots drawing energy up from the earth into your t’an t’ien on the inhalation, and feel the energy spreading down through the roots on the exhalation.
Continue to feel and visualize this circulation of energy — up on the inhale, down on the exhale — for five or ten minutes.
Tuning in to your body
The following meditation, which has counterparts in yoga and Buddhism, helps reestablish contact with the body by drawing attention gently from one part to another. Because it cultivates awareness and also relaxes the muscles and internal organs, it makes a great foundation for other meditation practices. Allow at least 20 minutes to complete.
- Lie on your back on a comfortable surface — but not too comfortable unless you plan to fall asleep.
- Take a few moments to feel your body as a whole, including the places where it contacts the surface of the bed or floor.
- Bring your attention to your toes.
Allow yourself to feel any and all sensations in this area. If you don’t feel anything, just feel “not feeling anything.” As you breathe, imagine that you’re breathing into and out of your toes. (If this feels weird or uncomfortable, just breathe in your usual way.) - When you’re done with your toes, move on to your soles, heels, the tops of your feet, and your ankles in turn, feeling each part in the same way that you felt your toes.
Take your time. The point of this exercise is not to achieve anything, not even relaxation, but to be as fully present as possible wherever you are. - Gradually move up your body, staying at least three or four breaths with each part.
Follow this approximate order: lower legs, knees, thighs, hips, pelvis, lower abdomen, lower back, solar plexus, upper back, chest, shoulders. Now focus on the fingers, hands, and arms on both sides, and then on the neck and throat, chin, jaws, face, back of the head, and top of the head.
By the time you reach the top of your head, you may feel as though the boundaries between you and the rest of the world have become more fluid — or have melted away entirely. At the same time, you may feel silent and still — free of your usual restlessness or agitation. - Rest there for a few moments; then gradually bring your attention back to your body as a whole.
- Wiggle your toes, move your fingers, open your eyes, rock from side to side, and gently sit up.
- Take a few moments to stretch and reacquaint yourself with the world around you before standing up and going about your day.
Eating a piece of fruit
For this in-the-moment exercise, imagine that you’ve just arrived from another planet and have never experienced an orange before.
- Place an orange on a plate and close your eyes.
- Set aside all thoughts and preconceptions, open your eyes, and see the fruit as though for the first time. Notice the shape, the size, the color, the texture.
- As you begin to peel the orange, notice how it feels in your fingers, the contrast between the flesh and the peel, the weight of the fruit in your hand.
- Slowly raise a piece of the orange to your lips and pause a moment before eating. Notice how it smells before you begin.
- Open your mouth, bite down, and feel the texture of its soft flesh and the first rush of juice into your mouth.
- Continue to bite and chew the orange, remaining aware of the play of sensations from moment to moment.
Imagining that this may be the first and last orange you will ever eat, let each moment be fresh and new and complete in itself. Notice how this experience of eating an orange differs from your usual way of eating a piece of fruit.
Encouraging your creativity
Meditation naturally feeds creativity by helping you to bypass your analytical mind and tap into a deeper wellspring of energy, vitality, and intuition. Ideas and images may spontaneously bubble up in meditation as though from some collective source.
This meditation is called the “morning pages”, adapted from the book The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. It’s designed to engage what Cameron calls “artist brain” — the playful, creative, holistic part of your mind — and evade the “Censor,” the inner critic who dampens or even ridicules your creative impulses.
First thing every morning, preferably right after you get out of bed, sit down and write by hand three pages of whatever comes into your mind.
It doesn’t have to be good or grammatical; it doesn’t even have to make sense — it just has to fill three pages. By writing without double-checking or trying to be logical or smart, you’re bypassing the Censor, while clearing your brain of all the cobwebs that accumulated overnight.
You’re also showing yourself that you don’t have to feel good or be in a great mood to create. You can scribble down complaints or dreams or things you need to do, whatever — you can’t do it wrong. Just write!
Cameron does suggest a few guidelines for getting the most out of your morning pages:
- Do them every day without fail.
You can decide in advance how many weeks you’re going to do them, and then follow through on your intention. Like meditation itself, the morning pages may become a habit you don’t want to break. - Don’t show them to anyone else — and don’t read them yourself for the first few weeks at least.
Cameron actually suggests not reading them for the first eight weeks, but don’t be too concerned if curiosity overtakes you. - Remember that the negative opinions of your Censor aren’t true.
You can include your Censor’s judgments in your morning pages, if you like — but don’t believe them!
Croaking Meditation
Warning:
This exercise should only be attempted if you’re a frog. To a human, the term ‘croaking’ has a very different meaning and should generally be avoided for as long as possible.
Step 1: Chillax on your favourite lillypad.
Step 2: Croak
Step 3: Use your croaking as a focusing mantra, letting the sound fill your awareness and absorb you into your surroundings. Intend the mantra to carry you into your centre point of equilibrium – the state where all your ‘beingness’ is exactly in balance and harmony. Then let the mantra take you wherever it takes you.
Step 4: Explore at will, accepting and embracing whatever you discover with curiosity, wonder, and gratitude. Doing that is much more interesting than reading this website. Well, what are you still doing here? Go on, hop to it. *Ribbit*