Guided Meditation for Grounding: Drop from Head to Belly

I can feel the stability and the groundedness and the supportiveness of the lower dantian of the ground of being and of the pelvic bowl. It's as if it holds up the heart so the heart can just feel without any sort of inhibition or reservation or fear. Okay, good. All right, I will do a begin the guided meditation.

All right, find yourself in a comfortable position, either sitting on the floor in a chair, is usually best. I'll ring the bell three times, and that will begin the guided meditation. Notice the bones in your feet. Notice your breathing.

When you notice your breathing, notice either your abdomen pushing out and in on the in-breath and out-breath, or your chest rising and falling on the in-and-out-breath. Then notice your lower leg bones, your left leg, and your right leg, and your knees. Then notice your breathing in your chest or abdomen. Notice your upper leg bones, your thigh bones on your left and your right, and how they insert like there's a ball at the top of the bone, and it inserts into your hip socket on your left and your right side.

And notice your breathing. Then notice your hips. Notice how either hip there's kind of like a cup or the ball of your hip inserts into the hip on the left and right side. And then your pelvis, your coccyx, I think it's called, but your bone at the bottom of the hip goes down like a point, and then it goes up like two wings on either side of your back, lower back.

And then the whole thing kind of makes almost like a bowl shape. Good. So I want you to try to allow your focus of your awareness to be in the bowl, right? To be in the hip bones of the pelvic bowl.

If you're having a hard time, what you can do is take your hands and put them on the small of your back on either side. And right where they touch, I want you to feel the skin on your hands. And then I want you to go in about half an inch to an inch into where the hip bone is right there. Okay.

And then as you do that, as I do that, I'll walk you through it. So I'm doing that now. I now have my awareness in the lower back, in those bones, the top of the hip. And then I want you to draw a circle from that around to the front of your abdomen through the bones so you make kind of a bowl shape.

Good. And then with that circle, then make it half of a sphere. So trace the circle down to the bottom of your butt and then up the other side. So it's like you have like a shallow bowl, right?

Like the pelvic bowl. And the hip bones are kind of making up part of that. Good. And now I want you to use that as your focal point of awareness, that bowl.

First, just notice your breathing. See if you can be aware of your belly button pushing out and in on the in and out breath. Good. And what I notice is that some of my attention is in that pelvic, the hip, the bowl, and some of my attention is in the top of my head, between my eyes, and in my forehead, and around my ears.

And sometimes my awareness wants to kind of go back and forth between the two. If you notice your awareness getting pulled into your head, then just gradually bring your awareness back down into the pelvic bowl. If it's too difficult to be aware of the whole bowl, it's okay. Just pick a spot.

You can kind of pick any spot, but if you had a recommendation, just pick the spot right in front of the spine, a little bit below the belly button. You can just pick that spot if this is too difficult. And when you go move your awareness from your head down into the lower abdomen, I want you to try to do it in a gentle way if you've gotten stuck up there, right? So you're moving backwards as if you're backing away from, say, the side of a cliff, or you're backing away and then you're going to fall back into your bed.

We want to kind of return to the abdomen instead of push our way into it. Good, and then just invite any sort of tension or contraction or pain or thoughts or worries in the head to begin to relax. And you're maintaining your awareness in the lower abdomen, still aware, and you're looking up at the head. You can either be holding the whole space in your awareness if you can do that or if that's a struggle then you can just switch your awareness from the spot in your lower abdomen to the head and pendulate your awareness back and forth.

Either it works fine. We're inviting and encouraging the tension and the contractions in the head to settle and kind of relax and fall down through the body almost like a leaf falling off a tree, floating kind of gradually down into the abdomen. And for me as the tension in the head or the thoughts in the head relax or the anxieties relax, it begins to kind of open like a fist opening to an open hand into a leaf. And then it begins to kind of settle and fall down through the head, down the throat, down through the heart.

And what I notice is it moves through the heart area, it's as if the worrying thought or the tension takes on almost like an emotional hue or a tone. And it's almost like this, like subtle sadness and loss of letting go, and then it falls down through that into the abdomen, and then it becomes more still and kind of grounded as it returns to the source of being. Let's just do that a few more times. Noticing any tension or thoughts or anxiety in the head, and then encouraging that to return to the ground of being.

Good and bringing our awareness back to the abdomen if it got distracted, making sure it's still kind of there, noticing our breathing, noticing the belly going in and out in the breath. See if you can become aware of how the bones in the pelvic bowl provide the structure and the support for the abdomen and the torso and the shoulders and the head and the whole body. If it's the bottom of the trunk of a tree or the foundation of a house Good. and then connecting now from the abdomen, the pelvic bowl up to the heart and then trying to begin similar to what we did with the head, holding both the abdomen and the heart space in your awareness at the same time and seeing if you can let them communicate with each other what is the relationship between the ground of being your pelvic bowl and your heart is it a negative relationship?

Is there any sort of animosity between them or conflict? Is it a connected relationship or a disconnected? Is there love or positive embrace exchanged between the two? Good.

What is the impact on your heart when you connect the grounded stability of the abdomen and the lower dantian and the ground of being when the heart feels those beneath it? before it was as if there was part of my consciousness in my abdomen and the pelvic bowl and another piece of my consciousness in the heart. And they were like looking at each other, right, and kind of talking. And then now what I want you to do is keep the awareness in the abdomen the same, looking at the heart, but have the heart almost turn around like it's this back to the abdomen and the heart is either looking up to the head or out through the chest.

And then see if that feels any different. See? Like I can feel myself looking from my heart out through my chest and out through my head and my eyes. And I can feel the back of me, right, or below me.

I can feel the stability and the groundedness and the supportiveness of the lower dantian of the ground of being and of the pelvic bowl. It's as if it holds up the heart so the heart can just feel without any sort of inhibition or reservation or fear. It's as if the heart was before was almost quivering a little bit or vibrating almost like a subtle insecurity. And now that it knows that it has the support of the abdomen, it kind of settles and in the settling and relaxing grows brighter and more alive.

Good. And then looking from the heart up into the mind, now that we've done this exercise, the mind to me feels like this vast, clear space. There's almost like a ground in it, almost like a field on the top of a mountain. The air is very thin and crisp and bright.

Let's see. So now we have this energy signature of the three different levels. We have the level of the gut with its stability, groundedness, and structure, supportiveness, physical support. We have the expansive, loving, warm, kind of rolling movement of the heart center.

And then we have the bright and light and crisp kind of openness and spaciousness of the mind. Each level of our consciousness has a kind of basic attributes to it and getting to know how these levels are when we are in stillness, meditation, on retreat, at our best, at very deep levels of inner silence and stability become pointers and touchstones for when we are checking to see if we are in our own integrity, if we are in our authenticity, if we are standing on our own two feet. When we begin to lean on old rules or stories or memories or other people's opinions or influences, we will lose connection with the authentic and more undeterred, undisturbed qualities of each of these levels.

So, this is one way to help guide you and help you identify if you are in alignment with your own authenticity or if you have gotten lost and given loyalty and value to something outside of yourself just take a minute or two and notice how these three parts of your body feel.