An exercise for your meditation practice:

The Mystery Within

• Find a comfortable seat and close the eyes. Feel the natural process of breathing. Relax the shoulders and the inner thighs. Feel the weight of your body and give it to the earth. Feel the support of the earth give rise to that body.

• Lean back slightly into the space behind you. Find that spacious, yet precarious line of balance, your spine dangling upwards.

• Relax the jaw, feel the back teeth separate slightly. Lick the lips and place them gently together. Place the tip of the tongue at the front of the palate and relax the root of the tongue. In Taoist thought, the tongue is the tip of the heart and the tongue is also the embassy of the mind. The roots of the word embassy are connected to being a servant, a bridge, but it also literally means ‘going around,’ as the tongue does.

• The lids of the eyes are heavy and drop down. The gaze is turned inwards. Release a sigh on that exhale and feel the body relax.

• The breath is smooth, rhythmic, and deep, yet unmanipulated. The breath breathes the body.

• Feel the movement of the breath in the body: the ribs expand, the lungs press down towards the kidneys in the back body, to the sacrum, in the front body to the space of the heart, to the lower belly. Feel the home within the body.

• Imagine yourself sitting within your own body on the pelvic floor with your heart above your head? Listen to all the sounds that surround you, the ocean of sound surrounding the continent of your being. All of those sounds are within you.

• Seek the origin. Imagine the striking of a bell. Let the sound penetrate and absorb into that center and emanate outward.

• When you are ready to return, bring your awareness to the inhale and slowly open your eyes.