Hello friends. Lets meditate.
Last week I was listening to On Being, a podcast hosted by Krista Tippett. Her guest was Christine Runyan, a clinical psychologist and professor at UMass Medical School. Christine recommended a quick practice of just grounding our bodies through our feet.
She offered the beautiful insight that fight or flight lives in the toes – on the run. And where does deeper calm live? You've got it - calm lives in the grounded feet.
Try it now while you read this article.
Take a moment to allow your feet to relax towards the earth. Uncross your legs, sit in a way that allows your feet to rest solidly on the floor. You can take your shoes off if you’d like. Connect each toe pad to the earth. Allow the ball of the foot to fall into the earth. Invite the heal to feel solid and restful. Feel the feet relax and soften. Begin to just breathe some soft energy into the feet. Perhaps you may benefit from a sense of warmth and comfort- so breathe that into your feet. Imagine your feet in warm sand and invite that sense of warmth to travel into the feet with the inbreath and then float that warm sensation up into the legs with the out breath. Breathing in warm. Breathing out, float it up into the legs.
If you feel the need for cool calmness imagine your feet solid in cool summer grass– allow the feet to connect with that sensation. Breathing in pull in a sense of freshness and aliveness. Breathing out allow that to wash up into your legs. Feeling a sense of freshness and abundance.
Some ideas of where you can practice this short meditation:
1. In the car
2. Traveling on a plane
3. Standing in a long line
4. Sitting at your desk at work
5. Standing at the sink washing dishes or prepping a meal.
6. While brushing your teeth each night.
Meditation isn’t so much about carving out large sections of the day to sit on a cushion in a meditation hall and clear your mind – it’s about finding these small, daily moments to practice more awareness, more intention.
This simple exercise can help you learn to calm your central nervous system and come out of flight, fight, or freeze into a more sustainable space that is good for you and those around you.
As you move into this holiday season, here is an invitation to carve out some intentional space to practice more grounded living. It can be as simple as allowing your feet to feel anchored into the earth for a few minutes every day.
Namaste friends!
May you be well.
May you feel abundance this holiday season.
Juli Larsen,
Certified Meditation Facilitator
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