Meditation Series Activity 2
About the Series
This meditation series is inspired by meditation prompts written by Oriah in her book, The Dance: Moving to the Deep Rhythms of Your Life. This book combines story-telling and meditation prompts to guide the reader on an investigation of personal and spiritual development.
About the Activity
This activity may be approached in stillness or with movement. As I guide this activity, I encourage participants who are moving their bodies to acutely listen and mindfully respond to impulses as they arise throughout this meditative improvisational exercise. Please be mindful of your surroundings and only practice what is safe and reasonable for your body at this time.
Here I have included a quote from Oriah's poem, "The Dance" as it pertains specifically to this activity:
Show me how you follow your deepest desires,
spiraling down into the ache within the ache,
and I will show you how I reach inward and open outward to feel the kiss of the Mystery, sweet lips on my own, every day.
The full poem can be found at this link.
Activity 2
Throughout this activity I will denote direct quotes from Oriah's "Meditation for Awareness," from chapter 2 of The Dance: Moving to the Deep Rhythms of Your Life with quotation marks. All quotes are directly from this text published by HarperSanFrancisco, A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers.
Let's begin. Decide to approach this meditation either in stillness or with movement.
Oriah writes, "Sometimes opening our awareness to the sacred life force that is both within and around us is as simple as turning our attention to it...so try this wherever you are at the moment."
Bring awareness to the skin of your face. Relax the muscles of the forehead. Unclench your jaw. Notice the weight of your eyelids as they close down or blink open. Feel the texture of your lips effortlessly closing together or stretching to open. Bring awareness to the muscles behind the eyes and allow them to be soft and not strained. Bring awareness to any pressure in the sinuses beneath the outer surface of the face's skin and woven throughout the skull's bone structure.
Oriah suggests, "be aware of the temperature of the air where it touches your cheek, your forehead, your lips and eyes...the air currents moving around your face, touching your skin and being rerouted by any movement you make. Slowly turn your face and be aware of the change in sensation there."
Take a few breaths to explore the relationship between your face and its external environment.
Explore the following visual offered by Oriah. "Imagine the molecules that make up that air...colliding and bouncing against your skin. The atoms that make up those molecules...see them vibrating with sub-atomic particles-spinning electrons and shimmering quirks and quarks. Be aware of this consistent life force in all the different molecules of the air touching your face, surrounding you."
Spend some time being aware of how the air interacts with the architecture of your face.
Oriah offers that you apply this same awareness to your internal environment. "The same kind of vibration in the cells of the skin. Expand the awareness of this life force energy down your neck, through your torso, down your arms and legs...in the organs-in the cells and the molecules and the atoms of your lungs and stomach and heart. Feel your whole body as a manifestation of this same life force that vibrates in the molecules of the air around you."
Continuing noticing this vibrating force of your internal and external environments, expanding further now to acknowledge the objects surrounding you. Oriah offers, "be aware of the large...the small. Be aware of the innate vibration of the microcosms within each of these, of how the same force sends their electrons spinning through inner space. Feel how the force of the wind that tosses the branches of a tree is the same as that which makes the air moving in and out of your lungs flow...the flow of life-giving liquids up and down the trunk of a tree...the same source as that which moves blood throughout your body."
To close this meditation I want to offer a final piece from the second chapter of Oriah's book, The Dance: Moving to the Deep Rhythms of Your Life. It reads, "Feel how the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, embodied within you and yet larger than yourself. Be aware of how this presence is constant whether or not you turn your attention to it. Be aware of how it holds you faithfully."
Follow Up
I want to thank Oriah for permitting me to quote parts of her "Meditation for Awareness" for this activity. If you would like, please comment on this blog post with any feedback for me or use this space to safely share and discuss anything that came up for you during this meditation. You can continue participating in this series every Friday when I go live on my Instagram, here. Thank you for participating!!
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