Julia B

San Diego, CA, USA

Inhabit your body as a temple through breathwork, body scanning, and a traditional Celtic circling prayer.

Religion

Health & Happiness

Contemplative Prayer

Presence

Christianity

Visualization

English

In this practice, you will create space to practice embodying your spirituality, what I call dwelling inside the sanctuary of your body. We will tune into breath and body, release tension, and pray an embodied circling prayer/Caim, from the Celtic Christian tradition. 
Music courtesy of bensound

Dwelling In The Sanctuary

 Welcome. In a previous meditation, I discussed the idea of your body being a temple. In today's meditation, we will create space to work with a few ways to practice embodying our spirituality or what it means to dwell inside of that temple. In the evangelical Christianity that raised me, there is a pervasive dualism between body and spirit. This seems to stem from some of the writings of the Apostle Paul. The faith that I was raised with was a very cerebral, mind-based religion seeming to lack in physical practices that engaged my body in my spirituality. It felt like this constant battle of filling my brain with knowledge in order to combat my body. In other spiritual traditions that I've learned about, there also seems to be an idea that in order to reach transcendence or some spiritual realm, we need to transcend our body, our humanity. In this meditation, we will explore the idea of our spirituality being rooted in our bodies, in our physical sensations, in our emotions, and explore the idea that when we can more fully inhabit our bodies, this will bring us fresh spiritual perspective and spiritual power. Let's begin by tuning into our surroundings. Begin by taking several deep breaths, tuning into the sounds of the world all around you, both natural and human-made. Instead of trying to ignore these sounds, receive them as an invitation to include them in your practice as well. Begin to consciously engage the breath, creating a steady rhythm by breathing in to the count of four and breathing out to the count of four. So you may notice thoughts distracting you. Instead of trying to ignore them, acknowledge them and let them go. Next, let's tune into our body. Scan your body for areas of tightness and adjust your posture if you want to. Common places that you can scan for tightness include your shoulders, between your eyebrows, your glutes, belly, neck, or jaw. Imagine that you can bring in an inhale and encircle that tense area with your breath. And then as you exhale, imagine that your breath is softening that area and drawing out the tension. Even as you do this, you may have the urge to move your body around, wiggle some body parts, and feel free to do that. The goal here is to give space and attention to what your body is telling you. So once you've released tension, try to come into an awareness of what it feels like to be intentionally inhabiting your body. Try to let go of thinking or concepts and instead focus on feeling sensation experience. How does it feel to be intentionally inside of your body? Often our lives are so jam-packed with doing and action, we tend to ignore our body. We tend to stuff emotions that can often manifest with bodily sensations. And so when we finally do allow space to tune into our bodies, it can feel uncomfortable. If there's a time when it feels unsafe or too overwhelming to tune into your body, that could be a time to pause the meditation and consider finding a licensed therapist who can work through that with you, especially if you have experienced trauma. Sometimes it's not safe for you or you feel that it is not safe to connect that deeply with your body. And if that's you, that's okay. There are practitioners who can help you with that. In my own life over the past 12 years, I've been in a lot of pain and pain and pain. I've been in a lot of pain and pain. I'm also aware of the problematic nature of Western yoga and how often the yoga postures are split from the rest of the yoga tradition. Alongside my yoga postures and yoga yoga postures, I am also aware of the problematic nature of Alongside my yoga asana practice, I have done study in the other limbs of yoga. And I also have been slowly learning about embodied practices that have existed historically within my own faith tradition of Christianity. There's actually a lot, even though many of them I was not familiar with as a younger person. Some of these include walking a labyrinth, chanting in the Christian tradition, praying at the specific times of day. And also, if you look at the sacraments within the church, they are actually physical practices. For example, the Eucharist, otherwise known as taking bread and wine for communion, is a physical act of eating and drinking. Baptism, another sacrament, is a physical act of junking under the water and coming back up. Confession is a physical act of speaking words to another person. So there's actually a lot of biblical and traditional basis for an embodied spirituality within Christianity. And really, we don't need to look further than Jesus, who is the literal embodiment of God. The literal word become flesh. Today I want to offer one simple embodied practice that comes from the early Celtic Christians. It's called the circling prayer, and in Irish Gaelic the word is caim, which means protection, sanctuary, or circle. So these early Celtic Christians regarded a circle as a sacred space, a symbol of the universe in which God lives at the center, as well as a symbol of something having no beginning or end, and therefore representing God's love and time, eternity. During a caim, you draw a circle around yourself. Psalm 125 2 says, Mountains encircle Jerusalem, and God encircles the people of God now and forever. So we will practice a circling prayer together. The following prayer comes from Mary DeJong of Waymarkers. And for this circling prayer, I will offer two options. The first, if you feel comfortable, is to stand up and face north, stretching your arm out in front of you with your pointer finger extended. If you don't want to stand up, or you're in a place where it would be strange for you to stand up and start pointing, you can take your right pointer finger and place it on your left palm on the finger pad of your left middle finger, representing north. Take a deep breath and feel the air around you and feel what it feels like to bring that air inside of you through your breath. We will draw a metaphorical expansive circle, either with our whole body or with our right pointer finger on our left palm. If you're standing up, you'll slowly turn your body in a clockwise rotation. Or if you're still seated, you'll slowly move your finger in a clockwise rotation. Facing north, we say, circle us spirit, keep protection near and danger afar. Slowly rotate to face the east. Circle us spirit, keep light near and darkness afar. Slowly rotate to face the south. Circle us spirit, keep peace within, keep evil out. Slowly rotate to the west. Circle us spirit, keep hope within, keep doubt without. And slowly rotate back to the north. And we will finish with this. May you be a bright flame before us. May you be a guiding star above us. May you be a smooth path below us and a loving guide behind us. Today, tonight, and forever. Amen. I will end the meditation, but feel free to stay in the circle you've created, practicing what it feels like to sit inside the temple of your body.