IT IS SPRING & I LET THE MUD DO IT'S WORK

Thank you to Naomi for the insights into this, the season of mud and the lotus preparing to flower.

• Today's suggested practice: Allow this season to do its muddy magic... (see below)

• My playlist while writing today's meditation: Shostakovich, 24 Preludes and Fugues (Nikolayeva)

• My morning practice: 1.5 hours with short warm-up for the lower triangle, followed by Kriya to Know the Other as Myself, and Linking to the Infinite pranayama and mantra (FYI: I'll be teaching this on Thursday morning)

• My vulnerability practice: I surrender my impatience to this season of slow solitude...

—Hans Peter Meyer

MY MEDITATION It is Spring now. The season of mud, of rooting. The season of the husbandman.

This can be the hardest season. My impatience for the flowering. My impatience with the necessary wet and still-dark and so-slow time of mud and rooting.

I am reminded of who I am, who I aspire to be: He Who Must Be Trusted. The husbandman. A man of so much depth and spaciousness, so much patience, that the mud and the rooting become beautiful. Sacred. All that is required is my practice. To be still, silent, solitary. Rooting myself. To become even more silent than winter's last days and know my roots, nourished by this mud, are what my beloved needs. My roots, her flowering. In her season.

And yes, I feel this slow solitude, this mud, as a problem. I am impatient to "fix" this solitude. To rescue my beloved from her dark underworld. To rescue myself from my impatience and my fear and my doubt!

But this is the season for my deepening, for what she needs. To be her husbandman. The husbandman of the divine feminine, holding this slow space with love, trusting that held, this muddy Spring opens into Her ease and Her flow.

Be still. Know this nourishment. Trust the slow, silent mud of this season.

TODAY'S INSPIRATIONS 🌀...once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvellous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky. ( Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet)

🌀Now be silent.Let the One who creates the words speak.He made the door.He made the lock.He also made the key.― Rumi

🌀You're not like that now. (My Oracle)

TODAY'S SUGGESTED PRACTICE It is the first day of Spring. Take ten minutes to feel your impatience for warmth and blossoming, ten minutes to relish this slow season of mud. Read it through, then...

• Set a timer for 10 minutes.

• Sit or stand facing the direction of the sun. Feel your feet or your sit bones connected to the solidity of the earth below you. Know yourself as a collection of atoms, subatomic particles, in constant motion, held still by your awareness. Feel how heavy you are —this is the earth, gravity, holding you. Allow yourself to be held. Lift your chest as you tuck your chin. Feel your spine subtly straightened, lifted from your pelvis into the near heavens of the space above you. You are now ready to align yourself to this moment, this season, a conductor for all the sensations....

  • Imagine your sit bones or your feet in the mud of Spring. Imagine root hairs moving out from your body into this earthly ooze. Feel the chill of it. Feel the tenderness of your expanding roots.

  • As you breathe in through your nostrils, fill your belly. Let it become large and round, full. Then, holding that breath gently in your full, round belly, push it into your roots, through your belly, your genitals, your perineum into this imaginary root that is pressing into the earth.

  • As you exhale, imagine this root drawing sustenance up into your body, through your root, your sex organs, your belly, up through your heart, and releasing it into the heavens through the crown of your head as your breath is released through your nostrils.

  • You are facing the sun, which is now bringing more light and warmth to the northern hemisphere with every day that passes, for the next three months. Imagine this warmth pushing through your expanding root into the chill of the earth. Imagine the earth welcoming this warmth, this necessary warmth. Welcome this warmth.

  • It is the wet season. The mud season. The wet softens the earth, the feminine, allowing you to penetrate deeply, gently, powerfully. The wet allows you to receive Her nourishment and bring it into your own body, up into the near heavens, beyond. Welcome this wet.

• Bring your attention to yourself holding all of these imaginings and all of the sensations they stir. Notice yourself, in this moment the husbandman to your own flowering, whether you are man or woman. In this noticing you are conscious of your consciousness. The awareness that allows this body, this mud to be the oracle to this moment.

• Finally, as the timer sounds, pat your body from the top of your head, down through your neck, shoulders, chest and belly, back, buttocks and genitals, fronts and back of your thighs and calves, down to your feet. Release yourself from this mud and this particular alignment, but carry the experience of this connection into your day. You are the husbandman to whatever this day, this garden, blossoms into.