Before beginning this program, please read and make sure you understand and agree to the disclosed potential risks associated with meditation and yoga practice. (link: Disclaimer)
Out of the Mud, Into the Meadow
Today’s practice is all about obtaining freedom from stuck-ness. In this practice, mud serves as the metaphor for anything in your life that keeps you stuck or trapped. The muddiness may represent an emotion, situation, thoughts, a person, or really anything that has you moving at 0 mph. I recommend choosing a small struggle to work with here, larger struggles or traumas may require the support of a helping professional or the guidance of a teacher, shaman or other healer. If regulating your emotions is a challenge, then I recommend doing this practice only in the presence of a qualified helping professional, such as a licensed therapist. Here is how to practice:
- Establish your sacred space
- Take seat or lay down
- Begin with mindful breathing
- When ready, bring the image of whatever has you stuck into your awareness and visualize this as being stuck in the thick mud of the earth
- really take your time here and feel this stuckness in your body, mind, emotions and even spirit
- know that you cannot obtain freedom until you are willing to fully feel whatever is the shackling around you
- really take your time here and feel this stuckness in your body, mind, emotions and even spirit
- Notice how the more you resist or fight against the stuck, it may be amplified, and this is OK because you are simply gaining more familiarity to it- remember your coping tools here, stay connected to sacred breath
- See clearly what you may be clinging to in the struggle, that’s right, sometimes we unknowingly or knowingly are holding on to what is familiar in this struggle- notice this grasping and clinging
- Mentally take some space from this struggle and authentically give yourself permission to release your holding, your grasping
- Notice any resistance to letting go- notice what investment you have in maintaining this holding
- Take your time and when you are ready, look around your mental field for something healthy you can grab onto that you can use to pull yourself out of the mud- perhaps you can visualize a tree branch that you can wisely take hold of and lift yourself up and out of the mud and swing your way into a beautiful green open meadow
- if you can’t connect to a tree branch, then take a moment to call forward a healer in your life, whether alive in this physical plane or existing elsewhere in the Ether- really call them forward by name and ask them to throw you a line, be your loving support and your anchor reeling you back in to safe and solid ground
- Once you arrive on this new found land, this great green open field of the Earth Mother take a mountain pose firmly rooting your feet to the ground, put your hands on your heart, and breath in all of this beautiful freedom, the liberation of this open Meadow
- Feel how what once had you trapped was something that you survived and conquered, take a moment of gratitude here in deep honoring of your Warriorship and offer a bow to yourself for your courageousness.