There are myriad ways of returning to closer connection with ourselves and of renewing our relationship to the body as a home. As with all things there is no singular correct approach or course of action that will universally allow everyone to experience the same homecoming. The pathways we walk, the practices we find supportive and the definitional experience of what being ‘at home’ feels like will all necessarily be unique to us. The best thing we’re ever offering as guides of practice and embodiment is the ways we know, the paths we’ve trodden as invitation to others to ramble down and see what they might learn and glean from their own direct experience.
These days my inquiry to myself and invitation in guiding practice around coming home to the body is rooted in creating open invitation to return in a manner of a drifting back towards it. What feels good right now is a spacious invitation that acknowledges the small incremental shifts and turns within ourselves where we adjust and reorient our perspective to turn towards the body, followed by conscious choice to slowly drift back towards the body as though on a breeze through windows and doors left open. It is not in any way an abrupt process. Its spaciousness lives in the freedom of the drift, that there is nothing commanding or demanding about the way that we then arrive inside of the body. That with those small, incremental shifts and steps in the direction of the body, we re-familiarize ourselves with its territories, with its rooms and its boundaries, with its open spaces and its confinements and all of the textures inside of it.
If we can approach it in this soft and tender way, then the body often itself opens up to receive more of us. And the parts of ourselves that have been protective, that have been layered and guarded in order to hold us in greater safety are then given an invitation to slowly reshape and remodel themselves to make more room for our presence to take up residence within. That slow return allows a compassionate meeting with those protective parts in lieu of a forceful handling that incurs their defences.
This practice of ‘drifting’ in to the body makes us breeze-like, affording us the freedom to gravitate back home, to move through open doors and windows inward without being rigidly bound in or shut out. We are left with both a steady ground to return to and the permission to expand outward, to ebb and flow as we need. We are granted the invitation to perpetually to return and settle into the roots and foundations of the body, but also to migrate outwards into the wider world.
This short guided meditation practice is an offering for you to experiment directly with drifting in and home to the many-layered, textured home of the body. May it serve you well.
