This Christmas, take some time for yourself, to allow the rush to meet your stillness. Find a quiet place to let your soul speak. It’s a gift to yourself, for everything your hands have worked on, created, touched, held, (maybe pushed away) in the past year to catch up with your heart. Meditation is a doorway into something wonderful. The idea is to learn to be with whatever is.  These notes may be a helpful outline into how you can start to meditate.

So, let your body find a comfortable seat – a chair or cushion and sit in a stable, alert, dignified position, grounded with a straight spine. You may choose to do some yoga first to awaken and relax your body, then become still. From here you can sense your capacity to face anything that arises, to be open in body, heart and mind. Close your eyes and attend to your breathing, letting it move freely through your body, giving calm and ease to each limb. Open your senses, feelings, thoughts into this space. Let the windows of your senses open, noticing with gentle awareness whatever feelings, images, sounds and stories show themselves to you. Become aware of where you feel holding and blocking in your body or mind and allow some space to open to open, so that anything can arise.  Continue to feel your connectedness to the ground and the space around you…it is as though you have taken a seat at the centre of life and are a vessel for all experience to pass through. Relish the balance and peace that make up aspects of your life and your ability to rest into the constant challenges and changes. Reflect on how, for every being on the earth, this rising and falling is taking place in every moment of time, bringing joy, sorrow, pleasant and unpleasant experiences. You can sit in this way for as long  or as regularly as you wish. Maybe try for fifteen minutes every day, then for twenty. Finding  that place for you, closing your eyes and letting yourself rest into the practice of being with what is, accepting each dimension without judging it or wishing it to be different. When you stand up at the end of your meditation, try carrying this mindfulness into the first steps of your day.

Have a joyful, restful and enriching Christmas!