That’s my impulse for sure, but it’s a bit too early for planting here in the far northwest. On a cool spring morning, when I still want the effects of having gone out and played in the dirt, I like to do a grounding meditation that will also cleanse anything negative from my experience.

There are many way to do this. Here are a few:

• Sometimes I just imagine myself barefoot in lush green grass, and allow the vibrations of the earth to rise up through the soles of my feet. I feel them make a circuit through my chakras, forming a perfect circle as I return the energy to the earth. Much like trees filter pollutants from the air, you can use earth energy to cleanse negative ideas, fears, sadness or anything else you want to leave your body.

• Or perhaps I go to the beach, remove my shoes, sit against a log and bury my feet in the sand. (Either for real or in my mind.) I hear the waves setting the rhythm of my meditation and match my breath to the sea. I see each of my cares leave my body and ride away from me on a new wave. I inhale salt air and allow the cleansing power of salt to purify my whole body, the contents of my mind, the essence of my soul. I might even imagine my body also covered in sand and salt.

• Another way to ground yourself is to sit on the earth and lean up against a sturdy tree—the older the better. Try and feels the tree breathing. Ask the tree to clear your own body of anything that is toxic to you. Imagine those toxins flowing back into the earth. (Don’t worry, the earth can process it!) Hold leaves or twigs you find from this tree in your hands. Study the brilliant patterns that make up these tree parts. Realize that even the tree continually releases parts of itself that it no longer needs.

We are constantly shedding hair and skin—why not consciously also shed whatever is on our mind that we don’t wish to be there? Why not also release conditions of our body that do not serve us? Our minds are so much more powerful than we acknowledge—put them to work in meditation to lighten our spirits and heal our physical bodies. Good health to you all!

CONTEMPLATIONS

• What negativity do you need to release today?
• What kinds of places in the natural world make you feel grounded? Can you go there now—at least in your mind?
• What is it about those special places that feel like healing spots for you?
• Can you bring some aspects of that energy into your home to experience on a regular basis?

MEDITATION VIDEO

This video from the Wellness Experiment will lead you through a brief experience of a cleansing and grounding meditation.

Click on any of the following links for more information:

What Is Meditation?
How To Meditate in 5 Easy Steps
Setting the Mood
Benefits of Meditation
Expanding Your Current Meditation Practice
Why I Meditate and How It Affects Me

I hope this photo of a pond in a cedar grove conveys the quality of our experience there. I could have sat meditating on that bench for an hour. We were fortunate to have the place to ourselves, something that would only be possible in the winter. I caught myself from typing “dead of winter”—the reserve was anything but dead.

Witch hazel was in bloom, as well as hellebores and lovely drifts of tiny, hardy cyclamen. The stand out though, was viburnum “blueberry muffin”—isn’t it well-named? That’s a puzzle to me, why there aren’t more plants with blue flowers. Perhaps they are more difficult for pollinators to see against a blue sky. Whatever the reason, it makes me appreciate blue flowers that much more.

MEDITATION EXERCISE

If you need a brief respite in your day, a space of even a few minutes to meditate, to pause and breathe deeply, then click on the photo above to enlarge it. Then lose yourself in the stillness of the grove. Inhale deeply the fresh, damp scent of so many cedars exhaling clean air for you. Feel the gentle dappled light filtering through the boughs. Enjoy the bright reflections of green vitality in the water and listen to the faint chatter of thrushes and sparrows high above you.

Hear the plink of a pine cone dropping into the pond, and stare at the rings moving slowly out from the spot—growing, then dissipating, and then disappearing. Feel your cares do the same—feel your cares dissolve into the clear water, feel them be absorbed by the earth herself. Now look up through the tree tops to fragments of blue sky, bright punctuation in this still grove, points of clarity to hold in your heart.

Take another deep breath…can you feel the sharp tingle of the cedar fragrance, that sense of being ultra aware and alive? What in your life needs that kind of freshness now? To what project or issue can you bring this kind of clear thinking?

I lugged my camera around all afternoon intending to take lots of pictures, but I was so enthralled with the serenity and the quiet winter beauty that I only took these few.

I love it when trees adapt so well to changes in their environment, as this marvelously bent alder did long ago.

I wonder what inspired her to turn sharply left then right? I wanted to sit on her mossy bench, but I didn’t. Whatever tested her desire to grow upward, extreme challenges have tested me in my life, too. I like to think I was able to cope and made good choices about what to do next. How about you?

CONTEMPLATIONS

• What extreme tests have you survived?
• How well did you cope?
• Do you show signs of the tests you’ve faced?
• Are you dealing with a tough challenge now?
• Could you find a more grace-filled way of handling it?

DOWNLOADABLE AFFIRMATION CARD

click image to enlarge, right click to save and print

See what a cormorant can teach you about meditating here.

(Click to enlarge the photo.) This is the view from my office as I write this, looking out over the Strait of Juan de Fuca toward the San Juan Islands (and on a clear day, beyond to Vancouver Island in British Columbia). This is the very edge of our country, a boundary between the U.S. and Canada.

That takes care of the geography, but what do you believe is happening in this photo? Surely there are ominous clouds hovering and rain falling somewhere.

• But is the storm advancing or receding?
• How big is the storm?
• Did you notice the sunlight on the water in the foreground?
• Did you see how it emphasizes whitecaps in the water?
• How about the seagull—is she battered by high winds or having fun riding the updrafts?

Clearly, a storm is either coming or going, and in truth it doesn’t matter which really happened. It does matter how you perceived it. Are you feeling engulfed with storms in your life right now? That’s an easy emotion to tap into at this time on our planet. What’s wrong with life is always available, and it’s easy to find people to wallow with.

What’s increasingly rare, are voices that still see light, that still observe opportunity, that still express gratitude every day for this magnificent earth we inhabit.

If you allow the Dow Jones Industrial Average to be your barometer, to color your emotional life, to drive your well-being, then you see your happiness as having an external source.

I have never run out of sources of gratitude.

It may feel like the sky is falling sometimes, but notice how it’s still up there.

Meditation can be an essential tool in coping with difficult times. Click on any of the following links for more information:

What Is Meditation?
How To Meditate in 5 Easy Steps
Setting the Mood
Benefits of Meditation
Expanding Your Current Meditation Practice
Why I Meditate and How It Affects Me

But today, today was just glorious! Still. Mild. Beach empty except for gulls and a pair of cormorants drying their wings on the old pilings. (When I say empty, I’m really talking of dogs and other people…of course every beach is teeming with wildlife seen and unseen…crabs, seaweeds and limpets to name just a few here.)

After a very productive stint of rock collecting—who ever has enough rocks??—we settled down on a big log to soak in the spectacular view of Mt. Baker already tinted pink by the sinking sun.

I love watching cormorants, they feel like guardian spirits to me.

I once lived high above the sea on the Oregon coast where I could keep watch on a large rock at the tideline. A single cormorant owned that rock, spent most of his days clutching it, and I came to think of him as my personal guard bird. We shared many sunsets and secrets that shiny black bird and I.

Notable fishers, cormorants will wait on a high perch like the one above for an hour or more, waiting for the perfect opportunity to dive into clear water and scoop up a snack. They stay focused on the water, patiently passing time until the moment is ideal to move. By remaining still, they create no moving shadow in the water to startle passing fish—until the last second.

This kind of extreme focus, this inner discipline, this divine quiet, is a goal for many meditators. Would that I could meditate as well as these cormorants who are my neighbors. If they spoke English—or I spoke cormorant—this might be their mantra:
I wait, my body still, fish swim by;
I wait, my body still, fish swim by;
I wait, my body still, fish swim by;
I dive.

So take a lesson from wise cormorant: find a quiet sunny spot, get comfy, get focused and ignore the hovering seagulls.

Take an evolution lesson from another seabird here.

I purposely pause to applaud each glimpse, as when this morning the sun made a brief appearance, pushing wisps of fog away, transforming the bay back and forth from gray to blue to steel to an azure reflection.

One way I hurry spring along is to grow flowering bulbs: purple tulips, miniature daffodils and my favorite—hyacinths.

As if the bright, cheerful colors weren’t enough to dazzle us in late winter, hyacinths also emit the most intense, delightful fragrance I know. I love to bring a luxurious number of potted hyacinths indoors at this time of year to thoroughly and constantly enjoy their essence. I even like the distinctive rubbery sound they make when I play with their leaves. Now I’m not much of a drinker, but I can get drunk just smelling hyacinths. At bedtime I even move a group of them to my nightstand, so their scent can also infuse my dreamscape.

Infuse hyacinth into your life, click image to enlarge

MEDITATION EXERCISE

Try surrounding yourself with hyacinth blooms—real or imagined—and meditating inside their circle. Their extreme sweetness can carry you places you’ve never been before or back in time to recapture gentle spring memories…or to exotic lands where they grow wild…or to a hidden corner of a sunny country garden, where they pop up each year as rewards for surviving winter.

Experience all the colors and moods of hyacinth, even the many colors within one bloom. Marvel at the wonder of such bold flowers, that rise out of the cold ground to wake bees from their slumber and to delight us all with their luscious triumph over temperature.

Take in the miracle of blue skies emerging from damp soil…absorb the blueness into your cells…feel the coming spring…sense the growing light…feel your spirits lift and brighten.

Bury your nose inside a hyacinth bloom and breathe repeatedly and deeply until you feel a sugar rush…until you feel a high…intoxication.

Study each tiny star-shaped bell until you can enter into it…until you feel its curving petals welcome you…until you feel united with hyacinth…until you feel you are the plant and the plant is you…bliss.

Inhale deeply…
inhale into your heart
the sweet perfume of hyacinth.

Inhale deeply…
inhale into your soul
the sweetness of life.

MEDITATION VIDEO

DOWNLOADABLE AFFIRMATION CARD

click image to enlarge, right click to save and print

CONTEMPLATIONS

• What is stirring in you now, wanting to rise up, seeking light?
• What is lifting your spirits lately? What other ways can you find to do that?
• What fragrances do you find intoxicating? Can you use that feeling to take an inner journey?
• Where do you find sweetness in your life? How can you add more?

OFFERINGS

Bring the beautiful pastel colors of spring into your home…
enjoy your own print or poster of the hyacinth artwork in this post by visiting my CafePress shop.

(Available with or without text in the image.)

Sniff other plant allies here.

To live someplace so dankdrippingwet that the gentle palm of the sun against your back cannot be summoned even from memory? To dwell only in shadowless montone light which flattens mountains into torn paper collages? To waken yet keep your eyes closed, for there is no reason to embrace another grimgrayday?

I do. About 300 days a year here in the Pacific Northwest. Yes it is lush and ohsogreen, but it is not enough to sustain me.

I need light. Yellow rays beaming through clouds like hope in cheap religious paintings.

I need light. Even the hot sunsoak of August that I only peer out at from beneath the drone of my ceiling fan. I want palpable lightasheat to push into on a walk with my dog, tinges of gold caressing my fuchsias in late afternoon. I need splashy, gaudy sunsets to applaud the accomplishments of my day. I seek the serenity of night that I can see. I must move away from here. Soon.

MEDITATION EXERCISE

The following video fits this mood perfectly and features lovely images of skies emerging from clouds. Enjoy the Buddhist Meditation Music, Zen Garden, by Kokin Gumi. Try assigning a care or concern to each new set of clouds as they appear, then watch your cares dissolve away. Or simply relax and sink into the meditative music.

Are you in the mood for more sky shows? Enjoy more of them here.

The seventh chakra is located at the top of your head, and is known as the crown chakra. This is thought to be the seat of your karma and where you have a direct link to divine wisdom, inspiration and your Higher Self. It is also thought to be a direct link to the parts of your body and mind that are involved when you meditate. It is associated with the color violet.

For the past week I’ve shared a video every day to balance a different chakra. These are short, soothing meditations that still manage a real impact.

Return to tune your first chakra here.

The sixth chakra is located in the center of your forehead, and is known as the third eye. This is where you access inner guidance and contact your intuition. It is also thought to be a balance center for opposing forces, especially between different aspects of your spiritual self. It is associated with the color deep blue or indigo.

For the next week I’ll share a video every day to balance a different chakra. These are short, soothing meditations that still manage a real impact.

Move on to tune your seventh chakra here.

The fifth chakra is located at the level of your throat, right behind your thyroid. It is thought to be the seat of communication, self-expression and certain forms of creativity. A sore throat often indicates you are not speaking up for yourself or do not feel empowered to speak your truth. It is associated with the color turquoise.

For the next week I’ll share a video every day to balance a different chakra. These are short, soothing meditations that still manage a real impact.

Move on to tune your sixth chakra here.

The fourth chakra is located at the level of your chest, and is so known as the heart chakra. Not surprisingly, it is thought to be the seat of all complex emotions. This is where you feel both unconditional love as well as rejection and compassion. It is associated with the color green.

For the next week I’ll share a video every day to balance a different chakra. These are short, soothing meditations that still manage a real impact.

Move on to tune your fifth chakra here.