Grounding in Autumn | with a singing bowl meditation

When autumn begins, and the rain and wind start moving the world around, I often feel like I’m being blown around, too. Grounding myself is the most helpful and healing action I’ve found that keeps me, here, breathing, here. With every pose, the one constant is that some part of me needs to touch the ground.

That’s where to begin, with the ground. When you don’t know what to do, when you are tired or scared or ashamed or overcome, if you cannot remember the last time you took a breath and remembered it, touch the earth. Go outside and touch the grass or the trees or the sidewalk, stay inside and stand in your room, sit in a chair and press your toes into the floor. Be with the earth.

Because in the swirl of everything, here’s what matters: your breath, your beating heart, and what you feel.

Any movement you take while you’re touching the ground is up to you. If it feels good to stand and breathe, do that. If it feels good to do a lunge or a warrior or lie on your back, curled up into a roly poly bug, do that. You are in charge of you. And you are definitely in charge of what your body does. Sometimes, when the wind blows, I like to stand in it and face it. Then I ask, what do I need to know? The wind doesn’t always respond. It might respond the next day, and I am not connected enough to realize that it is the wind talking instead of my thoughts. But, every once in a while, it answers, and I know it answers. And to fully understand what the wind is saying, I have to be really here, listening and breathing here. Grounded.

The last time the wind spoke to me, it said, feel everything. And for many moments, I did.