Hello, beautiful soul, and welcome to Meditate with Mandy. I’m Mandy, and it is my honor and my joy to share a moment of presence with you today, day or night, wherever you find yourself.
Please get cozy and comfy in your space. For this style of practice, ease and comfort are celebrated. So no challenging posture, no holding any muscle or tendon erect or tense. Let yourself melt. If you’re familiar with shavasana, or lying down horizontally is available to you, please lean into that quite literally.
And when you’re ready, my sweet friend, flutter your beautiful eyelids closed and take a nice, smooth, deep breath in through your nose. Let it go through your mouth. Follow it with another deep breath in through your nose, and let go through your mouth. In through your nose, and out through your mouth.
Beautiful.
Now breathe easy, in and out through your nose. No rules, no structure. Let the body set the tempo, the volume, the depth.
Bring your awareness to the center of your chest, my sweet friend, breathing easy. Feel that space fill with the white light of awareness and with the vitality of your breath.
And as the moment slows down, and you with it, find yourself in the here and the now.
Who are you underneath language?
Underneath words, ideas, beliefs?
Underneath the credo, or even the mantra, who are you?
Who are you underneath the image?
Spiritual culture has called it an ego. I call the same thing patterns etched into your cells from ancestors, held together by genetic code and by nurture and environmental influences.
We have all of our predispositions, our genotype, our phenotype. We have a physicality that we show to the world, and organs and bones with genetic predispositions that influence behavior and thought pattern.
Who are you underneath that?
Underneath ethnicity, nationality, gender, sex.
Who are you?
Who am I?
Who are you underneath emotions, tsunamis of joy and melancholy, emotional states and moods, beneath boredom and apathy and hope and fear, and even what we call love and intellectually understand and define as love?
Who are you underneath that?
Breathe easy and let your shoulders drop, my sweet friend.
And even as we ask these penetrating existential questions, let’s melt into this body and hold the paradox.
We can be in it and not of it all at once.
We can be of it and not in it all at once.
As you breathe, let your brow smooth and your scalp melt. Ears release and jaw unlocks gently.
Who am I?
Who are you?
Breathe easy, my sweet friend, and let each breath crest through you. Inhales and exhales, bringing the perfect balance of nutrition and the excretion of waste from our bodies.
And it just so happens that what we excrete nourishes the Earth, and what the plants excrete nourishes us.
Don’t cling to any breath.
Let it move through you as you sink even more deeply into comfort and into the delicious, infinite question.
[Silent interlude]
Beautiful, my sweet friend. Beautiful.
Take a deep breath in through your nose and let it all go through your mouth. Another deep breath in through your nose and let it all go through your mouth.
And last one like this. Deep breath in through the nose and release it through your mouth.
Gorgeous.
Breathe easy.
In your life, my darling friend, you’ve already shed thousands of self-concepts.
Some without noticing.
Some you felt very keenly and may have processed grief or anger or even joy at the shedding, as a footnote into the journey of who you are.
Take this with you into your day or night, wherever you’re headed:
You can shed infinite self-concepts and still remain whole and intact.
Each time some version of your identity is changed or released:
There is no end to who you are.
Until we meet again, my sweet friend, I am sending you all of the love that I’ve got.
It’s always more, and it’s never, ever less.
Do you know how much love that is at this point?
My goodness.
It’s about as infinite as you, my dear friend.
For you are so very worthy of it.
You are.