Below are twelve meditations, plus instructions for recapitulation. Try using one meditation each month, as a regular or daily practice, and work with the theme it offers.

 

Golden Bones: Meditation into the Body

 

Lie down so your body is relaxed and comfortable. (Do this at a time when you will not be tempted to fall asleep.) Send your awareness to your hip and shoulder joints, focusing on relaxing and loosening the muscles and connective tissues.

 

Imagine a golden light filling these joints, permeating your muscles and settling deep into the bones. Imagine this light penetrating into the marrow of your bones, radiating from the hip and shoulder joints into all the bones and cartilage in your body. Move the light all the way down to your fingers and your toes, infusing every bone with golden light.

 

When you can visualize your bones glowing with this light, then move the light up each vertebra, beginning at the tailbone. Ask the light to help you open and free the spine and the neck. Then fill your head with this golden, healing light.

 

Once you have completed igniting each bone in your body with golden light, begin to visualize a beautiful deep red color flowing through your muscles and organs. This color will vitalize your blood and increase energy. Invite it to help you clear away any old emotions or resistance to change and healing.

 

Do this meditation once a week for a month. Use the golden light whenever you feel a block or ache or tightening in your physical structure, and the red energy whenever you feel sluggish or withdrawn.

 

Increasing Energy and Awareness: Grounding Fire

 

In order to bring more energy into the body, we need to strengthen our physical and energetic containers. Begin each day by connecting yourself through your physical body to the earth. Take at least five minutes in the morning to dance, stretch, and plant your feet firmly in the earth. Then sitting down, imagine a cord of light moving through your body, down your spine, and deep into the heart of the Earth. Send that grounding cord all the way to the fiery center of the earth. Breathe that fire energy up through your cord, through the earth and all the way into your own body.

 

Invite the fire-earth energy to travel up your spine and out the top of your head. Imagine yourself as an extension of the earth, being created by the flow of fire into solid form. Imagine your physical self literally expanding and getting bigger with every inhalation. Let the energy fill you. Breathe it especially into your heart, asking the fire to burn away any self-doubt, sadness, fear, or judgments you are holding. Imagine all these things as kindling and brush that the fire is happy to consume.

 

When you feel full of life force, let this energy overflow you. Send it with love to your family, friends, and anyone that needs healing.

 

To finish, ground the energy again by placing your hands on the earth and breathing any excess energy into the ground. Keep as much energy as you need, and let the earth store the rest for later use.

 

Each time you do this meditation, you will be increasing your capacity to hold energy. Play with imagining yourself as a container that you fill with fire energy. Let the container be flexible, so it can grow as you learn to pull in more energy.

 

Inner Child/Child's Wisdom

 

Create sacred space by lighting a candle or incense. Sitting comfortably, visualize yourself in the middle of a stone circle. Imagine connecting your energy body to the sun. Create a channel of light that stretches from the sun to your womb for women, or just below the belly button for men. Bathe in the light of the sun. Let every cell in your body soak in energy from the pure sunshine around you.

 

Invite an imaginary child into your circle to express his or her joyful abundance. Open your heart to this child and take in some of its sweet innocent wisdom. If you have any issues that have been bothering you, ask the child for advice. You may be surprised at the insights you receive.

 

To close, let the child and your channel to the sun dissolve. Release the stone circle by imagining it dissolving into the earth. Whenever you need a boost in your day, reconnect to the power of the sun and draw in sun energy. As you do this meditation over time, you will begin to deepen your relationship with the sun, and with the power of the child.

 

Inner Temple

 

For this meditation, either stay up late or wake up very early, when the world is quiet. Create a special altar that you can work with during this time. Your altar can represent your inner temple. Place objects on it that nourish you and remind you of your connection to Spirit.

 

Get your blanket and slippers and sit at your altar, wrapped in warmth. Sit first in the darkness and silence. Listen deeply. You'll need to sit long enough to go beneath the words and planning of the mind. Invite yourself to drop into silence. Breathe into the belly and keep your awareness low in your body. Once you tap into your own inner silence, begin to listen for a song, a message, a whisper. What does your spirit need at this time? Is there anything that needs to be realigned in your temple? What steps can you take to remodel your inner sanctuary?

 

Visualize yourself as a temple, and notice if you feel cluttered or stagnant, or clear and open. Do some temple housecleaning! Imagine creating space and silence in your own temple. You might find you want to move, chant, or sink deeper into silence. Listen and act. When you are ready, open your eyes and honor the darkness around you. Then write any images or actions that came to you, and make sure you honor them.

 

Ocean Mind

 

Practice resting for five to ten minutes a day in the deep ocean of the mind. Let the storms of the judge and victim play out above you. Keep your attention and focus on the silence and space beneath the chaos of the monkey mind. As your awareness gets pulled back into the storms and twists, keep bringing your attention back into the deepness of the mind, instead of the loud, shallow waves. Notice how you feel and perceive from this place.

 

Now imagine facing someone, a friend or stranger, who is holding the same open mind space. Let yourself open and be present with their energy. Notice how you feel and perceive while facing this person in your mind. Now shift to imagining someone who has an agitated, chaotic mind. Can you stay in the same open silence, witnessing their energy without becoming attached or repulsed by it? What if they were angry or upset with you? What if they believed you had made a mistake or blamed you for a wrongdoing? Notice how you feel and perceive while facing this person in your mind.

 

Keep practicing these three meditations until you remain in the stillness despite what is happening outside. Watch how this affects you in your everyday activities.

 

Opening

 

For this meditation make a pact with yourself to open the door to any emotions you have been repressing or avoiding. Write yourself a note about this new commitment, writing directly to your physical, emotional and energetic bodies: "Hello, I invite you to relax and release any barriers and blocks to any emotions I have been holding. I want to learn to honor and release all the stuck emotions and fears from my body." Let yourself know that you are now open to listen and have compassion for any pain or stuck places in any of your three bodies.

 

Check in with your physical body/temple. Have you locked the door of your temple to keep out fear and negative emotions, or have you locked them in the temple with you? Imagine opening the door with all your love. Call in guides, animal or human, to help support you in learning to open. Remember you are not opening to call in more wounding or inflict more pain on yourself; you are opening to release tension, discomfort, and disease from your body. Breathe! Let your breath open up the hardened, numbed areas in you. Be compassionate and patient. Breathe out, into the earth, anything you would like to release. Breathe in the brilliant light of life, the laughter of the flowers, the softness of forgiveness.

 

Recapitulation

 

1. Set your intent on why you want to create more energy in your life: Is it for healing, so you can be more in the present, so you can be released from your past? Decide what you want to recapitulate in this session: Do you want to recapitulate a certain event or age, or are you simply going back to see where you lost energy today? Make this clear so you can stay focused.

 

2. Connect your will to a higher energy source - the sun or earth work well. This link will strengthen your practice.

 

3. Either sitting or lying down, let your mind go back to the time you are recapitulating. See the circumstances, people and places as clearly as possible, without getting hooked into the emotional aspects of the scene. Literally breathe back your energy from this scene, either by visualizing your energy returning to you, and/or feeling the energy coming into your body. Pay attention to what part of your body you feel as the energy returns. Do not get caught in analyzing; simply get your energy. You can analyze and ponder later.

 

4. Breathe out any energy you took from someone else, or any agreements you made at the time. Remember all this work is done with love, so if you begin to feel judgmental or angry, shift to recapitulating something that isn't as emotionally loaded. Imagine breathing in your energy, and breathing back any energy that you may have taken on that does not belong to you. Again, all of this is done in love. If you feel that you sent out some negative energy in the past, you can practice breathing this in and then breathing it down to the earth, letting the Mother take and transform it.

 

5. You may find your mind jumps from image to image. Keep breathing in your energy, and let whatever pictures come up be. You may need to bring yourself back to the scene you initially set out to recapitulate if you find your mind is trying to drag you away from it.

 

6. Recapitulation can last as little or as long as you can stay focused. When you first begin start out small and work your way up, both in terms of time and the weightiness of the issues. Don't begin with the most painful experiences of your life unless you feel really ready to bring the energy back. It is better to start out smaller and be successful. One way to begin is to by recapitulate your sexual relationships, as they are often the ones where we lose the most energy.

 

7. When you feel complete, slowly bring yourself back and release your connection to the earth or sun. You may want to say a prayer of thanks. You know that you have been successful when you feel an increase of energy in your body.

 

Release Masks, Dissolve the Self

 

Creating change in your life means letting go of what keeps you fixed in one place. This meditation exercise helps you practice new ways of communicating with yourself and getting to your true self, not the masked, separate self you created.

 

Spend several minutes each day writing down your self-concepts and beliefs. Who do you perceive yourself to be? Who do you want to be? How do you hope people perceive you, and why? Just do a little bit each day.

 

Then spend some quiet time feeling how these self-concepts may be based out of fear or lack. What does your body say when you contemplate releasing these masks?

 

Pick a mask that is absolutely against your self-concept, and imagine becoming this person. How would it feel? Each day, pick a different mask, and play with imagining yourself wearing that self-image. Become a homeless person in your mind. Become a king. Become a traitor. Can you learn to find your center, no matter what the outer mask looks like to other people, or even to yourself?

 

As you play with these masks, you will see that really none is better than another. They are simply masks. When we let go of needing to be a certain way or appear a certain way, we then have the absolute freedom to change our masks, knowing we are the stillness beneath it that is untouched by the only fleeting external appearance.

 

Return to Center

 

Each morning sit or lie in a quiet spot and visualize yourself in a sacred circle. Imagine yourself as a beautiful ray of light, connected to the earth beneath you and the sky above you. Call in your essence, your spiritual warrior, your highest self into this ray of light.

 

Now imagine your structure surrounding this light: your agreements, belief systems, your limitations, any way in which you seek approval or acceptance outside of yourself. Notice how this structure feels around your light. Don't get caught in judging yourself or feeling victimized by your structure; simply notice how it limits you or helps you feel safe.

 

Look beyond this structure and imagine a new structure with the four elements (earth, air, fire and water) as your foundation. Call on these four powerful life-sustaining energies to help you expand and open past your old structure. Feel them at each of the corners of your new circle, and connect your ray of light to each of the elements.

 

Each week, work with a different element to help you dissolve your structure. The first week, work with air. Use your breath and the wind to blow away your fears and doubts and hesitations. Play with the power of the wind.

 

The second week, work with the energy of fire. Use fire to burn away what is no longer useful in your life? Invite fire into your day to transform and clear out the old underbrush. Connect with the fire in candles, in the sun, and in the sparkle of a stranger's eye.

 

The third week play with water energy. Take baths, pay attention when you wash your hands (what are you releasing?), let tears flow. Bring your awareness into the moment with each sip of water.

 

The fourth week embrace earth energy. Hug trees. Lie in the grass pulling earth energy into your body. Honor your physical temple. Release judgments about your body into the earth. Connect to the simplicity of your bones and flesh. Dance, eat well, touch.

 

Each morning honor the element you are working with. When you have completed each element, and as you move around in your own daily life, you can develop the skill of feeling in each moment which element would best support you.

 

Sacred Sensuality and Sexuality

 

For this exercise, pay particular attention to sensuality of all sorts: food, clothing, flowers, friends. Slow down to enjoy your touch, smell, taste. Say a prayer of gratitude before each meal and slowly savor at least the first three bites of food. When you dress, slow down to feel the fabric against your skin. Imagine you are dressing the Divine, whether you are putting on jeans or a silk dress.

 

Then set aside an evening to honor your sexual nature (do this by yourself at first...if you want to invite a friend to play with you the next time, have fun!). Begin by putting on clothes you like, and putting on your favorite music. Dance with yourself, eyes closed, listening to the pulse of your energy, and inviting you sexual energy to build. Open to the energy and breathe it throughout your entire body.

 

Slow your body movements down, practicing holding your sexual energy. Gently sit down on the floor or in a chair, and sit with the energy that is moving through your body. Let yourself feel intense sexual energy without needing to do anything, just let it flow through you. Use your breathe to move the energy, to keep it flowing. If this energy feels uncomfortable, continue to sit with it until is shifts. Let the discomfort push against whatever block or agreement is present until the energy shifts.

 

Notice when you open your eyes how keen your senses have become. If you want, eat a scrumptious meal, directing the energy you've raised into your taste buds. Or fill your bath with water, flowers and beautiful smells and sink into the bath, letting the energy you've raised charge the water. Place your hands on different parts of your body, sending healing energy to any place you've neglected or are holding pain.

 

Each morning, sit quietly and feel the naturalness of your sexual energy as a part of your overall energetic system. Notice any agreements you hold around sexuality, and breathe them out. Invite yourself to come fully into integrity with you sexuality for yourself, not anyone else.

 

Sun Meditation

 

Each morning, connect to the light of the sun. Imagine the sun rays seeping into every cell of your body. Remember your happiest times, the times you felt most connected to the Divine. Fill your heart with gratitude, even if you feel stuck, unhappy, or sullen. There is a part of you that remembers what it feels like to love fully: nurture it each morning by remembering all that you are grateful for, calling up your magical moments.

 

Now invite your human self to be a channel, a bridge between the Divine and the child. Call up your warrior self, your magician. Use a role model, fictitious or real, and fill yourself with their energy.

 

Imagine yourself on a quest to awaken and reunite the child. With your divine warrior eyes, look at the beliefs and agreements that have lulled the child to sleep. Watch throughout your day for what the child believes, by watching your reactions to events and people. What are the core wounds the child holds?

 

Begin each morning bringing the divine human to the child. Imagine washing and cleansing the child in golden-white water. Sing to the child, telling stories of heaven. Listen to the child's response without believing it. Learn the child's dream without falling into it. Keep a firm foot in heaven, and reach with your heart and all of your faith. Have great patience.

 

Of course, each of us also has a healed, magical child. Ask this child to help you in the game of reuniting the divine family.

 

Triangles: Connecting with Yourself

 

Pick two physical objects (or choose two tarot cards, or draw two pictures), one to represent your child self and one to represent your divine self. Sit on the floor or on a chair, and place these objects in front of you to form a triangle between yourself, your child, and your divine self.

 

Face the object that represents your child, and close your eyes. Imagine sending a ray of violet light towards your child self. With this violet energy, imagine you can forgive your past self for any hurts, any ways you've betrayed or others. Forgive all of your mistakes of the past, sending your love and forgiveness through that violet channel to your child. Imagine that violet light as a gentle flame, that can burn away any emotions based out of fear. Continue this for five minutes. Let any images come into your mind. Keep sending out love, letting anything not based in love dissolve and be released.

 

Now turn to face your divine self. This is the part of you that is connected to source with pure faith, an aspect of yourself that has a huge vision and endless compassion. Imagine sending a white ray of light towards this divine self, connecting with your present/future magical self. Say prayers to connect you with your highest self through this white light. Continue for at least five minutes, opening yourself to the love and presence of this being of light that you are. Let any images come into your mind. Keep sending out love and light to this being, letting any fear you have of the future, any negative energy between yourself and the divine dissolve and be released.

 

Now ask that your divine self connect with the child self, the future connect with the past, the past connecting with the future. Imagine a channel of blue light connecting these two beings, cleansing and purifying and allowing the child to be calmed in the pure light of the sky.

 

Now imagine connecting to the child self and the divine self with a rainbow of color, to balance each level of your being. Ask that every action help lead you towards your highest good. Allow yourself to take in the healing of the rainbow, inviting the colors to align your energetic system.

 

Do this meditation each day, and take note of what images and messages come to you. Remember to keep sending love out, releasing whatever is stagnant or stuck, breathing in pure light.

 

(Thanks to Wes Bailey for his wonderful teachings on light color energy. Visit his website at http://www.fssh.org)

 

Untangle the Web of Agreements

 

See yourself as a divine being who decided to play a game with yourself. You are pure light, pure essence, a seed of Spirit. You choose to weave a physical body around and through your essence, so your spirit and body are perfectly melded. Take a few minutes to visualize yourself as this being of pure light embodied.

 

Imagine now that you begin to interact with other human beings. You can see that these humans have forgotten their core, and are tangled in a web of beliefs and agreements. Visualize what those human agreements look like on an energetic level, and how they connect to other people.

 

Let yourself begin to weave others agreements into your light body. Without judgment, watch what happens to your energy and life force as you do this. Watch, without being victimized, what happens when you begin to look outside of yourself for approval. What do you do with your energy?

 

Your game is to untangle, find your core again. Take a few minutes to untangle and dissolve the connections between yourself and others that are based in fear. Approach this untangling process as you would brush the hair of a child you love dearly who has been playing in the forest. Bring the same patience and gentle touch to yourself as you brush out the thorns, twigs and tangles from your energy body.

 

Begin now to build connections to others based out of love. What do these connections look like? Continue to untangle and reweave your light body, until you feel whole and connected to the divine again.