"Mindful Body" exercises

To purpose of these exercises is to discover how you connect, in your body, your emotions, and your awareness, with the synthesis of knowledge called the Earth Sciences and to further develop for yourself an integration of mind/body/emotions and knowledge as systematized and explained by the Earth Sciences.

Exercise 1: Atmosphere as a Human Commons

Find a quite place outside where you can lay down, face-upwards, on the Earth and have a good view of the wide open Sky.

(You may want to do this with a friend.)

(All through this exercise you may have various emotions and thoughts. Don't resist them. Observe them as they emerge and disappear, while you return to the focus of the exercise. If you can you will later remember them as you write down the experiences you had during this exercise.)

Look quietly at the sky and attend to what you see, without judgment.

Close your eyes, and start attending to your breath, making it slow and deeper, without straining yourself. Follow the motion of your breath with your attention.

Relax your body while your attention moves from your right hand through your arm to your body, through other parts of your body, while your keep your breath slow and steady, a little deeper than a regular breath.

Become aware how your body rests on the Earth, visualize the Earth as supporting your body.

Now, move your attention and visualization through your body and your breath to the Sky above you, with your eyes closed all the time, depending on visualization only.

As you breath in and out, visualize you taking in the Sky into your body on an in-breath, and releasing the Sky on an out-breath.

Become aware of your breath and the sky as a unison, taking each other in and releasing each other.

Visualize how your body is a conduit between the Earth and the Sky, by which the Earth takes in the Sky and releases it.

Now add to the periphery of your visualization other people who, similarly to you, lay on the ground and take in the sky in their breathing, breathing in the same Sky as you, in similarly slow and deep movements, with a similar quite attention to their pulsating body, breathing in and out the same Sky that you share with them.

Move the vantage point of your visualization from inside your body and your breath to above you, circling as a bird through the Sky, looking down at yourself and the others who take in the Sky in their breathing.

Move higher as visualize how all over Sonoma County, people are laying on their back taking in and releasing the Sky. Move even higher as you can now see the whole of Northern California, From the Bay, Point Reyes to the Sierras, along the Coast to Fort Ross, Point Arena, the Lost Coast of Humboldt County. The whole of Northern America ...

As you move high over the Earth and away, finding a vantage point half-way between the Moon and the Earth, visualize the Earth's atmosphere as a thin skin covering the land masses and oceans of the Earth. Be aware of the skin as a breathing life force for the Earth.

Visualize that this Earth is your body, and that the Atmosphere is your body's skin, and reconnect in your awareness with your own body, with your skin, and with your breath, as if each pore of your skin takes in and out the atmosphere.

Release your visualization and open your eyes. Make some notes about your experiences before you return to your journal to work out a report of this exercise.

 

 

Exercise 2: Atmosphere as a Commons between Trees and Humans

Do the same vizualition as in Exercise 1, but add trees to your vizualization. The trees breath in CO2 and breath out O2.

 

Exercise 3: Earth System Cycles

Study the diagram to the point that you both understand the various components and can see it in your mind's eye.

Go outside and identify in your environment the components of the various cycles of the diagram. Point at them while your arm moves from one element to the next, saying out-loud the name of the element.

For instance, go stand close to the creek, with your eyes on the hills where the rain may fall, and flow down in the ephemeral creek, through the intermittent creek, to the perennial creek (look up in a dictionary if you don't know these words, or do a Google.) then point to the different parts of the water cycle and name it out-loud.

(If you feel strange speaking out-loud while nobody seems to be listening, you could pretend speaking into a cell phone; but speak as if you name the various parts of the cycles.)

You now repeat this exercise as a visualization, laying down, face-upwards, on the Earth, as in exercise 1. For instance, for the hydrological cycles you could pretend being a drop of water and follow it as it turns from surface water in the ocean to water vapor, to an ice particle, to a drop of rain to run off from a hill site, to part of ground water that sits there for thousands of years, to coming up in a geyser or spring, or a human dug well, moving through the bodies of people and trees, etc.