Focus on your feet. The part of your body that connects you to the Earth. Do they hurt? Try to find, using your minds eye, each of the 28 bones in your feet. Wiggle your toes, the metatarsals. Flex the ball of your foot. Is your arch the shape of a rainbow or a table-top plateau? How does your calcaneus bone or heel feel? Massage, with your hands or with visualized swirls of energy, the 100s of muscles, tendons, and ligaments connecting those bones together. Where have your feet have taken you lately? Where do you hope they take you next?
Continue with the same focus up your leg to your ankle. Do you have weak ankles like me? I stopped counting how many times I have twisted my ankle over the years. Follow your achilles tendon, the one at the back of your ankle up to your calves. These muscles help stabilize you when standing, walking, or running. Notice the thin muscle next to the tibia, along the front of your lower leg. Imagine how it connects to your knee and how the knee is connected to the quadriceps of your upper leg. Stretch and massage these muscles. Thank them for helping you get up from a chair or walk up stairs.
Imagine each organ within your pelvis, your abdomen, your obliques, your ribcage, your diaphragm, your lungs. Breathe deeply into your lungs. Give a little thank you to each of these important parts of your body. Your liver, kidneys, stomach, intestines. Respect them by feeding them whole foods, like farm fresh vegetables and fruits.
Focus on your heart. Feel the rhythm flow through your body. Take a ride through your bloodstream, hop on a hemoglobin cell and travel to your lungs to pick up life-giving molecules of oxygen. Feel that oxygen bringing energy to each part of your body from your feet to your heart, from your heart to your brain.
Shoulders, neck, and arm muscles must not be forgotten. Many of us hold our stress here. Spend some time here. Is there tightness? Pain? Do your thumbs hurt from too much typing or texting? Your wrists? Forearms? Have you done a pushup lately? A plank? Challenged someone to a friendly game of arm-wrestling? Draw circles in the air with your arms the next time you are outside. Swirl your wrists. Stretch your fingers.
As you climb up your neck, think of all the vertebrae. Beginning above your tailbone, each one is a building block for your entire body, housing the main highway of your nervous system, ending at the base of your cranium that houses the human CPU – Central Processing Unit – the brain. Eyes-closed, if they aren’t already, explore your mouth, your sinuses, your eyes, the mass of muscle that is your brain, think of how each section controls different parts of your body, of your emotions.
Relax. You are bringing your awareness inside. To the root of your being. To your powerhouse. Your temple. Your vehicle. Your ecosystem. Your body is perfect. You are perfect.
As you travel within, take time to notice how you feel. Is there physical pain? Emotional pain? Did you break your arm? Is the memory funny or sad? Are you angry at the pain in your back?
Sit with those feelings. Acknowledge them and release them. Be good to yourself.
If you are inclined, write your observations into a note app, or into a notebook. I like the physical activity of pen to journal. If you only have your phone app, try to rewrite it into a journal at a later time. Keep these thoughts in a sacred place. In the future, you will find that you will want to go back and read these observations. Or you may want to burn them to release them. But let’s wait a while before we begin burning things. That may come later.
With love and respect.
Rebecca Francesca Reuter Puerto 