Meditation For Beginners — Step Eleven: What Do You Rest Upon

Step 11 in the Beginner’s Guide To Meditation series.

(Step 10 / Step 12)

What do you rest upon?

This is about grounding. Oh my goodness…grounding is so important. On the path of meditation and spirituality, a lot of people get really excited about getting charged up. People want to be activated and become a guru with 30K followers on Instagram with their own line of crystals. There’s a lot of that. It’s great…but there are not enough people also focused on grounding to balance this.

Getting activated is an important part of the practice because it can open up doors to envisioning who you want to be, but grounding is about reminding yourself of who you are. You begin with where you are and what you sit upon. It’s a great way to locate yourself in the here and the now on the Earth. It’s important to know how to see reality as it is, not how you want it to be.

What we’ve done with the last four directions is look in front of you, look behind you, we’ve looked to your left, we’ve looked to your right, and now you’ll look underneath. What do you rest upon?

This is incredibly rich territory for inquiry. Practical reality can be much more interesting than you might think, if you just take a moment to appreciate it. You are — I don’t know — maybe you’re on a chair, on a cushion, or on flooring of some sort. Maybe you’re in a building that rests upon soil that rests upon deeper geology that rests upon the crust of the Earth the rests upon magma. It goes all the way to the core of the Earth. It’s a pretty miraculous thing that you can allow your imagination to keep going down, down, down, down to the very bottom of things.

You rest upon all of this. Remember all the way in the beginning when we talked about straightening your back? Have you been straightening your back in these meditations? This is a great time to think about that again. With your straight back, relax your shoulders into this idea of being on the Earth.

When I do grounding meditations, I like to imagine myself as a sandcastle on the beach. I feel like I am made of the same stuff that I rest upon. Very solid, very present in the here and now. My invitation for you, when you close your eyes to ask yourself, ‘what do I rest upon?’ is to allow yourself to drop down to the center of the Earth and bounce back to your body. Think about all of the things that you actually physically are. Think about all of the things that make up the patch of land that you reside on. Contend with what all of this means for you.

Think about what it means to sit in alignment with your body and your land. This is a very charged invitation. That charge is core to the magic of grounding.

What are you made of?

What supports you?

What do you rest upon?