Mapping the Body

Tue, 4/13 7:01AM • 1:06:46

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

body, mapping, map, meditation, womb, center, stacy, notice, landmark, learning, energy, left, people, scan, seed, data, grasping, receive, mind, starts.

Intro

How do our meditations become maps? Why the activity of mapping? When we engage with the mind, the home, the womb, etc. - we are essentially talking about relationships that we are constantly navigating, and part of the problem with navigating is that you need a map. The beginning of any mapping process is to find the ground that you’re standing on. To do that, you have to land where you are, which is why the first thing is to become present. This presence allows you to land in a specific location where you can then center, orient, and look around. Let’s assess the situation – What do you need?

When mapping the womb, the mind, or anything, the first step is to begin with mapping the body. People think meditation is for the mind, but it’s not. It’s what gives you a body. If you’re not a trained meditator, your brain just has a few different switches – on/off, awake/asleep. That’s the case for people who aren’t taught how to modulate brain activity. But as you become more masterful you learn how to curate the different levels of awareness. Learning to still the mind gives you a body because you’re learning how to modulate the different brain frequencies. Ultimately, you’re heightening your awareness of sitting (or lying down in yoga nidra). You end up spending time in the experience of being present in your body, and it gives you a sense of the body – how it feels is the map.

All of the chakra meditations, visualization meditations of the energy body, and the work we’ll be doing with phenomenal womb – takes the experience of the body and starts to articulate language around it. As you spend time, you start to notice landmarks. The longer you are in your body, the more the fuzzy gray outline of the body gains detail, as you zoom in, and keep zooming in. Then the landmarks start to grow more detail. This is the process of mapping. The insights that accumulate – all the different landmarks about your body – gives you context to do your work. Without the map, you can’t clear anything, because you don’t know where you are. The contemporary state of place-lessness or dislocation is a mental health crisis because if you’re ungrounded, there’s no way for you to orient yourself.     

Meditation

Close your eyes. Settle in. 

Land in a location.

Feel a distinct sense of arriving at a place in your body – in your beautiful body, your beautiful seat, in a sacred space of meditation. Place your attention there. Consciousness is a place you never leave. Where we tend to energetically be in our body impacts how we relate to our body in the world. You may know someone who lives in their heart, or someone else who lives in their mind. Where we tend to energetically be in our bodies impacts how we relate to our body in the world. If you are in your heart, you have a heart-centered relationship. If you’re in the lower chakras, it’s a survival-based consciousness.

Where are you in your body – in your navel? Your head? Your heart? 

Where do you feel the strongest anchoring in your body? 

Where is your current center?

Or is it all over the place?

Call awareness inside the boundaries.

Notice that you’ve already mapped the perimeter of your physical body, and perhaps a perimeter of your energy body. 

When someone isn’t in their body, it means their attention is not within its perimeter. If you feel bits of your awareness or your spirit outside of your body, call them back. If you experience points of dislocation like little splinters of you leaving, gently invite them back. Any life energy that's been scattered beyond the boundaries of your body, call it back to your body.

Where is your attention relative to your body’s boundaries?

When you call back the life energy where does it go back to?

Find the center of your map.

As you sit inside the perimeter of your skin, or of your energy field, notice how bringing all of your awareness inside the boundaries sharpen the edges. Now locate the magnetic center, which is the seed of the self. Like old medieval maps, there is the central piazza, local basilica, or sacred temple. Notice your own city center and start to build the foundations of your body map. 

Where is this city center located – at the belly, solar plexus, heart?

Center the center.

The process of centering the center is like centering a lump of clay on a pottery wheel. Centering clay on a pottery wheel is a profound experience of embodiment. You lean into it and it finds itself. For you to craft a vessel that can hold water, you must first center your lump. Refine your center and see if you can center your center. Feel the central axis of your body, an axis of anergy,  and allow your center to be centered around it. When you find the center, feel it click into place. 

If your center is high, like in your head, what happens if you drop it down a little bit? 

If it is below the navel, what happens if you raise the center up a little bit? 

Establish the base plan.

When you roll out a map, you see the borders, you see the center, and then you take it all in first, before you look for the place you want to go to. Now do an overall scan of your body skin. First scan from top to bottom and then bottom back up to top. While still feeling your edges, feel into your center again. Now hold the center, and bring your awareness back to the top of the map, the top of your energy edge. Then scan down slowly – moving down the head, down the shoulders, down the back, down the legs, all the way down to the feet. Then make your way back up – from the feet, to the legs, to the belly, to the chest, to the shoulders, back up to the head. Just take it all in, without judgement. With sweeping LEDs, you establish your base plan.

As you scan, what are you starting to notice?

What is pulling you?

What is of interest?

Listen for landmarks.

With your base plan, you can now visit whichever points of interest are calling you this morning. Within your holy body plan – this sacred space – something wants to be seen or heard. So mapping becomes listening – listening for communications, from your own self to yourself. Go there, drop in to that body landmark, a place that is calling for attention. Go inside. Go inside the inside of the inside. And listen. You are listening, you are holding, and you are cradling this part of you. This is self care. Self love. Just hold all your attention here. 

What is your soul, your spirit asking you to look at?

What do you see or hear?

Sense the details.

As you hold your attention there, details start to emerge. The landmark you’ve chosen comes into focus. Things you may not have noticed, or given room to be expressed – let them start to emerge, to be held. Learning to map is learning to hold inner vision. Maps take many forms depending upon which sense is doing the mapping. 

So, just notice the details that are arising.

Are they shapes? 

Are they sound and their colors? 

Are they temperatures? 

Are they words?

Receive the phenomenal data.

What you notice is information that has been given for you to receive. In Latin, the neuter singular past participle of the word given is datum, plural data. Data is that which has been given. It's beautiful to understand the roots of these practices, and receive what is given. Take the word data back from being a cold numerical thing. It has the spirit of offering, and of generosity. As you receive the data, there is a sensitization that happens. Your senses awaken to the multitude of things there are to receive. Your mind stays engaged as you directly experience this phenomenon. We call this phenomenal data – deep dive data that illuminates that which you are given, how you receive the world, your inner world, and your outer world. 

What are you discovering in the depths of your landmark?

How you are storing this information – in your body memory, your perception?  

Update your map with new insights.

Every investment of time learning to see the map, adds detail to the map. What's magical and amazing is that you change the map just by looking at the map. That's why we work at quantum speeds. But here's the challenge – our holding becomes grasping, because we become attached to the information that is at the crux of our identity. When you grasp, you resist the flow of change and transformation. 

For those of you who have been doing this work for a while, you're planting new seeds all the time and it feels like it’s going very fast. So you actually have to release your grasp of the old information so that you can allow that which you received to repopulate your map. That’s the clearing process. When you get to this stage, you start to see the different stages within the growth of your mental garden. Those things that you're actively manifesting, and those old crusts of previous identities that are still hanging out there in your body. 

You're afraid of letting them go before the new seed has grown – but there is no room for the new information to expand if you don't release the old. If your hard drive is full, you can't store more information. So delete half of those old files that you're not going to read, that you don't need anymore. What you are grasping is actually an old belief system about who you were. And it’s slowing down the growth of who you are. It feels like a leap, and that requires immense courage and trust. You have to take the leap of faith when you release the grasping and step into holding. You're constantly releasing the old map so that the new map can be drawn. There is no fixed map of self. 

What are you still grasping onto?

Can you see why you are still holding on to that?

Decide what is real.

The most common mental neurosis in modern spirituality. People obsess over practice, practice, practice, but forget about non-attachment. But it doesn't matter if you can't effort your way in. The old map stays if you don't release it. It's called ego. It's rooted or anchored at different places. Just heal. Just drop it and allow your new imagination, your new experience to become the ground. 

For everyone who does this work, it becomes a daily battle about what is real. The more you do this work, the less you believe the old map is real. The more you trust the potency of the present, the more you trust the edge of change, and learn to stay on the edge of transformation. Step up. Lean in. Become an edge dweller. Live at the edge of your own transformation. You are in full sovereign authority to create your own mind, your own body, your own world, your life. You now reclaim your power and your agency.

What do you believe is real – from the past self?

What do you believe is real – in the new self that you are seeding? 

Where do you not have sufficient faith yet – that your new seeds will bear fruit? 

From The Daily Muse Meditation Series

copyright Make Conscious LLC do not reproduce without permission.

spoken by Jessica Kung Dreyfus

edited by Faith Chiang and OTTER.ai