Stress and fatigue take their toll every day. It is the cumulative effects of these physical and emotional states that changes body chemistry and lead over time to serious health conditions, like chronic pain, sleep disorders, immune disorders, obesity, heart disease, and others.
Meditation has been used for centuries or calm down, focus, transcend and is also shown to alter our genetic expression in positive ways.
In today’s video article, my friend Taoist Monk Yunrou, himself a master of tai chi and qigong, will show you a simple standing meditation that will energize and rejuvenate your entire body.
How to begin
Stand with your legs a little more than shoulder width apart, feet flat on the floor. Gentlemen, take your right hand and put it over your navel and place your left hand over your right. Ladies, do the opposite with your left hand over your navel and right hand covering the left.
Standing there, relax from the top of your crown point all the way down your body, one section at a time, to the soles of your feet. Close your eyes, exhale, relax. Place your tongue comfortably on the roof of your mouth behind your front teeth. Breathe only through your nose.
Here are two simple ways to practice this rejuvenating meditation.
- You can concentrate just on relaxing so much that you are on the edge of falling down. This will de-stress and relax the body, improve circulation and rest the mind.
- You can concentrate only on your breathing, which will focus your attention away from the stress of life and the tiredness of the body.
In either case, do not try to banish your thoughts because you won’t be able to right away. And, the thought about banishing your thoughts… is a thought! So forget about it for the purposes of this meditation exercise; which is not about mindfulness or spiritual transcendence, but about energizing and rejuvenating the mind and body.
What to do
Close your eyes and just let your mind and your body relax. Imagine that from the middle of the ball of each foot, a little rootlet sprouts like you might see coming from a seed as it takes root in the ground. And every time you exhale image that those little roots are growing downward. In this case, in a hotel room, through the all the floors and into the earth. Here, imagine those roots are diving deeper and deeper toward the liquid, bubbling, molten center of the earth.
As you inhale you will bring up energy from the earth into your body, just like those roots bring up energy for a plant. As you exhale, the stress goes down the roots to circulate out the bad and bring in the new with each breath cycle.
Imagine as you are doing this that the roots, in addition to going deeper are also growing wider into a big network. In the end they are so vast and so deep beneath you that you are as if nothing but a little button on top of them. And if a bulldozer came it could not move you because of how vast and strong your root system.
Breathe and relax. Energy coming up from the ground, relaxing downward. Take five or 10 minutes at a time, 30 minutes if you can, and you will rejuvenate and energize yourself into a whole new day.
Relaxation Positively Affects Genetic Expression — Easy Health Options
