Reflections and practices will be offered each day. Journalling the thoughts, images, dreams, emotions, sensations and experiences that arise throughout the entire week can deepen your journey and the process of healing and transformation.

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Offered by Shelley Ostroff

 

INVITATION

 

DAY FOUR: Rest in Loving Contact – Reflections and practices

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Heartful attention – Find a comfortable position and just focus on your heart, senses into it, locate it, and offer it tender loving attention. It is always there for you, and now for these few moments, acknowledge it, put your hands on your heart, and feel the energy moving between your heart and your hands. Offer it a loving message.

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Expanding heartfulness – As you notice your heart, sense into the way in which it pulsates throughout your body, enlivening all the cells, reaching every part of you. And then imagine this incredible organ extending its loving radiance, its aura, beyond your skin to the space around you, and the space beyond and beyond until it extends to the whole continent and beyond and to the whole globe. Feel your heartbeat pulsating with the heartbeat of Mother Earth as one Heart, and two simultaneously, and then imagine all the infinite hearts on the planet beating simultaneously as one and many. Unique and yet connected.

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Sensing Heart- Sense into the quality of your experience as you focus on your heart. What do you notice? What images and sensations arise?

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Loving circulation - Allow yourself to remember a deeply loving moment with another being, human or animal – a moment of profound mutual caring – a moment that was deeply nourishing.  Sense into the essence of that experience – distilling from the experience the essence of mutuality, connectedness and enriching circulation.  Thank the experience for enriching you and informing you that such tender caring is possible.  Offer yourself that same quality of love you experienced with another being and receive that quality of love from yourself. And now in your imagination offer that same quality of love unconditionally to another being, human or animal.  Gift that experience to all beings – envisioning a world where this quality of relationship prevails.

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Loving Earth: Imagine yourself touching the Earth with love. How do you touch Mother Earth with your heart? How does She touch your heart? How do you walk lovefully on the ground? How do you touch the trees and the grass and the flowers with love?

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Heartful gesture: Imagine a gesture that you can offer someone else that comes from this heartful place.  Offer a heartful gesture – a heartful gift to someone that you know, and to someone that you don’t know. Offer a heartful gift to an animal, to a tree, to a plant, to Mother Earth.

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Heartful day: Imagine yourself moving into  a heartful day – what would the day look like. How would it look different from other days? How would you react differently to things that please you and to things that don’t please you?

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Heartful gift: What would you most want to receive right now from someone else? Gift yourself that which you would most want from another – the words, the touch, the attention, whatever it is.

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Heartful nourishment: Prepare a heartful meal and eat and drink with heartful gratitude.

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Heartful new friendships: Make new friends today from this heartful place, with people, with the trees, with the animals and the insects and the clouds and all that is in front of you.

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Heartful blessing: Offer a heartful blessing to Mother Earth and all her children. Please put this blessing up on the 7 Days of Rest Blessing Space.

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