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Inner
Work
For the Week of June 10, 2024
The Axis of Presence Exercise
(Deepening Our Practice 9)
For an introduction and background for this exercise, see The Axis of Presence and Prana and I.
- Sit quietly. Spend ten or fifteen minutes relaxing your whole body, letting go of tensions wherever you notice them.
- As you relax, the sensitive energy in your body, mind, and heart comes toward the foreground of awareness. Shift your focus onto the sensation of your whole body, the feeling in your chest, and the mind energy in your head, all as a single experience. Stay with that and return to it whenever you notice that you've lost that contact.
- Sit quietly and bring your attention to your breathing, to the sensations in and around your nostrils and upper lip as you breathe. Stay with the physical sensations of the air passing in and out of your nose.
- Now shift your attention from the physical sensations of breathing to the air itself, particularly the inhalation, as the air comes into your nose. Let your breathing be normal, except for a slight sharpening and emphasis on the inhalation. Become aware of the particles of active elements, or prana, in the air as you inhale. Set your intention to draw those particles into your body as you inhale and let the prana particles flow on their own, where they will, throughout your body. While you exhale, let your attention rest in your whole body, noticing how the active elements spread into your body and how they enhance the sensation of your body.
- Leave aside the drawing in of the active elements or prana. Move into inhabiting your whole body, mind, and heart, being present in the whole of yourself, centered in yourself. This means not only being in contact with your entire sensation, feeling, and mind energy, but also actively being here yourself in contact with your wholeness. It means having the ongoing experience that, if we were to put it into words, would be something like "I am here inhabiting the whole of myself intentionally right now."
- Maintaining that presence, also return to drawing the prana from the air. Let both actions become a single experience. Let the will components of the prana particles be drawn to this active presence, to strengthen your I.
- Leave all that aside. Move into opening deeply. This is an inward action, akin to contemplative prayer, directed at opening to and connecting with the Sacred deep within you, behind your thoughts, emotions, and impulses, behind everything, behind your ordinary self, behind your I. We are opening to the creative, benevolent, and loving force at the heart of the world, a Sacred force that is not separate from us. Go behind, behind, and behind, allowing that connection to blossom.
- Maintaining that inward opening, also return to drawing the prana from the air. Maintain both actions as a single experience. Let the will components of the prana follow you into that opening, enhancing the opening.
- Now let that inward opening make room for another quality of that Sacred force to arise from deep within, a force that moves outward to combine the receptive presence of opening with the affirmative presence of inhabiting yourself. This third Sacred force becomes the axis of your presence, a flow of will from the receptive opening to the active presence.
- Maintaining that axis of presence, also return to drawing the prana from the air. Maintain both actions as a single experience. Let the will components of the prana strengthen that total presence, that axis from deep within toward your wholeness. Let that total presence be you, be your core.
- Let go of drawing the active elements from the air and continue abiding as that axis of presence.
- Sit quietly, doing nothing, letting the results of the exercise settle into you.
Revised July 24, 2024
Provenance of the Exercises
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