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 through these seven days.

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DAY TWO: WATER

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7 DAYS OF REST AND REFLECTION

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Reflection offerings and practices for the day - Shelley Ostroff

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1. Intentional invitation:  There are many ways to connect with Water. Sense into the way in which you would like to deepen your relationship with Water today.  What are you inviting in for yourself, and for Water? How can you best create the conditions for this to manifest. 

2. Breathing with Water:  Spend time quietly breathing and noticing the subtle sensations moving through your body. Focus attention on the fluidity of the breath – sensing how the air moves through the fluids of your body. Sense into how it enlivens the cells as it is transmitted through the your veins as the rivers flow through the body of Earth. Breathe like a fish, through your skin and feel the water all around you as you take in oxygen through your skin.  With each breath - remember that you are a watery being, and that over 60 percent of your body is water. With each breath, enable the fluidity of the water to expand the fluidity within you.

3. Tasting Water: Hold a glass of water in your hand gently before you drink it. And as you hold it you may want to bless the water, knowing that water carries information. What information would you like to inform the water before it informs you from within.Sense the water in the glass between your hands before you even drink it - what are you saying to it... what it is revealing to you. What is happening in the exchange in this moment. Sip the water very slowly, and allow it to stay on your tongue for a moment - feel the taste and sensation of the water on your tongue and how it impacts the rest of the body. You may want to swill it in your mouth for a moment, noticing how it touches and refreshes the sides of your mouth, under the tongue. How does your mouth feel touched by water? Then swallow slowly, and notice how much you can feel of the water as it moves through your body - expand into the sensation.  And sense also how the water moves through the body out of the body, through the urination, the sweat the tears - feeling into these processes and what it means for water to travel through you in these different physical ways?

4. Sensing Water: Spend time sensing into your diverse experiences with water in your daily life. What are the many ways in which you encounter and engage with Water as you go through your day?  In what ways is Water present for you, around you and within you and how does water move through you? Sense the qualities Water brings you in these different encounters? Sense the qualities you bring to water in these encounters. For a moment sense what your life would be like without water – or if water was more difficult to access. Feel the water as it touches your skin in many different ways.

5. Reflecting water: Research has shown how water remembers information and responds to human thought patterns. Sense into the way in which your own thoughts may inform and impact the water in your own body and in turn the vitality of your experience. And then expand this picture to sense into the way in which our culture’s stories and ideas impact the water in our waterways. What would we be like as individuals and as a culture if we drank water that was pure from nature’s sources and ensured that our water sources remained with the nourishing clarity of nature’s true vibration?

6. Embodying water: Imagine yourself as water. What can you learn from water as you become still like a lake, or deep and vast like an ocean inhabited by diverse sea creatures, or shapeshifting from the solidity of ice, to the fluidity of water in the streams and the vapours of steam and the moisture of clouds and of the dewdrop? Allow your body to become these forms of water. How do you feel when you embody these different forms that water takes?

7. Waters of the soul: sense into the waters of your soul and your psyche – the emotional and imaginative realms of your being.  Sense into the tear drop, and how it travels through the emotional body to be released as a tear informed by so much feeling? Feel the stormy nature of your being, the fresh drizzles in the warm breeze of your nature, the icy coldness and the steamy sensation of your passion ignited. Feel it all as the watery, shapeshifting nature of your emotional body enriches your experience of yourself and the world around you.

8. Messages from Water: In your imagination – invite water to reveal itself to you. What form does it take as it appears to you in your imagination now.  Notice what it looks like, feels like, tastes like, and what happens as you attune to it – what happens as you listen in to its message. Imagine it has a personal message for you – a lesson. What does water tell you about the way in which it experiences your relationship with it/ What can you learn from water? What is the message water is asking you to share with humanity.

9. Messages for Water: What would you like to say to water? Given these reflections, if water could understand you, what would you want to let Water know at this moment?

10. Art from the Heart of Water:  Let Water inspire the Heartist within you. Express what is most alive in you in this encounter through any form of art – dance, music, visual arts, poetery etc.  If you use any form of materials in your art, attend to how they somehow are connected to Water. If you would like to share your Heartist offering and inspire others with it, please share it in our Community Sharing Space.

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