Again, I sat outside in a full hot sun, at 5800 feet above the sea, here in the mountains.  It was so warm, I rolled up my sweater to let the sun seep into my bones.  I sat cross-legged and made sure that my pelvis was well titled forward so that my mid-back would curve.  Otherwise, I feel the strain almost immediately creeping up from the lower back to my shoulders--stay back! stay back! into my neck curving forward with the weight of my head. 

     So, I began with a good "seat."  And with the sun warming my face and body, I felt good.  Sat for 23 minutes.  How strange!  This was exactly the amount of time I sat yesterday.  Maybe tomorrow, I will set a clock for thirty. 

    Oops, there I go, getting competitive, always striving for more, even with myself.  So, maybe I won't.  Maybe I will sit as long as feels 'right.' 

   I found it easy to sit.  This is strange--while I have practiced meditation in the past, I am usually anxious to "get on with it" after about eight minutes.  This time, I am ready to sit, to breathe, to let myself sink into the stillness. 

I used the mantra I had read about  in the Barbara Brennan LIGHT EMERGING book, "Be Still, for I am God."  I like this mantra.  I have never felt comforted with a Big Daddy kind of god up in the heavens.  Instead, the best moments of my life, I have felt all is god, or good.  God is in those huge firs climbing the steep ravine, in the sun yellowing the snow, in the  Stellar bluejay cawing, and in this house far from my normal routine.

Again, I focused on my body.  My hips open  up like a flower, knees nearly to the ground.  I love that I discovered this pelvic tilt that makes me reach up high and higher with my heart.  I visualize each part of me, from the sitz bones through the center, from the first through the seventh chakra.  It is amazing to think that my thigh is two of my face lengths and that my forearms are the same size as my upper arms and both are equivalent to the point of my neck to my belly button. 

I also focused on that left hip pain and the pain in my left jaw and my recently capped left wisdom tooth and the creakiness in turning my head to the left.  The left side of the body is the "feminine" side mostly controlled by the right side of the brain--the side associated with images instead of words, concrete instead of abstraction, the side of reading faces and emotions, of nurturing and of creativity. 

Hmmmm....what does it mean that my left side hurts?  Have I not been taking care of this side of me?  Have I oversubscribed to the left-brain values of logic, goals, focused attention, of abstraction and analysis, of words?   Or maybe, I am overdrawn on the feminine side--I have spent so many years taking care of others.  Maybe, I need to take care of my self-- and this meditation is a good first step.