Blowing in the Wind Water Element Meditation presented by Crystal Forest

Blowing in the Wind

a meditation by Melanie Fire Salamander

used with permission of the author

Air is the element connected to the East in many pagan rituals, linked with the spring equinox and with dawn. It's associated with beginnings, the birds chirping in peach light, the sun on the eastern horizon, potential. Its symbols are the wand, which channels energy, and the censer, from which incense floats; on the altar, air is often symbolized by feathers. It's connected with birds, the high-flying eagle and hawk, the raucous crow. Its colors are white, light blue and airy pastels. It's connected with mentality, communication; its power is to know.

Air can speak in whispers or gale force; to know best how it speaks to you, make your own connection with it. One way to connect with air is to meditate upon it. To use the following air meditation, either record it on tape and play it back or ask someone to read it to you. It takes about 15 minutes.

Before starting, find a comfortable place where you won't be disturbed; take the phone off the hook and if necessary shut out your pets. If you fall asleep easily, sit up as you meditate; if you have problems relaxing, stretch out on a bed, couch or the floor.

The Meditation

Relax. Deeply relax, and take a few deep breaths. In, out; in, out. Feel your body, wriggle your fingers; wiggle your toes, your nose, your hips and arms; roll your head. Feel where your body ends and what's around you begins; feel the air around you, the surface underneath you. Be here now, present in your body, in the present moment. Continue to breathe deeply, and begin to release the cares of your day and week with your breath. Be completely here in the present moment.

Throughout this meditation, you will have a complete, deep experience, and you will remember everything you sense and learn. If you need to return, you can always recall yourself to the physical world by moving your fingers and toes. You will be utterly safe and protected throughout.

Continue to relax and to breathe deeply. Be that breath, that wind inside you; feel your spirit infusing that air that moves through you. Starting at your center, behind and below your navel, feel that air filling you, the cavity of your belly, your torso, your arms and legs, your head. Feel oxygen flow through every part of your body. Feel your breath infused with spirit. (Pause briefly.)

Let a finger of your breath, your spirit flow downward, out of your body, into the space below. Let your spirit-breath flow down through the floor, through the building you're in, through its cold concrete foundations into the earth. The earth is infused with oxygen; tunnels burrowed by little creatures aerate the soil. Feel the air within the earth tickle your air-spirit.

At the same time, let a finger of air-spirit come upward through your head, out of your nostrils into the air of the room around you. Feel the freedom of the air around you. Let this finger of breath continue upward through the room, through the ceiling, through the roof into the air of the outside world. Feel the air's currents, warm and cool, the updrafts and downdrafts, the thermals ridden by birds.

Below you, let your spirit-breath continue downward, deep into the earth, into the darkness, the cool earth sticky with moisture, the cold stoic rock, down into the mantle of the earth where magma flows. Feel your air-spirit reach the center of the earth, the living, breathing Mother, breathing in her own way, constantly circulating the elements in her body. Connect deeply to Mother Earth. (Pause briefly.)

Above you, let your questing air-spirit continue up, through the air, past the clinging clouds, up into the brilliant sky. Let your air-spirit revel in its natural home. Continue upward until you feel yourself reach the heart of the sky. Connect deeply to Father Sky. (Pause briefly.)

Bring this sky energy downward, cascading down your column of breath, to your body. Likewise, bring the warm earth-energy up through your breath to your body. Feel the earth and sky energies mingle in your center. Let these combined earth and sky energies fill your body, cleansing and healing, shaking up and brushing away all the caught and negative energy. Feel the energies go through your body like a warm, cleansing breeze. Let go to this cleansing air anything you need to release. Let the wind brush it away, down into Mother Earth. Let go of all old energies that trap you, into the breathing Mother. (Pause briefly.)

Now, connected deeply to earth and sky, imagine yourself in a broad field, mowed and prickly with dry grass. At the edges of the field a group of trees stands, dark. It's late spring, and the smell of the cut grass is like honey. The sky is lightly overcast, but the sun beams through, warm.

You hear the wind rustle in the trees across the field. It's as if the trees were whispering to each other. The wind comes closer, rustling the dry grass, with a sound like waves. It comes toward you in a long curve, then starts on another circle of the field.

Connect with the wind, feel it, study it. Feel it move cool on your skin. Smell and taste what it brings to you, sense the scentless air that carries those smells. See the way it makes the grass and trees move. Hear its voice. Perceive it with all your senses. (Pause briefly.)

As you study the air, you notice it has associations for you. Let these associations come up for you. What emotion you have for air? What does it feel like? (Pause briefly.)

Do any images or symbols, sounds or words come up for air? (Pause for some time.)

You continue to study the air, seeing and sensing it as it circles the field, pushing the grass, waving the trees' branches. You sense that the air is trying to communicate with you. You ask the air who it is, and what its nature is. And the air replies. (Pause briefly.)

The air may have something else to communicate to you, about yourself or your work or life. (Pause briefly.)It might have something to communicate about the world at large. (Pause for some time.)

Continue to study the air. You sense that it is asking you to become closer to it, and you do. With utter confidence and safety you enter the air; you dissolve into air. You become one with it. Be the air; see how that feels. Know that you will keep all parts of your experience that you want to. (Pause briefly.)

Feel each particle of air. Feel single molecules of oxygen, of combined gas, tumbling in atmosphere. (Pause briefly.)

Feel what it means to be a breeze gently moving. Then go faster; be wind. Dance, run, whip through the landscape. (Pause briefly.)

Now, traveling upward, combine with water vapor, and be cloud: fluffy, massive. (Pause briefly.)

Now coalesce into a thundercloud. Feel the incredible energy within you. Feel lightning course within you, flicker, strike. Hear the thunder rumble through you. Let the rain pour through and from you, pattering the earth. (Pause briefly.) Circle, circle, feeling the power, the strength of air. Circle into a whirlwind, a sucking, moving finger of air. Touch the earth, and draw up again. Feel the power of wind. Feel its intensity. (Pause briefly.)

Now dissipate, gentle and spread. Become all the atmosphere, lower and higher; the air at ground level, of the mountains, the jet stream, the ozone layer, the outer atmosphere as it shades into the breathless night of space. Be the atmosphere, feel the consciousness of all Earth's air, the blanket of air lapped around the earth. (Pause for some time.)

Now coalesce, become small again, one small consciousness, and find the column of air connected to your body. Enter your body again, and become yourself once more. Separate into yourself a column of breath feeling the air around you. You feel cleansed and invigorated. Know that you will remember everything that has come to pass.

Say good-bye to the air, and thank the air in its many forms for its presence and the information it has conveyed and for allowing you to become one with it. (Pause briefly.)

Now see once more the broad field around you, the light overcast, the breeze rushing through the dry grass, moving the limbs of the trees.

You begin once more to feel your body. You are coming up from trance, remembering everything that has happened, retaining everything important that you learned, feeling warm and relaxed yet energetic. Feel your body; wiggle your fingers and toes; be present here and now. Feel the air above and the surface below you. You will remember everything you want to remember. Breathe deeply, and open your eyes.