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Meditation: The four-element body scan

Nourish your pictorial thinking and mobility and make it available to others!

In this exercise you make contact with the four layers of your body. The inner harmony between the elements becomes richer and  stable.

  • Solid, watery and airy qualities are present in stone, plant, animal  and in the kingdoms of nature. They also live in you!
  • Warmth is something more. It penetrates everything and brings about movement and change. It enables you to live in your body. To penetrate it and to unfold your will in the world.

With this exercise you build an inner base which helps you to react differently to influences from without.


Sit down and relax. You may lean back or sit without support, keeping your eyes open or closed. Take one to two minutes for each of the following stages. You may do it with or without the audio file of this lesson.

Earth

Inwardly go down through your whole body from the head to the feet. Feel how you feel the earth with the soles of your feet. Make contact with the earth.

Solid

Just relax. Let the holding against the heaviness release a little. Stay upright anyway. Try to feel the "solid" in you which gives support, form and stability. Feel the chair you are sitting on, your feet on the ground, your upright spine, your arms on your thighs. Can you feel your bones? The gravity that pulls on them? Can you "feel" something like a support inside?

Liquid

Go over to the sensation of the watery in your body. You can experience it like a fine tingling and pulsing. How do you feel it in your legs, in the body, in the head? Are there any places where there is more, where you feel less? Take time to let what you feel affect you.

Air

Now feel how in your organism the watery vibrating is aerated. Feel the breathing movement of the ribcage. Observe the lifting and lowering of the abdomen. Experience the dry streaming in the nose like something nourishing you right into your lungs. Do you experience something airy in your legs and arms? In the head? Take time to notice this in peace.

Warmth

Do you feel how warmth permeates everything: in the legs, in the feet, in the arms, in the head, in the whole body? Sometimes warmer, sometimes less warm, but everywhere? How do you feel the warmth around your body? Enveloping, balancing, relaxing? Can you imagine how the warmth helps you to turn the body into a home for yourself.


The end of the meditation

Perceive all four qualities again at the end. The warmth, the air, the watery, the solid. And how they jointly interweave.

Take leave of them slowly, swallow once, move yourself, stretch. Look about the room. Feel yourself sitting on your chair.

Focus your attention on your body again and how you feel.  

Free interpretation of Rudolf Steiner