The Ground Beneath the Fear
A Somatic Journey Into the Body's Capacity for Courage
Most of us treat courage as something we have to summon, manufacture, or talk ourselves into. This meditation starts somewhere different: with the body that is already here, already holding you, already in contact with something solid.
In eight to ten minutes, you will be guided into a direct felt experience of the body's own capacity for courage. Not as a concept. As a physical reality that lives beneath the fear, beneath the circling thoughts, beneath the familiar weight of whatever is asking something of you right now.
This is not a relaxation practice. It is a recalibration. The kind that happens when you stop trying to think your way through what only the body can resolve.
By the end, you will have located something in yourself that was there all along: a groundedness that doesn't require the fear to disappear first, a capacity to face what's in the room without being swallowed by it, and a body that remembers it has met hard things before and found its way through.
It is worth eight minutes of your day. Possibly more than anything else on your to-do list.
Click below to access the meditation.
Meditation simply means training the mind, but we are more interested in the collaboration between the mind and the body.
Kindrêd Meditation offers a way to incorporate the three research-based pillars of mind training—strengthening the focus of attention, opening awareness, and building kind, caring intention—that include mindfulness and have been demonstrated to enhance health:
Improve immune function to help fight infection.
Optimize the level of the enzyme telomerase, which repairs and maintains the ends of your chromosomes, keeping your cells— and therefore you—youthful, functioning well, and healthy.
Enhance the "epigenetic" regulation of genes to help prevent life threatening inflammation.
Modify cardiovascular factors, improving cholesterol levels, blood pressure, and heart function.
Increase neural integration in the brain, enabling more coordination and balance in both the functional and structural connectivity within the nervous system that facilitates optimal functioning, including self-regulation, problem solving, and adaptive behavior that is at the heart of well-being.
Taken together, these mean that three-pillar practice actually slows the aging process.
If these five physiological improvements with three pillar mind-training were not enough to catch your attention, how about this sixth finding: increased growth of integrative function and structure in the brain, the linking of differentiated regions as measured by changes in the hippocampus, corpus callosum, prefrontal cortex and the whole-brain connectome: Neural integration is the underlying foundation for resilience and optimal regulation.
WHY?
It re-builds emotional intelligence, and therefore self regulation. Life experience has a way of knocking us off balance sometimes. We learn to react rather than respond. When we allow ourselves to use our voice creatively - through painting, journaling, chanting, or moving our bodies, we gain access to the wisdom we once knew, the wisdom we have always known, but forgotten. Our response becomes gentler, kinder, more honest.
It enhances neural integration, and therefore brain function. Much like digestion of the foods we eat supplies our bodies with the nourishment for optimal living, the integration of every day happenings (big or small, happy or sad, good or bad), enhances our ability to function at optimal levels. Through a variety of practices we create new neural pathways, learning new ways to manage stress and respond to life’s many challenges. Our choices become clearer, stronger, wiser.
It optimizes the immune system, and therefore overall health and well-being. Our immune system takes a beating every day. As we allow ourselves to express creatively, our body responds creatively - all the way to the cellular level. The juices of life begin to flow again.
We come to appreciate the beauty and intelligence of the whole system - body, mind, soul - offering support, compassion and care to ourselves. In turn, our body returns with greater ease to homeostasis, balance.
“Sometimes our light goes out, but is blown again into instant flame by an encounter with another human being.”
Founder of Kindrêd Meditation, Jesh de Rox