Sixty Years in a Breath
To be read aloud slowly by a clinician, or recorded; twenty to twenty-five minutes. Leave a breath between lines.
Before you begin. This practice follows King Lavaṇa's induction and return: a moving light, a long imagined passage of time, and a sound that calls you home. It is safe for most healthy adults. Do not use it if you have thoughts of harming yourself or have recently done so, if you have or have had a psychotic illness or a dissociative disorder, or if trauma still returns as flashbacks; with any of these, practise only with a clinician who knows your history. With photosensitive epilepsy, imagine the light rather than watching one. Sit in a chair with arms, feet on the floor; never lie down, never practise while driving or near water. Before you start, set a soft bell or music to sound at about eighteen minutes. That is the palace music, and it will bring you back whatever you are imagining. Nothing you see here is a memory of fact.
How to return at any moment. Press your feet into the floor, hold the arms of the chair, say your name aloud, and open your eyes.
Sit down, and let the chair take your weight, the way a throne holds a king.
Put a small light where you can see it, or imagine one. Let it move slowly in a circle. Watch it trace its ring. Bright, steady, going round.
You do not need to follow it hard. Let the eyes ride it. Round. And round.
Notice the eyes growing a little tired of turning. That is right. Notice the edges of the room growing quiet, as a hall grows quiet when the king falls still.
Now let the gaze come to rest on one still thing in front of you, as if it were a painting, and you were becoming a painting too. Still. Unblinking for as long as is easy.
And when the lids want to close, let them close.
Breathe out.
Feel the body seated. The back held. The hands on the arms of the chair. The feet on the floor. This body is a horse that does not move. It will stand quite still while you go wherever you need to go, and you can always feel it under you.
Breathe out.
And now the mind may ride.
A wide plain opens ahead, empty under a high sun. Nothing to do on it but cross. With each breath the ground passes beneath you, and with each breath you go a little deeper. The light changes. The sun goes down.
At the plain's edge is a forest at dusk. Birds settle. Reach up, as he did, take hold of a hanging root, and rest in the fork of a great tree, held, as a bird is held in its nest.
One night passes here. It may feel very long or very short. Let it be exactly as long as it needs to be. Time here is measured by attention, not by clocks, and you are teaching the mind that it can stretch time and fold it.
Breathe out. Deeper.
Morning comes, warm. And now, if there is a stretch of life ahead that you have been dreading, a treatment, a recovery, a hard year, a long task, let it begin here, in this forest, this morning.
Do not live its worst moments. Live its passage. Seasons turn. Rain, then dry. You carry what has to be carried; you rest when you can; people walk beside you. Days become weeks, weeks become months, and you feel the whole stretch moving, quickly now, the way sixty years moved in two hours.
And notice: you are getting through it. Step after step, season after season, to its end.
(Pause: one to two minutes.)
There. It is finished, lived through to its end. What is completed here does not have to be carried twice. When that time comes in the world, part of you will know the way, because you have already walked it.
Breathe out.
Now, at the deepest point, remember what the dreamer forgot.
Far behind this forest, in a quiet hall, a self sits on a throne. It has not moved. It has not aged. Nothing in the forest has touched it: not the rags, not the cold, not any name you were given out here. It still knows its own name.
You may have forgotten it for a while. It has not forgotten you.
Rest here, between the forest and the throne. Nothing to do.
(Silence: two to four minutes, until the bell.)
And now the music.
Listen. A sound from the hall. It is calling you by your own name. It is saying jaya, victory. The forest thins like mist at sunrise. The plain folds up behind you. Let the scene dissolve. There is nothing in it you need to finish.
The horse is standing exactly where it stood. The chair is under you. You never left it.
Before you open your eyes, hold the arms of the chair. Feel your weight. Press your feet into the floor. No falling from the horse today.
I will count from one to five. On five your eyes open, clear and rested.
One. The breath grows fuller.
Two. Fingers and toes move. They are your own.
Three. The sounds of the room come back, near and ordinary.
Four. One deep breath in, and let the shoulders roll once.
Five. Eyes open. Here. Now. Fully alert.
Sit a moment. Ask the king's question aloud, and answer it. What place is this? Name the room. Whose court is this? Say your own name. Say today's date and the time. Name three things you can see and one sound you can hear.
If you feel slow or far away, count again from one to five, then stand slowly with one hand on the chair and walk a few steps. Drink some water. Do not drive or operate anything for ten minutes. If an image from the practice stays with you, tell your clinician, and do not treat it as a memory.
Then, as the king did, go and do one kind thing for someone who is having a hard time.
