What is the Earth Descent Meditation?
The Earth Descent Meditation is a visualization in which your awareness sinks, stage by stage, deep into the Earth. The worksheet below describes it as a way to get grounded and deeply relaxed. The technique was created by the Buddhist teacher Reginald Ray, who drew on indigenous sources, and it is also sometimes called “Earth Breathing.” The worksheet points to his audio series Your Breathing Body.
How to practice the Earth Descent Meditation
- Lying on your back in a comfortable position, perhaps with the knees up and feet flat on the ground to ease tension in the lower back.
- Closing the eyes and breathing deeply. On each in-breath, noticing any tension in the body. On each out-breath, allowing the tension to drain into the Earth beneath you.
- Allowing awareness to drop down into the Earth: about one foot, imagining roots growing down, then ten feet, feeling the strength, solidity, and warmth of the Earth.
- Continuing to sink to hundreds and then thousands of feet, then a mile, and then ten more miles with each breath until you reach a hundred miles.
- Letting awareness keep falling. If you meet a barrier or a feeling that you can’t go any further, letting go of it and falling right through. The depth of this experiential Earth goes on to infinity, which the worksheet invites you to think of as the source of all things and your true home.
- Feeling the body in contact with that infinite depth, resting at the point of infinity, letting go of ideas and effort, and noticing how the mind feels there: open, boundless, without barriers.
Ray makes the point that, according to Tibetan Buddhism, human awareness is only apparently bound within a boundary and occupies all of space and all of time.
