An Invitation to Practice a Lake Meditation
As summer is winding down & I’m looking ahead to a busy fall—including helping both of my daughters with cross country moves as they begin ‘adulting’—I’m making a concerted effort to embrace the power of pause every moment I can. Thankfully, I’m fortunate to live along the shores of Lake Michigan which makes it easy to get away from the noise and distraction of everyday life and practice one of my favorite mediations—a Lake Meditation.
A Lake Meditation invites us to consider the captivating qualities of water as a metaphor for our own lives. The earth acts as a container, holding water in its nourishing basin. In turn, the water adapts to changes in weather and nature, all while maintaining its own identity. Using this metaphor, we can connect with our own inner stillness and depth, and build awareness and acceptance of life's ever-changing, moment-to-moment experiences.
If you’re able, it can be quite a moving experience to practice this meditation near an actual lake or body of water—connecting with nature and allowing the sounds of the water to soothe you—or by simply using your imagination to bring a body of water to your mind’s eye.
I hope you’ll give it a try using either the guided recording or script below.
Mindfully yours,
Ashley
Lake Meditation
Adapted from Original Script by Jon Kabat-Zinn
Begin by getting into a comfortable position. Focus your attention on your breath.
Now picture in your mind's eye a lake—a body of water held in a receptive basin by the earth itself. Note in the mind's eye and in your own heart that water likes to pool in low places. It seeks its own level, and asks to be contained.
The lake you invoke may be deep or shallow, blue or green, muddy or clear. With no wind, the surface of the lake is flat. Mirror-like, the lake’s surface reflects trees, rocks, sky, and clouds—holding everything in itself, if only momentarily.
Wind stirs up waves on the lake, from ripples to heavy chop. Clear reflections disappear. But sunlight may still sparkle in the ripples and dance on the waves in a play of shimmering diamonds. When night comes, it is the moon's turn to dance on the lake, or if the surface is still, to be reflected in it—along with the outline of trees and shadows. In winter, the lake may freeze over; yet teem with movement and life below.
When you have established a picture of the lake in your mind's eye, allow yourself to become one with the lake as you sit in meditation, so that your energies are held by your awareness and by your openness and compassion for yourself in the same way as the lake's waters are held by the receptive and accepting basin of the earth.
Breathing with the lake image moment by moment, feeling its body as your body, allow your mind and your heart to be open and receptive, to reflect whatever comes near. Experience the moments of complete stillness when both reflection and water are completely clear, and other moments when the surface may be disturbed, choppy, or stirred up—reflections and depth lost for a time.
Through it all, as you dwell in meditation, simply note the play of the various energies of your own mind and heart, the fleeting thoughts and feelings, impulses and reactions which come and go as ripples and waves, noting their effects just as you observe the various changing energies at play on the lake: the wind, the waves, the light and shadow and reflections, the colors, and the smells.
Do you feel like your thoughts and emotions disturb the surface? Can you see a rippled or wavy surface as an intimate, essential aspect of being a lake, of having a surface? Can you identify not only with the surface but with the entire body of the water, so that you become the stillness below the surface as well, which at most experiences only gentle undulations, even when the surface is disturbed?
In the same way, in your meditation practice and in your daily life, can you identify not only with the content of your thoughts and feelings but also with the vast unwavering reservoir of awareness residing below the surface of the mind?
In the lake meditation, we sit with the intention to hold in awareness and acceptance all the qualities of mind and body, just as the lake sits held, cradled, contained by the earth, reflecting sun, moon, stars, trees, rocks, clouds, sky, birds, and light, caressed by the air and wind, which bring out and highlight its essence, its vitality, its sparkle.
Continue breathing and meditating in silence now.
When you are ready you may slowly and gently open your eyes.