Healing Light

Above you, imagine a light. Soft. Gold or white or whatever colour feels warm to you personally. Not a harsh light. A gentle one. The kind of light that exists in the best mornings of the best days, when sky and sun and the quality of air have conspired to make everything look both warm and true.

The light is above you. And it is for you. Not in a dramatic way. In the quiet way of something that has been waiting for you to notice it.

Begin to breathe it in. Not metaphorically. Actually, in the way your body needs a kind metaphor to work with: breathe, and let the breath be the light entering you. In through the nose or the mouth, drawn down into the body, the light following the breath.

The light moves. It enters the chest first. The lungs filling with warmth on the in-breath. A gentle warmth, not heat, not burning. The warmth of a hand placed over the heart. The warmth of something kind touching you from the inside.

On the out-breath, the light moves further. Takes what was warm and spreads it. Into the shoulders on both sides. The upper back. The neck. The warmth arriving in these places the way warmth arrives in cold hands held near a fire: slowly, then noticeably, then deeply.

Breathe again. The light enters again. This time moving lower. Into the belly. The solar plexus, the place where so much of what we hold is held. The muscles here that have been braced and tight and holding without our permission now receiving warmth. Releasing. Just slightly. The warmth says: you can let that go for now.

And again. Breathing the light. Down into the hips. The lower back. Places where bodies store what they have carried. The light does not ask why these places are tight. It does not need the story. It brings warmth and warmth does the work without needing explanation.

Down through the thighs. The knees. The calves. The feet. The light is moving through you the way water moves through soil, following the available channels, reaching everything eventually, leaving nothing in the dark.

Breathe it up through the arms. The forearms. The wrists. The hands, which have held so much in their time. The fingers relaxing as the light fills them. The hands warm and open. Let them open.

The top of the head. The scalp, the temples, the jaw. So much tension lives in the jaw. So much clenching done unconsciously, in the dark of night and the stress of day, the jaw braced against things it cannot do anything about. Let the warmth arrive there. Feel the jaw drop a fraction. Just a fraction. Enough.

The light is through you now. From crown to foot. You are full of the same warmth you began in. Your body, for a moment, is a lantern.

The places that needed it most have received it. They will need it again, because the body is always accumulating, always working, never fully still. But right now, in this moment, you have given it what it asked for.

Breathe. Warm. Full. Lit from within.

That is all. That is everything.

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