For your health and relaxation, I present to you a guided meditation that will whisk you away from whatever stresses and tribulations you may face today, to a place so tranquil and remote, you may find yourself revisiting it in your daydreams.
So take some slow, deep breaths. Clear your mind and let your worries float away, and calmly observe your thoughts pass through without judgement. Finally, with a quiet sense of peace and curiosity, engage your imagination.
Slow down your rate of reading. Give each thought a chance to seep in and conjure interesting images in your mind’s eye—as we begin…
You have spent the hot afternoon walking high into the hills. At first, you had traced a path through the woods, but the cooling canopy of the trees has long since receded, and around you now, the heather and gorse have taken centre stage. You have emerged onto moorland, on a bright, summer’s afternoon. Around you, uncountable little flowers are coming into full bloom, and decorate the landscape with a fine spray of deep pinks, lilacs, golds and egg-yolk yellows. You can smell their sweet scent. It reminds you of honey.
As your feet crunch along the loose gravel on the path, you watch the bees, hopping from plant to plant, and gathering their flavoursome nectar. There is a constant background hum that reminds you of all the work that’s being done.
Bright green ferns fill most of the remaining gaps, bursting out from every cranny, with youthful vigour. On a warm gust is carried that earthy scent of fresh growth. You breath it in with satisfaction.
And all this outward exhibition is underlaid with a dusty brown heath, that harbours a chorus of other insects—beetles, millipedes, aphids, woodlice—a million strong. You crouch down and tease open a scutch of heather to peer inside. You see the entrance to a different realm. Shady, cool, entangled.
Standing up once more, you shift your gaze and look outward across the landscape. These hills, clothed in their late summer splendour, recline proudly before their audience, keen to show off nature’s tailoring. You let out a satisfied sigh, as you feel a sense of peace and stillness.
Here and there, where the landscape is hemmed with marsh grass, warblers can be heard, spilling fruity tremolos and glissandos throughout the reeds. And beyond, in the folds of the hillside, there are narrow openings in the terrain. Leafy clefts, where the exposed rock juts out in bold angles, are softened in part with vibrant moss and the sprigs of wild herbs.
Here, if you stand still and cock an ear, you can hear running water, so faint that the thin sound has become dissolved in the afternoon haze. But this distant call is just the signal you’ve been straining to hear. It’s the clue that tells you where to switch routes, leaving the footpath and converging with the winding way of the stream. Somewhere up here, in the toes of the foothills there is a secluded plunge pool where nobody goes. A place that promises refreshing coolness, and exudes a magnetism, a focal point of the living forces that work this landscape. You are drawn to its soul as much as its beauty, almost like a shrine. This pool is an old friend. It’s not far now.
A brief clamber away from the beaten trail leads you to an expanse of waving fern through which you must cross. Bristly and exfoliating on your legs, the ferns bow to your passage and a cornflower-blue butterfly flees your lumbering gait in favour of deeper cover. Once through the knee-length forest, it is down a steep scree-strewn slope as you plot your way through alpine rockeries of succulents and tormentil. Finally, you reach the peaty basin below the main path, hot and sweaty, and in desperate need that cool embrace of the water.
Here, amongst heather and rock is your destination. Private, nestled in a fold of hillside and unseen from the footpath, and yet open to the sky and sun. You feel a sense of excitement, anticipation. It will have been worth the climb.
The water cascades down stepped knuckles of rock, leading you the last leg of the journey. You watch your step as you hop across the stone, until you reach the the place you’ve been looking for. For a few moments, you are mesmerized by the stream’s current, splashing off the sides and plunging the last few feet into the pool, rippling like a torn, silk curtain. You’ve found the pool. It’s just as you remembered it being, and immediately, a wave of gratitude and happiness washes over you.
The ferns and mosses lining the bedrock, bend and strain to sip at stray droplets that come their way. The cool, white noise of the waterfall sings melodies too complex for the ear to cling to. Tones and notes that are at once higher than the song of a skylark and lower than thunder. It is a beautiful, joyous song that all creatures here understand and are drawn to. A life-giving song that quenches the thirst of the soul as well as the body.
You approach. The pool, deep and rolling seems to welcome your presence. Crisp, clean waters promise to reinvigorate and to lend you their perfect clarity. Where the stream becomes a pool, glistening bubbles spray out across the surface like pearls, scattering splinters of sunlight. You look around. There is no-one here. No-one, probably for miles around. It’s as if the spirit of the stream is calling to you. The heat has been relentless, and the climb has been arduous, and now, the pool offers you the hand of invitation. The babbling song draws you like a siren, reawakens something inside of you. A small spark of something wilder, untamed, primordial even. You have the urge to cast off the affectations of the world of people, to return to something simpler. This urge is Nature calling.
Without even questioning, you begin to remove your clothes. You want to enter the pool as naked as the day you were born. Immediately, the exposed parts of your skin feel the gentle breeze wash over them. This breath of air has danced over the pool and percolated with the waterfall before unfurling about you, cool and damp. With feline grace, it coils around your ankles, and your knees, and elbows. It runs upwards along your spine as you discard your garments one by one, creating a pile on the ground.
Finally, you free yourself of the last vestiges of society, laying on the grass the collection of logos and labels with washing instructions. You let go of the cotton-polyester blends, the elastic, the buttons and zips and laces—everything that seeks to conceal you from the outer world, to hide the world away from your skin. Each factory-made garment of armour is now removed. There’s a thrill. You feel vaguely deviant. Hope that no other hikers stray this way.
With wilful vulnerability, you are entering nature once more, returning to the embrace of Eden, and forgetting all of your teaching, your conditioning, your schooling, your shame—everything that tells you this is wrong, everything that belongs to the world of people.
You approach the edge of the pool, where the water spills over a bank of shale and continues its way downstream. You dabble your feet in the water. Cold! Icy coldness stabbing at your toes, and then lapping across the bridge of your foot. There is no way you will be able to endure it. It’s too, too much. Surely, you cannot go any deeper. Here you stand, stark naked, only to paddle up to your ankles. A wave of embarrassment creeps over you as you find yourself stuck at the threshold, but you resolve to shake it off.
Moving past these feelings, you try to picture the spirit of this place; try to sense it. Of the waterfall and of the pool, and the rocks that cradle them, and the flora that dresses them. A unique, ever-changing, dynamic form, with a vitality and personality of its own. A life, unlike yours in every way, that experiences the passing of thousands of years. You seek to connect with the essence of this beautiful, hidden place, and to join with it—just for a while—so maybe it can imprint upon you in some way, enough to take a little of it back to your everyday life.
With a long, deep breath, you quieten your mind. You reach out with your awareness, trying to sense its presence. Trying not to feel self-conscious, you ask the pool for its permission to enter. Respectfully, silently, you allow yourself to feel, to listen, to receive its presence. Whether you fully believe in it or not, you know that the act of doing so is nonetheless meaningful. The stabbing in your feet abates, and you take this as an invitation to continue. So inwards you wade. Slowly and tentatively, ringlets of ice rolling up your legs, where the pool’s surface intersects your being.
Under the water, your skin is adapting to the cold. Only at the transition, the border between in and out, does the sensation feel too much to bare. Slowly does it. Part of you wants to leap into the churning waters and get it over with, but the other, more reluctant part of you, wins out. Soon, you are up to your waist. And then your belly.
Your legs feel the constant flow of the currents, swirling about you, brushing against every inch of your skin. Above the surface, the rush of refrigerated air continues to pass over you. Somehow, you upper half shivers, as your lower half becomes accustomed to the even colder water.
Little by little, you continue to lower yourself in. When you are chest-deep, you snatch a gasped lungful of air, like your first breath. Now the water is at your shoulders. And finally, your neck. You are in. With a gleeful splash of the face, you complete your symbolic immersion. You have become part of the stream!
Lifting up your legs, you push off and swim out into the midst of the pool. How glorious it feels to be naked and subsumed by the flowing water. To feel every inch of your skin bringing to you a stream of sensations and information. Feeling a thousand eddies unravel across your body makes you realise that you have been shut off from the world around for too long. Your senses have been shrouded by cloth, by glass and brick, prevented from giving you the full picture of your environment, prevented from feeling a part of the world.
Your feet can feel the terrain, your limbs feel the friendly resistance of the stream’s strength. Your belly resonates like a drum to the beating of the current. Your chest lifts you upward, buoyed with joy. And you feel delight at the rippling surface that tickles your neck and shoulders. Your back presses into the current like a sail, feeling liquid winds thrust and bellow, then you twist and arch, into the stream, and align with it as if you are a weathervane. Instantly, the strong winds become light as breath, caressing up and down your spine.
You feel refreshed, alive, and in touch with your environment. It feels like you have returned to a home you have long forgotten. The prodigal human re-enters nature, rediscovering their instinctive, intuitive, animal part. You have let go of the artificial, the thought, the reason, the language of objects and concepts and abstractions. You leave your worries behind. You let your internal chatter wash away.
You awaken to unfolding experience; to the sensuality of the moment; to the ongoing creation of every instant, and of the spirit that surrounds you now, the spirit that lives in all things, imbuing them with life.
And the stream welcomes you back into the fold, with a tender, ever-changing embrace, and you feel washed clean of your worries, and the chattel and junk you haul around in your mind. You place your hand upon the rock that lines the pool and you can feel its sound vibrate from within. It is resonating, with the stream, with the fall, and the splashing and the froth, and the rush of air across its surface. You resonate too, and it emerges from your mouth as a laugh. A laugh of pure contentment. This is how you are meant to be. This is how living feels.
You swim around the pool, in circles, and then back and forth, going over to explore the other rocky outcrops with their collections of heather and miniature ferns and wildflowers, each a private garden. It feels instinctively right to surrender yourself to the elements, and slowly, your sense of self begins to loosen its grip, and to merge with the environment. Your bodily boundary begins to blur. Sensing so much movement across your skin, you feel aware of everything in this landscape. Hidden inside the currents and undulations are whispers of immense rain clouds and their bounty that sinks into the hills. The sphagnum moss and the peaty heather soaking up the water, allowing it passage, inching slowly downwards, channelling it across the hillside, towards ruts, openings, creases, cracks, until trickles become rivulets, become streams.
Swimming over to the waterfall, you play with the foam as it skitters over your shoulders. The bubbles add a fizz to the liquid. They aerate and make it feel soft to the touch. The complex, aqua-phonic chorus sings old songs to anyone who wishes to hear. Songs as ancient as the stone over which it tumbles, telling stories and myths, of long journeys and the great rolling forces that once moulded the mountains and valleys.
The flow of the water becomes stronger, the closer you approach. You say a small hello, and push yourself close to where the waterfall meets the pool. Strong hands now beat the surface. A shoal of invisible salmon seem to thrash beneath it. You long to experience the primordial forces at work here, and with a final push, you plunge your shoulders into the curtain of water.
Great palms, numerous and fast, rain down upon you, pressing hard into your muscle, reverberating through your bones. Liquid fists kneed and pummel your flesh. The rush and roar of white noise and tremulous pounding threatens to unravel the bonds of your atoms. A watery earthquake is unfolding over your being. Something greater and infinitely more powerful than you, and it allows you to intersect with it. It is ferocious in its intensity—relentless, unstoppable and imperious—this scythe of mountains. You are but a fleeting stone along its unending course. The water, on its many laps around the world, has calved open canyons, gorged out ravines, quarried cliffs and razed islands to oblivion in its unceasing dance.
What you feel is utter powerlessness, as your muscles are massaged by litres, gallons, tonnes of water, while the minutes pass. But you know that you too would wear away to nothing, should you stay here too long, absorbed by the glare of its burning, searing spirit.
You try to sense this living dynamism extending over all parts of this landscape. The flow of interchange, movement and energies. Entities like the pool and the fall and the bedrock and the heather and the hill and the sky and the clouds, are separated, you realise, only by the words we give them.
Here, in the pool you now feel, clearer than anything you have experienced, that these distinctions are only in your mind. Now you understand how all things are connected, how all boundaries are blurred, and how all spirit is overlaid as expressions of one singular fractal force—a tumultuous, gargantuan living system. It feels profound.
And here you are, a person, swimming naked in a pool, being washed by a small waterfall, on a hot summer’s day. Nothing more complicated than that. And all is well. You inhale the fresh scent of a million tiny flowers on the moist air, and you watch the pin-prick eye-brights that hang like stars over the water’s edge. A bee criss-crosses the pool, on its way to another stamen. The pool babbles on, where the waters, still and rushing, meet as old friends, catching up on their news.
Perhaps, it is time to leave them to it. Perhaps it is time for you to return to the land, where your clothes await. Silently, you thank them for their blissful hospitality. You take one more look upstream, wondering where all this water has come from. What things it has seen, and what green things it has quenched. And then you depart the white ribbon and swim, one last time, to where the shingle shore of the pool presides.
Your feet touch the ground, and you emerge from the water, belly deep, waist deep, knee deep. As you step from liquid to solid, you feel utterly replenished, and a little wistful. For a while, it felt so good to experience your true self, unshielded by weft or convention. But your clothes await, and your life awaits. And it’s a good life.
Feeling cleansed and now bathing in the glow of endorphins, you make your way down from the hills, back towards the shade of the glen, but not before turning around for one last look. The chorus of insects hum their goodbyes, the meadow grasses wave, the hills look on benevolently, and somewhere, you hear the stream sing on, merrily, somewhere out of sight, in the ever-deepening valley.
Return gently now to the present, with a sense of renewal and inner peace. Experience the slow rise and fall of your belly, as you breath softly through your nose. Imagine a positive energy entering your body and coalescing at your core, to give you the confidence you need to continue with your day. Feel that blissful stillness that lets you know that your fulfilment comes from within, not without.
And don’t forget, you can return at any time, for another guided meditation!
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