Calling the Shens Home

This meditation uses the names from Chinese medicine for the ‘spirits’ of the energy systems of our major organs – the Lung Spirit is the Po, the Liver spirit is the Hun, the Spleen spirit is the Yi, the Kidney Spirit is the Zhi, and the Heart spirit is the Shen. Altogether they are considered to make up our greater Shen, which could be aligned with ideas of spirit, soul, and wider consciousness.

Position

Sitting or lying in any position that is most comfortable.

Place a palm on the heart centre, and a palm on the solar plexus, and imagining a cord of light connecting both, right in the midline of the body.

Take a few breaths.

Read through the meditation:

I sit with myself. Sit with these points. Palm on belly. Palm in centre of chest.

I sit and I listen, listening and watching the connection between my two palms. Sometimes it takes a while, sometimes it doesn’t arrive, and sometimes it comes quite quickly.

Send a greeting of light from the palm on my chest, allow it to drift down to palm on my solar plexus.

Send a greeting of light from the palm on the solar plexus, up my core to greet the middle of my chest and I sit and I listen.

This is calling the Shens home, so if I become scattered or lost connection with the Spirits of my Self, I invite everyone to come home, so we can have some time getting into connection with each other.

Liver

As I feel the warm, gentle and cosy connection between my two hands, and the light lighting up my core, I say hello to my Liver, I say you are welcome here. I say hello to my Hun, the spirit of my Liver, thank you, and I am inviting you to come home. Thank you for your love of life, thank you for your love of choice. And your love of planning. Thank you for the gift of intuition, and my dreams. Thank you for helping me to be flexible, thank you for helping me to focus my attention through my eyes, to the things that I see. Thank you for pointing me towards things that I want to see. And in all your planning and all your business, sometimes

busy in my dream life, if you don’t feel you can move as much as you want to in my awake life, I call you home, I invite you to come home to nourish yourself, and if you want to explore, to explore spaces inside, this is where you live and you are welcome here.

Spleen

I say thank you to my Spleen, thank you to my Yi, for your reflection, your growing wisdom as you transform our experiences into our being.

Thank you for showing me how to settle, and when I settle that I sense that you also settle, I want you to feel welcome, I want you to settle in, I want you to feel welcome in our home that you have made so beautifully, all the things that you have chosen that have become our home.

Lungs

I turn my soft gaze to my lungs. Thank you for being here, thank you for housing my Po, and I say to the spirit of my Lungs, my Po, thank you for taking me in my conscious awareness from moment to moment, I’m so sorry for your losses, I am so sorry for the times when you have felt that part of you has had to go into the ground, as those we love pass through this life, and you are so delicate, and I feel so grateful that you have the courage to take us from moment to moment. To breathe through times that have been shocks, and yet you carry on, taking us from moment to moment, and thank you to my Lungs for housing and holding my Po, and thank you my Po, for taking me and holding me through moments, and carrying on breathing.

Kidneys

And thank you to my Kidneys, and my will, and my Zhi, I look back to all the will of my ancestors, and I see myself as a still point, a gathering space for all of their will. And I ask us all, to stop for a moment so that we can gather, and as my will carries on with every person that I meet, and every thing that I see, and every thing that I do, now, right now, I invite you to come home, so that we can gather, and get energy, and be a still point, and express gratitude for all of the things that our ancestors did that brought us to this point.

Heart

And then I greet my Heart, My Consciousness, my Shen, my sense. And I’m so sorry for the times that you felt scattered, and you felt you had to leave, and I invite you to home now, where it is safe. I invite you back in, where I feel cosy, and thank you for consciously connecting with all the other parts of my body. And thank you for the light that you bring, to my whole life, and thank you for helping me to connect with other people, and thank you for the joy, I promise I will always listen to you first.

Thank you.

Thank you all for being here. Thank you for being my life. Thank you for carrying me.

Thank you for making my home.

Deep breath.