Which doorway are you entering through today?
Life is always presenting a doorway. Awareness enters. Something becomes visible. We learn to stay with it.
As you move through this Earth page, notice what is calling for your attention. You may enter through the body. Through the breath. Through awareness. Through relationship. Through rest. Or through the season itself. There is no correct starting point.
You may stay with one practice for several weeks or move between them as your experience changes. Allow the practices, reflections and teachings to meet you where you are.
This page is not a collection of content to complete. It is an invitation to participate consciously in the season and in your own experience.
Late Summer, the pivot
Late Summer arrives as the year begins its slow turn from Yang towards Yin. The fullness of Summer has not entirely left us - the days remain warm and golden and part of us is still turned towards the light - yet something has begun to pull us back towards ourselves.
This is the particular movement of Earth.
Wood moved us forward. Fire drew us outwards into relationship and the wider world. Earth remains touched by both, while adding another movement: a pull towards centre.
From the abundant growth of Summer comes harvest. What began as bud and unfolded into blossom now concentrates into fruit - something that can be gathered, received and transformed into nourishment.
Earth is the hub around which the other movements turn, a crossroads through which all directions meet. The ground beneath us and the centre to which things return. It has no need to move outwards to find things. Things find their way home to it.
Perhaps this is why Late Summer can sometimes feel as though we are standing at a crossroads: one part of us still facing the world, another beginning the slow turn inward.
Earth asks us not to rush towards either direction, but first to find our centre within the movement.
Meditation & Pranayama Practices for the
Earth Season
We begin with the body, move into breath and energy and refine into awareness. Each layer becomes more subtle and yet requires greater attentional clarity.
THE BODY IS THE TEACHER
Practices that help us trust direct experience.
A Short Yin Yoga Practice
Fire and Water meeting in Earth
In a spiritual sense, this is about what is behind us now, our longing for what is ahead and that friction of this meeting which is nothing other than a steady presence of now.
Fire gave us direction, meaning and this spark of purpose. Water, rootedness, memory and endurance. Earth is the embodied now, the fertile ground that holds both. This is presence.
A Yang Daoist Flow Practice
The purpose of this practice is to strengthen the legs, the quadriceps and to remember the movement of coming back home, to centre.
Remember, the more yang techniques can be more effective at engaging the mind, yet stop at the simplest thing that works. If it is distracting or difficult, let it go. Whatever gets you there is the one to do.
You can find support in the posture
Uplifted here by the posture itself. The position is an enduring posture and it is one that can support whatever you are feeling, whatever mood, whatever internal weather pattern moves through awareness, this posture can contain, can hold and can move with whatever shows up in the heart and body. The posture can support you.
BREATHING LIFE
Practices that reveal how breath shapes body, mind and energy.
Alternate nostril breathing
into breath awareness at the nostrils
Nadi Shodhana Pranayama is known as “the sweet breath,” and is a simple form of alternate nostril breathing. “Nadi” is a Sanskrit term denoting flow, motion or vibration and Shodhana means to cleanse. Pranayama refers to setting the breath and the energy of the body free. Intention here is create the conditions for a sense of balance and calm.
Chandra Bhedana Pranayama
This Moon piercing breath practice focuses on soothing the rising heat of summer, stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system, to calm and cool. This can be It useful during periods of over-stimulation. If you need to lift your energy, then listen to the instructions and go where you need to go. You always have a choice.
AWARENESS WITHIN EXPERIENCE
Practices that cultivate intimacy with what is happening.
Awareness does not sit outside experience looking in. It arises through the meeting of experience itself. These practices invite us to become more intimate with the movements of mind, attention and perception.
Follow the Ox Meditation
This is a Meditation focusing on the sensations of breathing in the lower abdomen. The breath is flowing very naturally without any manipulation and the focus stays on the lower abdomen.
The Ox represents the muscular wall of the lower abdomen and we sit quietly only to notice how this Ox moves in a constant and steady pattern. No controlling or shaping the breathing, only feeling what is there to be felt and experienced.
Stillness in the ground, peace inside the breath
We begin practice once the breath has settled, with a focus on just how still the ground is, under the pelvis, the legs as a way of supporting the breath to relax and liberate itself. Sometimes we can forget just how still the ground is so, let the breath, receive the stillness of the earth, let the mind and heart receive the stillness of the ground, this ground right now which is nothing other than present moment.
Cultivating the Spleen channel
The purpose of this meditation is to give you the time to immerse yourself in the Spleen’s primary channel in a way where you know roughly where it is yet, the rest is feeling. The channels are pathways of consciousness with each representing a different kind of consciousness. Perhaps then, the interest is in feeling what moves within. For the month of September, you can cultivate this channel for yourself.
Thinking, thinking
The mind with its infinite reserve of imagination and distraction, always tries to find a final reference point for each and every moment of experience. Thoughts build like clouds but they also undo themselves if left alone.
In this meditation, as you pay attention to thinking, you might start to notice aspects of the process of thinking besides just the content of what you are thinking about.
“The position is like a centre and this is earth. It is that by which the ten thousand beings, or all living beings, have everything they need to live, everything to ensure maintenance and to give life in each moment.”
RETURNING TO LIFE
Practices that help integrate awareness into ordinary living.
This section holds the return into everyday life, where practice is no longer separate from living, but becomes a way of noticing what supports us, what nourishes us and whether the life we are living remains aligned with what we know to be true.
Earth & the Practice of Home
A short reflection on what it means to find our way home - not only to a place, but to the inner ground that supports us. Earth invites us to explore where we find belonging, stability and a sense of centre when life pulls us in different directions.
Earth & the Practice of Abundance
A short reflection on abundance as nourishment rather than accumulation, and the relationship between receiving and giving. Earth invites us to notice what sustains us, what we are nourishing, and whether we are able to receive what is already here.
Earth & the Practice of Inner Alignment
A short reflection on Shraddha and the feeling of being aligned with what we know deeply to be true. Earth invites us to return to our centre, not necessarily to find an answer, but to notice whether the direction we are moving feels true to the life we are living.
Seasonal Reflections
Finding Your Centre
These reflections are offered as a guided practice, held within the lens of embodied awareness and Traditional Chinese Medicine.
They are not questions to be answered intellectually, but a way of noticing how experience is already moving through the body, the breath, and the mind.
There is no need to arrive anywhere with them.
Simply read slowly. Pause where you feel drawn. And allow the questions to meet you where you are.
TO CHANGE - Seasonal Wisdom: Cooling the Heart Fire
In the cycle of the year, midsummer is the height of outward expression. Light is at its fullest. Days are long. Life moves quickly into connection, activity, and expansion.
In Traditional Chinese Medicine, Summer is associated with the Fire element and the Heart. The Heart, which houses the Shen — the aspect of consciousness through which we experience and are aware of life — governs our capacity to relate and remain open to life.
When we look at nature in this season, everything is in bloom. But even in abundance, there is a quiet intelligence at work: growth without rest begins to burn out. And the same is true within us.
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Sometimes in this season, life can feel full in a way that becomes slightly overwhelming. More social contact. More stimulation. More emotional movement. More expectation. And instead of feeling spacious, we may notice something else arising: a sense of being stretched thin, reactive, or ungrounded.
Not because anything is wrong - but because there is simply a lot of outward movement happening at once.
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The practice of Summer is not to reduce your capacity for life. It is to learn how to stay connected to yourself within it. To notice: where you are moving with life…
and where you may have moved slightly away from yourself.
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Just like a garden in midsummer needs both light and shade, we also need moments of inner cooling — places of pause, stillness, and return. Not as escape, but as balance. A way of letting the nervous system settle. A way of remembering the body. A way of returning to inner quiet while life continues around us.
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And so the question of this season is not: “How do I do more?” But perhaps something simpler: Where do I come back to myself in the middle of life?
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TO CHANGE - Midsummer Reflections: Returning to Your Own Ground
Take a few quiet moments with these questions. Not to answer quickly, but to feel into them.
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The Pace of Life
Where in my life right now does everything feel full, fast, or outward-moving?
Where could I introduce even a small pocket of stillness, simplicity, or space?
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Relationship & Reaction
When I feel activated or emotionally reactive with someone, what tends to happen inside me first?
Do I move toward them, away from them, or away from myself?
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Returning Inward
If I place one hand on my chest and one on my belly, what is the quality of my inner state right now?
What helps me return to a quieter, more steady place inside myself — even briefly?
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May you flow out into life and may life flow back to you.
Em x
Pranayama
In this practice we approach lengthening the exhalation in a step-by-step approach. As our focus shifts, without hurrying we can gradually guide our breath from its natural uneven rhythm, spreading the breath, evening out the breathing, towards lengthening the exhalation.
When we lengthening the exhalation, we are not looking to create tension or pressure, especially in the heart or head. If you are pregnant, have any heart conditions, move through the first three stages from natural breathing, spreading the breath to evening out the rhythm. This would be a good place to rest.