A practice in attention, embodiment and the intelligence of light
There’s nothing quite like a little internal tune-up with the morning sun as your companion. That first light has always held something rather magical for me—the transition from darkness into illumination, the warmth beginning to touch the skin, the world waking up and, if we give ourselves a moment to actually be there for it, something within us waking up too.
This is where conscious attention becomes interesting. We can understand all sorts of things intellectually, but for something to become realised, eventually we have to play in it. Get our skin in the game. Allow the idea to move out of theory and into experience. This practice is beautifully simple.
Step outside as the sun rises. Find somewhere comfortable to sit or stand and allow yourself to arrive. Feel the air, the temperature, the earth beneath your feet and the morning beginning around you.
Rather than staring intensely into the sun, soften your gaze and receive the morning light. Breathe deeply and begin to bring your awareness into the skin.
Feel the light touching you.
As you inhale, imagine yourself receiving it through the whole surface of your body. Let the warmth and energy of the sun seep through the skin, reaching into the tissues and cells, waking up the internal landscape.
Play with it.
Imagine every cell joining the morning, a little internal dance of light, breath and attention.
As you continue to breathe, move your awareness towards the centre of the brain and the pineal gland. In my own practice, I experience the sun’s energy moving into this space, spinning away calcification and clearing the pathway for greater clarity, perception and insight.
I have experienced this process directly through practice, and for me the decalcification of the pineal is not simply an intellectual concept—it is something I have come to know through my own body and awareness. I don't need to make that experience a universal truth for it to hold value.
““Keep your face always toward the sunshine—and shadows will fall behind you.”
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This is the beauty of experiential practice. Rather than accepting an idea because somebody else tells us it is true, we enter the experience ourselves. We bring attention, curiosity and awareness to the human instrument and discover what becomes available. The body becomes the laboratory. Spend some time here. Twenty minutes is beautiful when you have it, but this isn't another rigid prescription to get right. Let yourself build a relationship with the practice. Notice what happens. What changes in sensation? What happens to your breath? Your attention? Your energy? Your internal imagery?Your perception? Perhaps you feel warmth travelling through the body. Perhaps there is tingling, spaciousness, clarity or a subtle shift you don't yet have language for. Perhaps one morning you simply experience the pleasure of sitting quietly while the day wakes up around you.
It all belongs.
There are biological relationships between morning light and the rhythms of the human organism, but there is also the subjective, energetic and spiritual experience of meeting light consciously—and this is the territory I love to explore. Not everything we experience needs to be immediately explained. Sometimes we can simply enter into relationship with it.
Light has held spiritual significance across cultures and traditions for thousands of years, and I understand why. There is something rather extraordinary about consciously sitting with the source that illuminates our world and allowing ourselves to experience that relationship through the body. For me, this is where meditation becomes less about withdrawing from life and more about entering it.
Light.
Breath.
Skin.
Attention.
Energy.
Consciousness.
All meeting within the human sleeve. and this is why I continue to return to practice. We can read about consciousness, energetics, the pineal gland, meditation and the extraordinary intelligence of the human organism, but eventually our understanding has to find its way into lived experience.
Get your skin in the game.
Let your own evidence rise through your experience. Feel the change. Notice what opens. Stay curious about what you discover rather than needing to arrive at somebody else's conclusion. There is something wonderfully playful about that. A sunrise. A human body. Attention and the possibility that there is still so much about this extraordinary instrument we are only beginning to experience consciously.
So tomorrow morning, go and meet the light.
See what happens.