Grounding Meditation: Choosing to Make Room

Grounding Meditation: The One You Have to Choose

prepared for Spiritual Feast for May 3

[For the reader: slow and warm throughout. Pause generously between paragraphs. This is approximately 5-6 minutes.]

[Arriving]

Everything offered here is an invitation. You are the sacred steward of your own experience. Engage in whatever way feels honest and available to you right now.

Begin by arriving. Not by relaxing, not by letting go of anything yet. Just arriving. Right here, in whatever this moment actually contains for you.

Notice what supports you. The chair beneath you, the floor under your feet, the particular quality of light or darkness in your space. You don’t have to do anything with that awareness. Just notice that you are held.

[Finding your way in]

In a moment, I’m going to invite you to breathe out.

Not yet. But I want you to know that this is where we’re going. Because the exhale is the breath you have to choose. The inhale comes on its own, once you make room. But the release? That one is yours to make.

If connecting with breath is difficult or uncomfortable for you today, you might instead find this in another way. The release of tension in your shoulders. The unclenching of your jaw or your hands. The deliberate softening of whatever in your body has been braced.

We are all looking for the same thing: the thing we have to choose to let go of, so that something can follow.

[The exhale]

When you’re ready, breathe out.

All the way. Further than feels comfortable. Let the body empty itself of what it has already used up.

The carbon dioxide leaving your body right now is not failure. It is not waste. It did its work. It carried what the body needed to release. And now it has to go, so something else can come.

You don’t have to force the inhale. It will follow. That is the agreement the body has always kept with you.

Breathe out again. All the way. As completely as you can.

Notice that the body knows how to do this. It has been doing this, faithfully, without your permission, your optimism, or your belief that it would work. It just kept showing up. Exhale after exhale after exhale.

[Making room]

Stay with this for a moment. The space between the exhale and the inhale.

This is not emptiness. This is the threshold. This is the door held open.

You drove something out. And now there is room.

Whatever arrives in the inhale, let it arrive. You don’t have to name it. You don’t have to trust it yet. You just had to make room, and you did, and that was the act of faith. The rest followed.

Breathe out once more. Choose it. All the way.

And receive what comes.

[Return]

When you’re ready, let your breath return to its own rhythm. You don’t have to maintain anything. The body will keep the agreement it has always kept.

Bring your awareness back to the room. To the sounds around you. To the weight of your body in this moment. To the presence of others gathered here, each of them having just done the same faithful, active, ordinary thing.

Wiggle your fingers. Shift your weight. Take in a sound or a color or a sensation that reminds you that you are here.

You released something  and we’re willing to make space. Something necessary and nourishing followed. That is Beltane. That is the work.

Welcome.

This Spiritual Feast series is ©2026 Amy Beltaine, all rights reserved. You may freely reprint any blog post, website, or print resource. Simply include the following attribution, and if you print online, make the link at the end live:

Article ©2026 Amy Beltaine, all rights reserved. Reprinted with permission. This article and hundreds of others, along with other free resources are available at http://www.AmyBeltaine.com