Yoga nidra: Lung meridian

Session text to read

Close your eyes gently.

Allow your body to settle onto the ground beneath you. Feel the weight of your limbs becoming heavier with each breath. Your heels, your calves, the backs of your thighs — all releasing downward. Let your arms rest a little away from your sides, palms turned softly upward, open like leaves falling.

Take a slow breath in through your nose, and as you breathe out, let your jaw soften. Let your tongue drop away from the roof of your mouth.

Now bring your awareness to your intention. Let it arrive quietly, like a single leaf touching still water. Your sankalpa for this practice: *I release what no longer serves me, and I trust in what remains.

Say it once inside yourself, gently, as if you mean it.

Now begin to travel through your body with your awareness. You are not trying to change anything. You are simply noticing. Witnessing.

Your right thumb. Index finger. Middle finger. Ring finger. Little finger. The palm of your right hand. The back of your hand. Your wrist. Your forearm. The inside of your elbow. Your upper arm. Your right shoulder. The right side of your chest.

Your left thumb. Index finger. Middle finger. Ring finger. Little finger. The palm of your left hand. The back of your hand. Your wrist. Your forearm. The inside of your elbow. Your upper arm. Your left shoulder. The left side of your chest.

Now bring your attention to the path of the Lung meridian — it begins deep in your chest, just below your collarbone, and travels down along the inner edge of your arm, all the way to the corner of your thumbnail. Feel this line softly, as though a warm thread of light runs along it. On the right side first. Then on the left. Then both at once, rising and falling with your breath.

Your chest is wide and open. Your collarbones are soft. There is so much space here.

Now simply breathe. Notice how the air arrives — cool and quiet — at the tip of your nostrils. It travels in, expands your ribs gently to the sides, lifts your chest. And then it leaves. Slowly. Completely.

The lungs are the organ of autumn. They understand that things must go. They do not hold the breath. They let it go, again and again, without effort, without loss.

If there is any heaviness in your chest right now — any quiet sadness, any old grief you have been carrying without noticing — you do not need to push it away. You do not need to explain it. Just breathe into it. Let the exhale carry it, the way autumn wind carries the last leaves from the branches.

Grief is not the opposite of peace. Sometimes it is the doorway to it.

Now allow an image to come. You are standing at the edge of a forest in late autumn. The trees are nearly bare. The air is crisp and clean, and it smells of damp earth and something faintly golden. Above you, the sky is enormous — wide and pale, the colour of first light. There is no wind now. Everything is still.

A single leaf detaches from a branch above you. You watch it fall — slowly, turning, unhurried — until it rests on the ground at your feet. You breathe in. The air fills you completely. You breathe out, and something you have been holding — you may not even know its name — quietly releases.

The space left behind is not empty. It is clear. It is yours.

Once more, return to your sankalpa. Let it arise from somewhere deep and still within you: *I release what no longer serves me, and I trust in what remains.

Feel the truth of it in your chest.

Now, very gently, begin to return. Bring your awareness back to your breath. Notice the weight of your body on the ground. Begin to move your fingers, your toes. Take a slightly deeper breath. Let it go slowly.

Roll onto one side when you are ready. Rest there for a moment.

And when you are ready, make your way back to sitting. Take your time. There is no hurry.

Welcome back.