Close your eyes and visualize your child sitting before you.  If your child is an infant, cradle your child in your arms.  If you child has not yet been born, carefully cup your tiny baby in the palms of your hands.  If your child is sitting in a chair, reach your arms out and hold your child’s hands in your own.  Breathe deeply and smile as you make eye contact with your child.

 

Gaze into your child’s eyes and let your sight rest on your child’s small round pupils.  Sense a weightless part of yourself slowly moving toward your child.  As you begin to move, you become smaller and smaller, your body reducing to the size of a grain of sand.  You continue to approach your child’s face, and float into one of your child’s pupils.  You feel as though you are in a cool cave.  It is pitch black.

 

Imagine the depth of deep space.  Sense the vast reach of this emptiness, spreading endlessly in all directions. With your next breath, inhale this open space.  Imagine this energizing space filling and moving about not just your lungs, but your whole body.  Sense your body opening to create room to accept this space.  This silent, open space spreads beyond your body and fills the room or place you are in.  Imagine it filling the Earth.  As you exhale, visualize and sense the vast emptiness of this silent, open space leaving your body, leaving the room, and leaving the earth, as it fills again the far reaches of outer space.  Hold your breath for a few seconds as you float amid absolute stillness.

 

Now, breathing comfortably, visualize a bright pinpoint of white light centered within the heart of the deep, black, void of space.  Watch the light as it grows larger and begins to pulse. The pulse is familiar to you.  It pulses in rhythm with your beating heart.   Sense it.  Move with it.  Breathe deeply and slow the rhythm so that it meets the internal rhythm of your breathing.  In and out.  In and out.

 

As you begin to breathe in time with the pulse, you feel yourself moving toward the light.  The light is millions of miles away, yet the journey is effortless.  Time is imperceptible, as the bright pinpoint of white light grows larger and brighter.  You continue to travel toward the light as it becomes a large round, brilliantly glowing, shiny, white orb.  The orb burns bright but you can safely look directly at it.   Gaze at the white orb. As you do,  a penetrating blue light appears in its center. Your breathing is steady and slow.

 

The blue light slowly grows larger and larger, increasing slightly each time your heart beats. As it grows, you come to see that it is has three dimensions.  It is a sphere.     

 

Look deeply into the blue sphere.  Clear your mind.  With crisp clarity, you realize that the blue sphere is the Earth.

 

Ever so slowly, you feel your body beginning to move toward the Earth.  All it takes is the slightest thought and, effortlessly, your body begins to move. You are still thousands of miles away, but becoming perceptibly closer with every breath.  As you approach the Earth, you reach your hands out toward it.  You can see your hands outstretched. You envision your hands cupping the Earth.  The white clouds are swirling around its edges, its surface a deep blue.   Sense your body, its position,– your hands floating in front of you.  You curl your legs into your belly.  You see the water, the land, and the clouds.  Relax into the beauty of this scene.

 

Breathe deeply as an image of your child as a newborn appears before you.  You notice your child’s beautiful features and that your child’s eyes are closed, soft lids covering them lightly.  Your newborn’s eyes open and you smile.

 

Look at your beautiful child and gaze gently into your child’s eyes.  Study the lovely white space at its edges.  Can you feel the cool briskness of the clouds that continually circle the Earth, producing rain and snow.

 

Now, bring your awareness to the deep blue of your newborn’s eyes. 

In those large round circles, can you envision the round, full, heavenly Earth on which we live and which sustains every moment of our existence.

 

Continue to gaze into your child’s eyes.  Breathing deeply, look into your child’s black pupils and consider the vastness of space. From so small a place, a portal to the cosmos.  

 

Smile as you sense your child’s infinite presence, your child’s infinite wisdom, your child’s infinite embrace. 

 

Every time you see or visualize your child, every time you look into your child’s eyes, your awareness can open to the infinite in your child.

 

Breathe deeply and slowly for a few minutes and contemplate whether the cosmos gave birth first to your child or to the Earth.

 

--End of meditation