This week’s meditation practice is designed to help you cultivate and tune into the emotion of awe.

This meditation was inspired by the fact that awe is one of my favourite feelings, it is just such a beautiful, profound, expansive, inspiring and soul-healing emotion.

And interestingly, but not surprisingly, there is a growing body of research exploring the science of awe and how it shapes our wellbeing, sense of connection and even our physical health.

If this is something you are curious about, I’d encourage you to read the paper The Science of Awe by the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley which you can find HERE.

Personally, like many, I feel most filled with awe in nature. Whether it’s the way the afternoon sun beams through the trees, the magical swirls of pink and orange that fill the sky at sunset, sitting on my surfboard surrounded by a pod of dolphins in the early morning sun, spotting whales breaching in the distance, walking round the corner of a rocky path to the glimpse of the most stunning beach with turquoise blue waters that glitters under the light of the sun.

So what is it about awe which is just so wonderful? And what is it about certain moments which stir this feeling of awe within us?

My thoughts are that there are a few contributing factors:

The first is an element of surprise.

It is unexpected. Seemingly out of the blue. It catches us off guard. It exceeds expectations of what we thought possible. And there is something beautifully child-like about this, which I think is why it is so captivating for us as adults to experience. Through a child’s eyes there is so much newness, wonder, delight, surprise and awe to be found in the world around them. But as we get older, the world becomes more familiar and less becomes new. So when we experience awe as in adulthood, I think in many ways, it brings us back into this child-like state of experiencing the joy and delight of surprise.

The second is these experiences offer a reminder of perspective.

The expansiveness of our surroundings tend to remind us, in a good way, that we are but a blip in the vastness of the world, the cosmos, the universe. The feeling of smallness and insignificance in relation to the bigness of our environment. Research refers to this feeling as the “small self” - that humbling yet liberating recognition of our place within the greater whole.

And thirdly is an element of connection.

And this connection may be with the person or people that you are sharing the experience with. But even if you are physically alone, there tends to be a sense of connection with Mother Nature, the universe or something bigger than ourselves. Even when we are alone, awe reminds us that we are never truly separate. We are one.

So I hope you enjoy this meditation, it was a lovely one to create for you. And after you have listened, you may like to journal to deepen this connection.

You might reflect on questions such as:

* When was the last time you felt a sense of awe? Describe this moment and consider what it was about this experience which made it meaningful for you.

* What environments, people or moments tend to evoke awe for you? Is there a common thread?

* How does awe feel in your body?

And while this practice is beautiful for tuning into the feelings of awe and wonder when we may not have immediate access to this in our everyday life, my invitation to you is to go out into the world and allow yourself to be open to wonder and beauty. And not from a place of searching for awe, because as I touched on above, one of the magical things about awe is that it tends to find us when we least expect it. But in order to experience these moments at all, you do need to be out in the world and open to receiving.

With love,

Alice x

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