Hi, and welcome to Day Four of our seven day meditation challenge on coming home to yourself. So I hope you enjoyed yesterday's session with Cory, where he explored how we can be alone, but not lonely. So how we can learn to be nurtured, renewed, and strengthened through solitude is such an important message during this time in the world. So today I'm going to share with you how we can shift from longing to belonging and therefore feel more connected, more present and more whole in our lives. So as we go about daily life, we tend to be very busy for most of us.

So in that busy-ness, it's easy to forget that beneath all the activity on the surface of our lives, there is a connection to the rhythm and the pulse of nature. There's such a strong tendency for us to go about life with this sense that there's nature and then there's us, there's the world and then there's us like we're separate from nature. But we are nature, we are planet earth. So in the words of author and philosopher, Alan Watts, "We do not come into this world, we come out from it just like leaves, come from a tree and waves come from the ocean. People come from the earth." So in his lectures, Alan Watts used to use this beautiful metaphor about our interconnectedness with life.

He used to say, you know, let's say you have a tree in the garden and every summer, this particular tree produces apples. So we call it an apple tree because the tree apples, that's what it does. All right. So if you have a solar system inside a galaxy, and one of the particular things about the solar system, at least on one planet is the thing peoples in the same way, an apple tree apples, then that's very interesting. So if a million years ago, somebody came from another galaxy, let's say flying saucers exist, they came in there flying saucer, and they had a look at the solar system and they looked it over and said, look, it's just a bunch of rocks.

And then they went away. And came back a million years later and realized, Oh, we thought it was just a bunch of rocks, but it's peopling. It's alive after all. So we can see with these examples, with these metaphors, that we are one with the earth, the way that an apple is one with the apple tree. We grew out of it.

We are it. And so I think for so many of us, we've become really disconnected from this awareness of our oneness with life, our oneness with nature. But the more we can remember that we are the earth, we are nature, the more we have a deep sense of belonging within it and trusting it. And the more we naturally begin to honor its rhythms, its pulses, both within us and outside of us instead of pushing or fighting against them. And if we can really listen to and align ourselves with the unfolding of nature, then we start to understand and feel that we are a part of something much larger than ourselves.

And so we find a greater sense of belonging, connectedness and ease in our space of life. So today, in our meditation, we're going to continue this contemplation on our interconnectedness with life. But also as you go about your day to day, I invite you to tune into the rhythms of your own body and mind and environment as much as you can. And every now and then, just pausing to remember that you are not separate from the living world. You are nature unfolding.

So as always, thank you for your practice and your presence here with us. And now let's settle in for today's meditation.