This week, what if you try sky-gazing? Many forms of meditation invite us to concentrate on nature. We must know somewhere deep within that nature calms us. Especially right now when we feel frazzled and at our wits ends, many have turned to sitting outside, going for walks, planting flowers or a garden, hugging a tree. The natural world grounds us.

Dzogchen meditation often uses the elements (fire, air, water, earth, space) as focus for concentration. One such form is sky-gazing meditation, which is exactly what it sounds like. Here’s how:

Find a place outside, whether sitting up or lying down (though lying down will obviously feel less strained on your neck). Take a few minutes to close your eyes, bring your breath into focus, and let those thoughts move toward the background. When you feel ready, open your eyes, and take in the wide expanse of the sky. Notice its fullness, its openness, its endlessness. See the space, and try to FEEL the space within you- in your breath, in your heart. See if you can just let yourself go into that space. Let yourself dissolve into it as your awareness focuses on the blue sky and the white clouds and nothing else.

Feel that the life of the earth holds you, even now, even in the midst of all this grief and death and uncertainty.

Feel the oxygen of your breath filling you, and the carbon dioxide you exhale into space, an endless dance between your lungs and the air around you.

Beyond our particulars, the sky IS. The sky lives and breathes, and the clouds move, and here we are, breathing.

We’re not used to counting space as an element, but it is. In many ways, space and sky and air are the pinnacle, because they hold everything else. The spaciousness of the sky teaches us to rest in spacious awareness, and to trust all that is.

Lama Surya Das calls it “infinite luminous emptiness.”

Can you find time to go outside this week for five minutes and let the fullness and emptiness of the sky nourish you?

This post belongs to my series on practicing the Eightfold Path. Find all my posts on Right Concentration here.