Botanical Building

Welcome to our botanical building, a vast preserve of natural beauty, hidden safely away from the relentless flurry of city life, just beyond the hills. You arrive just before the golden hour, when the boundaries between day and night dissolve into a soft, warm glow, that blankets the entire horizon. As the sun makes its final descent, your shadow draws forward to meet the coming night A lily pond teeming with life beckons you towards the garden's entrance, offering a glimpse of the complexity of nature waiting just beyond the walls. Before we continue on, let's start off with a little wind down exercise. Tonight's wind down is an exercise we call noting. It helps to sooth the mind. And once you've learned it, you can even use it if you wake up in the night. We're going to be counting our breaths and then, just gently noting thoughts and feelings as they arise. We're not trying to change them. We're simply labeling thinking as thinking, feeling as feeling. It may sound incredibly simple, but it can help to create a distance between ourselves and the thought and ourselves and the feeling so we don't get so involved in it. That in turn creates a more restful state of mind. In other words, perfect conditions for gentle restful sleep. So to begin, just take a moment or two to get comfortable, make sure you're nice and cool. Just starting with some big, deep breaths, breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth. And with the next out breath, allow the breath to return to its natural rhythm, in and out through the nose and feeling the weight of the body pressing you down into your bed. And in your own time, starting to count the breaths as they pass, one with the rise, two with the fall, just up to account of 10. When you get to 10, you can stop and start again at one. And remember, anytime you get distracted, the moment you realize you're distracted by thought, simply note it, thinking and return to the breath or if a feeling arises, note it as feeling and return to the breath, noting is very gentle, not harsh at all. Think like a feather, just gently touching the surface of a crystal glass. I'm going to give you a few moments just to keep counting the breath and noting any thoughts and feelings that arise. That's great, that's great. A concrete path curves around the lathe house a line for us to give each and every plant the attention they deserve. And tonight, the orchids call out to us with their open mouths. A deep shade of velvety red draws our attention. The rare blood orchid sits front and center gazing up at us from its aerial roots. The anatomy of this flower is unique. Petals of equal size mirror each other to the left and right of the bloom's silk lip while a trinity of sepals...