So this morning I woke up to the sound of birds, probably about 40 robins, in my crabapple tree just outside of my window. It just felt really nice to hear. It's been a long winter here and in my bedroom the light was coming in and it was warm and I lay there way longer than I should have, just thinking about how much I love spring.And I thought about how primal that feeling is. We live in our cities and in our towns. Most of us are fairly removed from the natural world and yet something in us still responds to the returning warmth and light in a way that goes much deeper than just noticing the weather.Some part of us thinks the worst is over, good things are coming. And I knew the full moon was rising soon, this month's full moon, the flower moon. I started thinking about what that means. To me it means abundance. Abundance. Where there was scarcity, suddenly there is more than enough. More light. More warmth. More life.And I knew that this full moon episode needed a theme and I thought, that's it. Abundance. About welcoming more of it into your life. Because I think that most of us have a complicated relationship with abundance. We say we want more. More of the good things.But somewhere underneath that we carry beliefs that work against what we say we want. The belief that wanting too much is greedy. And that other people, better people, deserve good things more than we do. And that if life is going well, we should brace ourselves. Because it won't last. And these beliefs shape the small decisions we make.Whether we reach for the thing we want, or talk ourselves out of it. Whether we accept the compliment, or deflect it. And whether we allow ourselves to enjoy what we have, or just keep working. So tonight, as I take you into a state of deep relaxation, the unconscious part of your mind will remain more open, more receptive. And the ideas that we explore, that you deserve abundance, those ideas will have a chance to settle. But before we go any further, please make sure that you are somewhere safe and comfortable to fall asleep. The episode uses hypnotherapy and relaxation techniques designed to help you sleep. So you want to be in your comfortable bed, and not anywhere you need to stay alert. And just a reminder that I love hearing from you.If something is keeping you awake, and you would like me to make an episode about it, tell me. Tell me where you're listening from. Or if the podcast has helped. Or, and I could really use this one, tell me how I could do better. And if you have a recipe for crab apples, I would take that too. It's just nice to know that you're out there. And now, let's get you settled. And before we begin, if the light is not already off, turn it off now. Make the room as dark as you can. Dark really does matter. And take a moment to get yourself comfortable. Punch your pillow a few times if you need to. Find the spot that your head has been looking for all day. And pull your blankets around you, however it feels right. Some people like to be wrapped up tight. Kind of a blanket burrito situation. Warm and enclosed on all sides. And some people prefer light covers. Just a suggestion of warmth. We're all different. Just find the position that feels right to you. And when you're settled, take a slow breath in. Feel your belly first, and then your chest. And then let it go.Keep breathing that way as we continue. Nothing complicated. Nothing to count or track. Just that easy rhythm. Breathing in and breathing out. Notice the surface beneath you.Your mattress. Your pillow. The weight of your blanket. Feel where your body makes contact with all of it. Your shoulders. Your hips. The backs of your legs. All the places where you and the bed meet. And now, I'd like you to imagine that gravity has increased just enough that your body is being drawn downward. Feel it in your shoulders first. Imagine that your shoulders are made of river clay. That dense, cool, extraordinarily heavy clay that comes from deep riverbanks. The kind that holds the shape of your hand when you press into it. Feel that weight now in your shoulders. Pulling them down and away from your ears. Let them go completely. Let gravity take them. And your arms are growing heavier now. As if the muscles and bones have been replaced with wet sand. Packed tight and dense. The weight of it pulling your arms into the mattress. Your elbows. Your knees. Your forearms. Your wrists. Your hands lying open and still. Too heavy now to lift. Even if you wanted to, the pull moves into your chest. Your ribcage. Heavy and wide. Rising with each breath. And then sinking back. Your belly feels heavy.Your hips are pressing into the mattress. With a solid weight. Your legs now. Imagine them as heavy as concrete. Your thighs pressing into the mattress. Your knees.Loose and still. Your calves heavy. Your ankles. All of it sinking. And your feet. Your hard-working feet. Let them grow so heavy they seem to belong to the bed itself. Your whole body is heavy now. From the top of your head to the soles of your feet. Heavy and warm. And completely still. Your breathing.Slow. Your heart rate. Slowing. And now, I want you to focus more carefully on my voice. Let my words become the only thing that matters right now. If other sounds drift in. A distant car. The building. Settling.The hum of the world beyond your window. Just notice them. And then let them fade into the background.Always return to my voice. Let it anchor you. Guide you.Carry you. Deeper. The New Forest sits in the county of Hampshire, in the south of England. Not far from the coast, it was claimed as a royal hunting ground by William the Conqueror in 1079, which makes it nearly a thousand years old as a protected place. But the forest itself is far older than that. The oaks and beeches that grow here were ancient before the Normans arrived.Some of them have been standing for five or six hundred years, which means they were already enormous and old when Shakespeare was alive. The forest has been protected for so long that it has had the luxury of becoming truly itself wild in the way that only very old places are. Tonight is the night of the full moon of May. The flower moon. It has been called that for centuries by people who lived close enough to the land to notice that the world changed in May. That the long and difficult months of cold and bare branches were finally over.They knew this moon was not just beautiful. It was a signal. It meant the planting could begin.It meant the rivers would fill with fish and the hedgerows would fill with food. It meant survival was assured for another year. That abundance is coming.That moon is rising tonight over this ancient forest as it has risen over it every May. For longer than anyone can calculate. Carrying the same message it has always carried.The same promise. The sun still above the tree line is beginning its slow descent. The air carrying that particular warmth that means the cold has finally, definitely gone.You can tell by the scent. A deep, sweet, green smell that rises from the earth itself. From the moss and the warming soil and the millions of living things going about their business.Fine particles of pollen drift through the shafts of light between the trees. Catching and releasing as they move. Turning slowly in the still air.Tiny insects move through these drifting clouds. The whole visible air is alive with it. It's slow, drifting, abundance. The hawthorn trees along the woodland edge are in full blossom. This is the May tree. Named for the month it blooms in.And right now, it is covered so completely in white flowers that the branches are almost invisible. The scent of hawthorn blossom is sweet and almond-like and slightly wild. The bees move through the blossoms, doing the quiet work that makes everything else possible. And guaranteeing the berries that will follow in the autumn. Every flower they visit is a promise kept. This is how abundance works.One small act leading to another. Until the hedgerow is heavy with fruit. The bluebells grow and drifts beneath the oaks. Their soft blue-violet color settling into spaces between the tree roots. Walk among them and they brush against your ankles with the lightest possible touch. Their scent is cool and sweet and very faint. Something you catch and then lose and then catch again. There are millions of them in this forest right now. Every single one will be gone by the end of the month.This is their moment and they are entirely in it, holding nothing back. There's a lesson in that, if you want one, but mostly they're just beautiful. Along the bramble stems, threading through the undergrowth, small white flowers are opening, easy to overlook. But each one of these modest little flowers is a blackberry in August, fat and dark and sweet. Hanging heavy on the stem. The elder trees nearby are doing the same thing.Their flat white flower heads just opening, filling the air around them with a sweet heavy scent. By September those flowers will have become deep purple berries and the creatures of this forest will eat them with enthusiasm and some of them will become elderberry wine in someone's kitchen. All of that richness is already here, written into these quiet little flowers that most people would walk straight past. A robin moves through the lower branches of a nearby oak.It has a nest nearby, tucked into the roots of an old hawthorn, and early May keeps it very busy in the long grass at the meadow's edge. A hare sits perfectly still, its amber eyes open. Its long ears swiveling, its sounds too faint for human hearing, and somewhere in the hawthorn hedge, the dormouse has spent the entire winter curled and cold and barely breathing, but is now warm and fed and moving through the new world of May.The oaks stand enormous and patient throughout all of this. Their bark is silver gray, thick with moss on the shaded sides. These trees have been standing here through everything.There were people who worked in this forest for centuries, people whose names nobody remembers now. The charcoal burners lived among the trees for months at a time, tending their slow fires, their shelters made from branches and turf, poachers moving through the dark between the same trunks, knowing every path, pilgrims passing through, grateful for the shade and the stream water. All of these people moved through this light beneath these same branches, breathing the same May air in every one of them.On the night of the flower moon, would have looked up through the canopy and seen what you are about to see tonight. The forest doesn't decide who deserves its beauty. It simply gives every year, and yet so many of us move through our lives with a quiet, persistent feeling that abundance is for other people, that wanting more is somehow greedy, that we should be satisfied with less, that we should apologize for wanting things, that we should make ourselves smaller so as not to take up too much space.That feeling serves no one, not you, not the people around you. But the truth is that abundance shared multiplies. The tree that produces the most fruit feeds the most creatures.Generosity and abundance are not opposites of each other. They are the same thing moving in a circle. The stream runs through the eastern part of the forest. It is fringed with water mint and yellow flowers that lean toward the current in the shallow places where the sun reaches the bottom. The water warms slightly and runs clear as glass over pale sand. If you dipped your finger in it, the cold would be the clean, sharp kind, and then warmth would find you a moment later. Where the sun has been working on the shallows, in the still pools, the surface catches the light and holds it. Reflections of the trees above broken into moving pieces. The light is changing now. The soft afternoon warmth deepening into something rosier and quieter. The shadows between the trees growing longer. The pollen has stopped drifting. The bees have gone back to their hive. The forest is making its evening adjustments. Small daily shift from the busy world to the quiet one and then above the eastern tree line. It rises, the full moon, full and bright and enormous as it clears the top of the oaks and begins its low arc across the May sky, flooding the forest with a light that is different from daylight, turning the bluebell floor to silver and the stream to mercury and the white hawthorn blossoms luminous. The people whose names are long forgotten stood exactly here and they looked up at exactly this moon and they knew that the long wait was over, that good things were coming and they were right and the same moon that told them so is telling you the same tonight. The robin has returned to her nest.It is a small cup of moss and dry leaves and grass lined with the softest feathers she could find, collected over several patient days. Inside it is warm and perfectly fitted to her body and she has settled into it now with her eyes half closed. The stream is running below her and the hawthorn blossoms opening above her in the moonlight, in the long grass at the meadow's edge. The hare has lowered herself into a hollow pressed into the grass. It is warm and hidden and smelling of earth and green things, the long grass closing over it like a roof and in the hawthorn hedge. The doormouse is curled in its nest of woven grass and honeysuckle bark, its small round body tucked into itself.Seven months ago it was cold and still and barely breathing, but tonight it is warm and fed and sleeping. It's a world full of elder blossoms and warm nights and everything it needs. The abundance they will enjoy this summer is showing itself.The blackberries are already in blossom. The long warm evenings are already coming. The caterpillars and berries and seeds that will keep them through the season are already growing on the brambles and the elder and the oak.They don't need to believe in it or deserve it or earn it. It simply is. You can choose to believe in abundance for yourself. You can decide in this quiet May night with the flower moon flooding the ancient forest with its steady light that the good things moving toward you are already on their way. You don't have to earn it in some complicated way or make yourself smaller to justify wanting it. You simply have to be open to it and when that abundance comes you will find that there is more than enough to share.That giving some of it away doesn't diminish it, but the more freely it moves through your life, the more of it there seems to be. That is what the flower moon has watched over for a thousand years. The robin is asleep. The hare is still. The dormouse barely breathes in its warm nest. The stream runs on in the dark. The hawthorn blossom glows in the moonlight. The oaks stand as they have always stood, patient and tall and completely at peace, adding their quiet ring for another year, needing nothing more than this, this moon and the soil and the slow turning of the seasons. Rest now under this moon that has watched over this forest for a thousand years and that is watching over you tonight.With the same steady light it gives to everything, simply pouring itself out completely into the May night. The abundance that is already on its way will still be on its way in the morning. Tonight there is only this, the quiet forest, sleeping creatures, the ancient flower moon and you, finally still, finally resting, finally allowing yourself to receive exactly what you need.Feel how heavy your body is, how completely still. Your breathing is slow and deep and with each exhale you are releasing any remaining grip on today, on the week, on whatever you have been carrying that doesn't need to be carried tonight. Your pillow cradles your head, your blankets are exactly the right weight and warmth around you.The flower moon is watching over the world and you can rest, you can let go, you can sleep. Your body knows how to do this, it has done it thousands of times before. Trust it now, trust the darkness, trust the quiet. The robin is sleeping in her nest of moss and feathers. The hare is still in its warm hollow. The dormouse breathes so quietly in its honeysuckle cradle. The whole May world is resting under the moon's full light and you can rest too. Tonight there is only this, feel yourself drifting now. Your thoughts softening and losing their edges, appearing and disappearing like flowers falling in a warm breeze, impossible to hold on to and beautiful anyway.Drifting into the quiet, into the dark, into the deep restoring sleep that this night and this moon and this ancient turning world are offering you right now.