Hello Lovelies,
How's the holiday rigamarole treating you? Are you remembering to breathe? I hope so!
Those of you that study and practice with me know I like to take a pause at the beginning of practice to settle and deepen our breaths. I'm also fond of encouraging awareness of the way that deepening the breath creates an easing of tension and holding. When we hear that cue, we all tend to tune into physical sensations of tension and holding easing. There is often a more subtle mental and emotion softening that happens too. We stop gripping and holding onto our thoughts and feelings so tightly when we take deeper breaths. We add some space to the mix. Just like beating a batter or kneading a dough adds some air to increase the lightness and fluffiness of the cake or bread, adding some pause to your day can create some new lightness in you too!
It's not easy to create quiet time for ourselves, even for a few minutes--especially quiet time that has no intention or agenda accept to be quiet awareness. We have a lot of cultural pressure to always have our eyes on some aim or goal. This is critical for being able to work towards accomplishment. And...having some balance of time to let the mind wander and be curious without boundaries is also where we can find inspiration and intuition.
When I graduated from my Yoga Therapy training program on October 1st, I gave myself these last few months to not have an agenda about what's next for Yoga Grace even though part of me was chomping at the bit to dig in and create something new and exciting. It was hard to do that! It felt itchy and uncomfortable and I sometimes doubted the value of it. I even felt kind of guilty for not jumping back into all the promotional stuff I had put on hold while I focused on my studies. But I just practiced letting all that wash over me and turning back towards the pause.
And then about one month ago, I at a networking event of holistic health care providers someone casually mentioned that there was some space opening up for rent in Middlebury. Now, starting in January, that's where I'll be on Thursdays! It wasn't a big perseveration for me about whether to do it either. It just unfolded very easily and affordably--almost like it came to me rather than me grasping for it. Not only that but I've also been having these moments of total out of the blue inspiration about lots of great yoga with deeply transformative potential that I want to share with you next year in my classes as well as in my private practice.
So yea, if you do nothing else for yourself the rest of this year, I encourage you to give yourself the great gift of pausing and clearing the to do list. Try an agenda free hour or two or more! Take some deep breaths. Listen. Be curiouis. Notice what comes up.
It might take a few sessions. Transformation often does. It's worth the wait. I promise!
In that spirit, here is a poem for you to enjoy from a local poet and wonderful human:
Slow by Slow – 2 by Julie Cadwallader Staub
“Secret work has been done in us of which we’ve had no inkling.”
- John O’Donohue
It’s like yeast, they say
or a mustard seed
but I submit
it is also like carpenter ants
the way they work, hidden,
unbidden, unnoticed,
deep within the foundation, the walls,
the very structure of the house
so that one day
light filters through
where a thick wall stood
one day
you see a patch of open sky
where the hardest ceiling had been
one day a door
stands ajar that has been
locked for a lifetime.
Slow by slow
grace finds a way.
Slow by slow
still the gift comes.
