At Home in the World

Wise souls tell us that time and space are great healers. Slowing down and waiting patiently, they teach, can allow stress to slip away and feelings of wellbeing to re-emerge from deep within.

Moving mindfully in slow, simple, steady ways can help us find our way back to these feelings of ease and peace. Little by little and stretch by stretch, our bodies grow calm. And as the body settles, the mind begins to steady, too. It turns out that we don’t need to head to the far ends of the earth - literally or metaphorically - in order to recover feelings of spaciousness and ease. Sweet, slow and simple works!

In the moment it may feel like not much is happening. If you are the high achieving type, your brain may even wonder why you aren’t doing more. But there is beautiful magic at work here and when we emerge, we feel restored. Time, space and presence have shaken loose our ill-will and aggression, and have restored our clear-minded, warm-hearted way of being in the world.

Those of us who have befriended these gentle, attentive and unhurried practices sometimes wonder how others make it through the day without them. These easy stretches and gentle movements - accompanied by patience and presence - become good friends that help us reclaim our steadiness and ease, each and every day.

Meditation teacher Ram Dass was famous for saying, “Be here now,” an instruction that lies at the heart of all mindfulness practices. If we want to shine brightly, if we want to show up for our lives, we need to keep our awareness tethered in the present moment.

This is easier said than done, of course. The mind tends to get tangled up in distraction and delusion remarkably easily. Lucky for us, we have many beautiful practices that help us find our way back to the here-and-now, the only place where life can be truly lived. We move, we breathe, we contemplate, we see. We train our minds to spend less time trolling in the past or skipping into the future. We remember what it feels like to be here now - fully embodied and fully present.

This 11-minute guided relaxation practice is designed to help us shift into a quieter, clearer state of being that settles us into the moment, just as it is. Little by little, we nudge our minds toward the simple delight of resting quietly and paying attention to life as it passes in and through and beyond our beings. What a relief!

As I write this, we are settling into the heart of fall. The world is growing quieter - and, perhaps, so are we. We sense a stilling within, a settling of our energies inward.

And yet, we’re not quite ready for hibernation. We still feel life stirring and we still feel a need to move and stretch ourselves out into the world. In this lovely space we are invited to inhabit the middle ground, the place where movement and stillness meet, where doing settles into being, and then being rises back into movement. And on and on and on.

This 15-minute reclined movement practice explores these various energies, along with the possibility of saying yes to them all. We explore possibility of settling in and down, while still maintaining a sense of inner agency and freedom. We say yes with one way of being without saying no to the other. We affirm the possibility of simply enjoying the sensations of being alive, right here and now.

Hatha yoga classes traditionally end with a guided relaxation called savasana, or corpse pose. After having moved the body and freed the breath, we rest in stillness. Within this quiet space, we cultivate a steady, rich awareness that helps us feel deeply alive in the moment and utterly at home in the world.

In many ways, the entire session leading up to the last few minutes of yoga class is preparation for savasana. In the more active portion of class, we move and breathe and release tension, so that when we come to stillness at the end of class, we are primed to open to the clarity and tenderness deep within.

This 10-minute guided relaxation is, in fact, a savasana from one of the yoga classes I offer each week. (It even includes a little birdsong and a gentle rain shower.) I hope it gives you a taste of contentment, even if you haven’t enjoyed a session of mindful movement beforehand. Or, better yet, stand up and move gently for a few moments, and then settle onto the ground for what I hope will be a tasty dessert.

A few quiet moments feel like a balm and a gift, especially amid the din of our busy world. Just a few moments of rest nestled into the folds of our lives can reset our bodies and our minds, helping us cultivate steadiness and light even amid the challenges of life.

We begin the process of settling into a state of calm by bringing the body and mind right back to the present moment. This simple act of cultivating embodied presence changes everything.

Adding gentle movement to this quiet presence helps us release even deeper tension held within our muscles, tendons, bones and breath. Moment by moment and movement by movement, we are returned to a profound sense of wholeness in our bodies, our minds and in the world.

In this 36-minute gentle movement session, we turn away from the busy events of the day and remember that right here is where life happens. We rest, we move quietly, we watch and we listen. After a little while, we return to to the world feeling calmer, brighter and more like the person we were meant to be.

There is a common misconception in the world of yoga and other somatic disciplines that if we want to harness the true power of the breath we need to huff and puff in huge and aggressive ways. We are taught to sound like Darth Vader as we vault from one yoga pose to the next. We are taught to hold our bodies taut and then gulp big breaths of air… as if bigger is always better and more is always best.

Beautifully, there’s another way to breathe that can be even more potent and restorative. Ancient adepts suggested that we relax deeply into a state where the breath can be slow, steady, quiet and nearly imperceptible to the outer eye and ear. Sometimes called the subtle breath or the embryonic breath, this tender-hearted approach can leave us feeling relaxed and also quietly revitalized. It feels like a gentle breeze on a lazy afternoon.

This 14-minute practice offers an introduction to this subtle way of breathing and being in the world. What a relief to remember that less is often more. What a relief to shed our need for speed and over-caffeination. What a gift to explore the possibility of letting the body, breath and mind grow deeply calm… simple light, spacious and free.

Mostly we lead lives of distraction, bouncing from one thought to another. We spend a whole lot of time in our heads - thinking, ruminating, planning. This endless parade of thoughts can easily lead us toward a deep sense of depletion - sometimes even exhaustion. We get so tangled up in our small-minded preoccupations that we lose touch with the greater flow of life.

It’s good to have a brain, of course. But it’s also good to remember that we are so much more than simple thought machines. We have bodies that move and breathe and reach out toward one another. We have hands that create and legs that carry us and hearts that keep life flowing into every cell of the body. We have eyes that take in beauty and ears that listen to the sounds that tell us we are here, now, awake and alive.

The practices of embodied wisdom - yoga, meditation, qigong and modern somatic disciplines, too - have the power to return us to a wider range of human experience. They remind us how to enter the stream of deep awareness, of heartfulness, of love, so that we can feel awake in each moment and at home in the world.

This 32-minute guided practice offers a taste of the ways that embodied presence can cultivate vitality and light. It is slow, quiet and improvisatory. It nudges us, little by little, toward steadiness and calm.

Through practice we unearth the deep and life-giving vitality that comes with living fully and attentively in the here-and-now. Something shifts when we climb out of our heads and back into our bodies. Life blooms when we are reunited with the deep and natural intelligence that flows through all creation.

Taoist sages long ago created beautiful and evocative maps of our inner worlds to help us cultivate deep wakefulness and profound ease. Their imagery was poetic and profound. Their visions offered a path inward, in ways designed to help us find our way back home to wholeness and peace.

This 19-minute meditation (with a little bit of movement) explores what Taoist masters called the three heavens within us. These heavens, sometimes called fields of elixir, are said to serve as reservoirs of potent energy and vital essence. By nurturing the energy flowing through these three heavens, Taoist masters taught, we can cultivate strength, peace, longevity and love.

Whether or not you believe that heaven is within you (not to mention three heavens!), exploring these three regions of the body can be both soothing and enlivening. Sometimes by simply placing our hands on our bellies we can sense some inner ease or unease, some sense of being settled or a little off. Sometimes when we place our hands on our hearts we can sense warmth or coolness, buoyancy or depletion, lushness or a sense of feeling parched. And when we rest our hands on our brow, we might sense congestion or thickness or deep blue peace.

More and more I find myself astounded by the natural intelligence that seems to flow not just within us but through the whole universe. There are ways of knowing and being that are bigger and wiser than our small passing thoughts. We short-change ourselves when we are lulled into believing that our conscious thoughts are the sole source of intelligence. Maybe we would be wise to widen our vision just a bit.

Perhaps there’s a good reason that we instinctively place our hands on our bellies when we have a stomach ache. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised when we touch our hands to our chests when we are deeply moved. And any parent knows that there is something big going when we rest a cool hand on the warm brow of an ailing child. Maybe those old masters were on to something, after all.

Mostly, it seems, we just have to make room for this wise presence in the world to let it flow in fullest form. We need only pause, grow quiet and listen for the song of life to reveal itself to us, note by note.

We spend so much of our lives thinking, planning, replaying, figuring things out. Sometimes we even begin to feel like one big brain with a body whose job is simply to carry around all of our thoughts.

We are so much more than our puny thoughts and it can be such a relief to remember this from time to time. Embodiment brings us back to life - to real life in its full range of experience and feeling and sensation. Embodiment tethers us to the here-and-now, to the feeling of being awake in this moment, connected to all of the other lives that are also living right here and right now.

We know how to be fully present in the world when we are babies and small children. But often as we grow up we lose touch with this sense of being alive in not just our brains but our bodies, too. We sense that something vital is missing from our lives. And then we do crazy things like sign up for yoga classes (or even listen to guided audios!) to help us find our way back home to a deeper sense of presence in the world.

This 30-minute guided practice offers an invitation to return to our sensing, feeling, breathing and perceiving way of being. Through gentle organic movement, we remember the sheer delight of being able to move through space. We explore the possibility of riding the waves of life as they pulse through us. We remember how to trust our deeper intelligence, how to climb out of habits and ruts of own making. We remember how to shine.

Befriending the earth is a beautiful practice. We lie down, close to the ground, resting in stillness and perhaps even gliding through a few quiet, earthy movements. In the midst of so many challenges in the greater world, settling back into the arms of Mother Earth can be such a relief. We reconnect with the greater flow of life and remember how good it feels to invite equanimity and ease into our beings.

And, beautifully, as we hand ourselves over to the embrace of gravity, the earth not only holds us close, but she also somehow magically buoys us upward again into the arms of the great blue sky. Earth and sky… they are good friends and they are good teachers, too.

This 13-minute guided meditation explores these possibilities of both grounding and rising. We are invited to melt into the earth, we are invited to bloom into the sky, and then we consider the possibility of embracing both in the very same breath.

Lucky for us, we don’t have to choose one over the other. In fact, we can’t really choose one or another. We get to be friends with both. We are invited to be as steady and faithful as the earth beneath us. And, in the very same breath, we are invited to be as clear and spacious as the sky above.