Would you like to restore your spirit and save your soul, right here and right now? Here’s an idea: Turn off your computer for a little while. Turn away from the news of the day for just a bit. Bury your phone underneath a pile of pillows in the farthest reaches of the house.

Settle down and settle in, perhaps on the floor or a bed or even your favorite easy chair. Exhale deeply and turn your gaze inward. Notice the gentle drumming of your heart. Watch the wave-like rise and fall of your breath. Shift out of doing mode for just a little while, and enjoy the possibility of settling into a deep state of being.

Pay attention and be amazed, as poet Mary Oliver once advised. You have a body! You have a heart! You have tender thoughts and emotions. You care, you love, you are.

Just rest in the sensations of being alive, maybe even moving a little bit from time to time, when the spirit moves you. While you do this, know you are resting in the sensations of being alive. Be aware of your awareness, and be amazed by that, too.

If you need a little help, feel free to rest and breathe and move along with my words and suggestions in this 19-minute restful flow. The movements are simple - a little spinal undulation on the back, and then a little rocking and rolling on the side - and the instructions are gentle and welcoming. You don’t need me to guide the way - you know the way back home inside - but sometimes it’s nice to travel with a friend.

Not much has to happen, it turns out, to soften and to settle, to return us to our sane and steady self. To refuel and recharge. To just be present.

And then, after a little while, my hunch is that you will rise back up and out into the world again feeling just a little bit clearer, a little bit shinier, a little more whole.

If you’re inclined, please visit my home website to explore additional ways of cultivating ease and wellbeing, including this essay about how befriending the earth saves my soul daily. And if you’re enjoying these practices here at At Home in the World and would like to support this programming, please consider subscribing as a paid member. (Visit the site and click the subscribe button or select “My Account” in the dropdown menu.) If you’ve already contributed, deep thanks to you. I am humbled by your generosity and your faith in these offerings.

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Even the Dalai Lama agrees that the purpose of life is to be happy. But what exactly does that mean? What constitutes happiness, and how do we find our way there?

Does happiness come from savoring a fresh raspberry as it bursts on the tongue? Does it come from a sense of mission in one’s broader life? Or does it come from sensing a deep and radiant connection between our small self and the vast Self of the world? Yes, yes and yes!

In this 19-minute practice, we’ll explore three important pillars of happiness: pleasure, purpose and peace. This is a restful and meditative practice that could be explored sitting upright or perhaps tucked into a cozy chair with a cup of tea.

Spending a little time contemplating the experiences, actions and relationships that bring us alive can incline our minds toward a deeply embodied sense of happiness and wellbeing. This sort of contemplation can also cultivate clarity about aspects of our lives that might need a little tending and care. My hope is that returning to this practice from time to time might shine new light on the pillars of happiness in your own life.

I consider all that I share, in some way, to be an investigation into the ways we can cultivate happiness in our lives. Perhaps you’ll find a few more glimmerings of happiness on my website. While there, you’ll also find my very favorite essay about happiness - an experience picking blueberries with my sons. Enjoy!

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As we enter the new year, starting off with a little rest and restoration sounds like a good idea to me. We might give ourselves the opportunity to relinquish the year behind us. And we might open ourselves to a sense of calm and quiet possibility as we slip into the year ahead.

That’s just what I hope to offer in this 22-minute reclined practice. The exploration is simple and sweet and restful and spacious. We move a little, we breathe a little and, of course, we do a whole lot of nothing. We settle into slower rhythms, we wait patiently, and we trust the process of deep rest.

I hope you enjoy these gentle movement practices as much as I do. They feel like magic to me. Not much seems to happen as we gently slip this way and then slide that way. But by the end we feel like we’ve sloughed off our tired old skin and are somehow born anew. What a gift!

This exploration is inspired by the SATYA (Sensory Awareness Training for Yoga Atunement) practices of master teacher Tias Little. I am so thankful for the wisdom and expertise with which he has developed this lovely hybrid approach inspired by yoga, meditation, Feldenkrais, Hanna somatics and more.

Please visit my home website to explore a range of articles and essays that I hope will help us move toward greater calm and quiet in the year ahead. And if you’re enjoying these practices here at At Home in the World and would like to support this programming, please consider subscribing as a paid member. (Visit the site and click the subscribe button or select “My Account” in the dropdown menu.) If you’ve already done so, a million miles of thanks!

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Thank you for joining me for another guided practice. This week, we’ll consider extending our sense of awareness beyond the skin of the body and out into the greater world. We’ll do this first in stillness, then with gentle and free-form movement, and then we’ll finish up in stillness once again.

This 14-minute session is offered as an upright, standing practice. It could easily be explored, though, while sitting down. As always, feel free to modify my suggestions in ways that work best for you.

I’ve explored this somatic “game” hundreds of times, and each time I find new ways of painting out into the world. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do!

If you’d like to learn more about this exploration, you might enjoy this article I wrote several years ago that envisions yoga and movement practices not as exercises in mastering poses, but rather as explorations of the vital flow of energy that flows throughout all creation. One way or another, most of my offerings relate to this lovely and life-affirming possibility. Please visit my website to explore more.

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What a relief to have a practice to return to when the waters of life grow choppy. What a gift to remember to turn away for a little while from the news of the world and reclaim our inner sense of steadiness and light. And what a balm to restore our whole beings to a place of tenderness and ease, to remember the way back to unshakable wholeness and light.

I hope that you, too, find these practices to be little life rafts that help keep us afloat. I hope that you find the simple act of lying down, exhaling, and settling inward to be a wise and necessary act, in good times and in bad. I hope that you, too, find your practices to be good friends always ready to soothe the soul.

I’m here with another good friend to help us stay steady and bright in the season ahead. This 27-minute practice offers gentle reclined movements for the hips and the shoulders that help create spaciousness within. We surrender into the moment, we relinquish stickiness and stagnation, and we welcome into our beings a sense of tenderhearted vitality. Slowly but surely, breath by breath and stretch by stretch, we find our way back to calm and clear state of being.

I once heard a yoga teacher describe nirvana - the state of enlightenment yogis are supposedly seeking - as simply “an untroubled mind.” I loved that possibility so much that I scribbled the words onto a sticky note and stuck the note to the wall by my computer. Something in me softens every time my eyes land on those words: an untroubled mind.

Why stop there? How about an untroubled body? An untroubled heart? An untroubled soul? My wish is that somehow these practices nudge us - at least a little - toward that direction of being utterly engaged in the world, but with the mind, body and heart untroubled… calm, steady, bright and free.

Please visit my home website to explore a range of articles and essays I’ve written through the last several decades that I hope will help us move toward untroubled ways of being in the world. And if you’re enjoying these practices here at At Home in the World and would like to support this programming, please consider subscribing as a paid member. (Visit the site and click the subscribe button or select “My Account” in the dropdown menu.) And if you’ve already done so, a million miles of thanks!

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We spend so much of our lives looking outward to the world around us. Every once in a while it can be such a relief to turn our gaze inward instead for a little while. Closing the eyes and refocusing within can help us quiet the nervous system, recharge our batteries, and return us to what matters most in our lives.

In this 12-minute practice, we’ll consider the lovely possibility that we have a beautiful garden within where we can rest and savor the moment. We’ll call upon our powers of imagination and imagery to create a quiet oasis within us. Consider this a meditation, perhaps, or an opportunity to practice deep rest.

Sit upright if you like, or rest back in any comfortable position. You might even be able to do this while strolling through your favorite garden. Feel free to toss out any of the words or images that don’t ring true to you. And, of course, head off into your own inner journey any time you like.

I share many resources on my website that point us toward ways we can cultivate deeper calm and ease in our lives. I’ve even written about my own failures as a meditator, and the ways that gentle persistence - and lowered expectations - can eventually guide us toward deeper ease and calm.

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Thank you for joining me for another guided practice session. This week’s offering dives into the body’s core, exploring gentle movements that help us cultivate a long and spacious spine.

Our inner bodies need space in order to move optimally and support us as we move out into the world around us. Alas, sometimes life conspires to leave us feeling constricted, as if there’s not enough room for the rivers of life to flow freely within us. Gentle and mindful movement can help!

This 21-minute session is practiced on the ground or some other supportive surface. We begin in “constructive rest” position, with the knees bent and the feet on the floor. Tuck a pillow under your head if you like, and adjust in any way that feels appropriate for you. As always, please stay within your comfort zone throughout our practice. If any movement causes strain or discomfort, please stop, and then move in a happier way.

Please visit my home website - claudiacummins.com - to explore additional offerings. If you’d like to learn more about back health, my site includes this article offering some of my favorite resources. Enjoy!

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Once upon a time I relished traveling to the far ends of the earth. I loved pushing the boundaries, seeing just how far my body and brain could go. I found sweet medicine in setting goals that seemed beyond my abilities and then somehow - through drive, grit, or sheer luck - finding ways to overcome the impossible.

Obviously, I was young.

I doubt that I’m alone in finding that with age comes a renewed interest in the middle way. Heading off into far-away worlds can wake us up to possibility and adventure, for sure. But day by day and year by year, the sweet relief of coming home feels more like the balm we need.

We warm to the possibility that we already have everything we need. We notice that we don’t have to travel far from home in order to feel content. We consider the possibility that less is sometimes more. And blessedly, our expectations of ourselves and the world begin to soften just a bit, and in a good way. Sometimes - in a pandemic, for instance - we even embrace the possibility that good enough might just be, well, good enough.

Committing to these possibilities requires relinquishing some long-held beliefs and welcoming some new ones. It asks us to forsake the “no pain, no gain” mentality of our younger days. It requires a certain flexibility in spirit and in soul. As the poet Louise Gluck once wrote, “The extremes are easy. Only the middle is a puzzle.”

The SATYA movement practices of Tias Little feel to me like the perfect exploration of the middle way. SATYA explorations are soft and gentle, with rocking, sliding and gliding movements that can offer profound relief to the body, breath and mind. They are akin to the fluid movements of qigong, but they are done while lying close to the ground. And they offer the same feelings of renewal as restorative yoga, even though gentle movement is involved. I’ve never not felt better when I’ve emerged from a SATYA practice.

This 35-minute gentle movement sequence is an introduction to SATYA practice. It embodies the possibility that we don’t have to reach to far extremes in order to cultivate balance and wellbeing. Lying on our backs, close to the ground, we commit ourselves to soft, easy, pain-free movement. I hope you enjoy SATYA as much as I do.

You can explore this practice and all of my other guided practices any time at our At Home in the World website. If you enjoy what you find and would like to support this programming, please consider subscribing as a paid member. (Visit the site and click the subscribe button or select “My Account” in the dropdown menu.) And if you’ve already done so, a million miles of thanks!

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Ahhh, the breath… It’s our constant companion, our link between inner and outer, our good friend from the beginning to the very end.

We tend to take the breath for granted, though, unless it fails us or until we need it most. How lovely it might be to enjoy this ordinary miracle when it’s quietly humming along, keeping us alive without making the least bit of fuss.

In this 15-minute breath awareness session, we’ll do just that. We’ll cultivate a deep and abiding interest in the breath as it pours into us and back out into the world again. We won’t do anything fancy - holding our breath until we’re blue in the face or wheezing like Darth Vader. We’ll just let the breath unfold in its own beautiful way, like waves rolling up and down a beach, each breath as long or as short and as deep or as shallow as it would like to be.

Resting in any comfortable position - upright or flat out on the ground - we’ll explore the power of the breath to steady the mind, calm the body, and anchor us in the here-and-now. We’ll invite the breath to lead us to a space where we feel both vibrantly awake in the moment and at contentedly at home in the world.

This guided audio was created years ago for my Mindful Breathing CD as a gentle introduction into basic breath awareness. My hope is that it will share a taste of what spiritual adepts the world over have taught for centuries: The breath is a potent gateway between the outer and inner worlds. Anchoring our awareness in the gentle, oceanic quality of the breath can help us find our way back to the deeper waves of life that flow within us and beyond us, too.

Once we find our way to the breath in this way, we befriend the breath as a patient teacher and steadfast ally in our lives, grounding us when we’re spinning out of control and uplifting us when we’re feeling stuck.

My home website shares many more resources about the breath. This article about listening to the breath would be a good companion to The Mindful Breath. And this article I wrote long-ago for Yoga Journal offers a more structured introduction to the yogic breathing practice of pranayama. Enjoy!

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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.

Enjoy Being, a 15-minute reclined movement practice explores these various energies, and the possibilities 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 possibility without saying no to the other. We affirm the possibility of simply enjoying the sensations of being alive, right here and now.

The 15-minute practice is explored on our backs close to the ground. As always, though, feel free to vary the practice in ways that work best for you.

Many more practices are available for you to explore any time at our At Home in the World site. If you enjoy what you find and would like to support this programming, please consider subscribing as a paid member. (Visit the site and click the subscribe button or select “My Account” in the dropdown menu.) And if you’ve already done so, thank you for your generosity!

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