Mostly we lead lives of distraction, bouncing from one thought to another. We spend a whole lot of time in our heads - analyzing, ruminating, planning. Our endless parade of thoughts can lead us toward a crippling 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 sounds that tell us we are here, now, awake and alive.

We live amid amazements. Changing leaves. Falling snow. Seemingly endless winters that eventually sprout into spring, and summers that return with their bounty no matter how much thinking we have - or haven’t - done. Life just keeps on happening, whether we show up or stay lost in our small and petty distractions. What a waste it would be to miss out on our lives.

More and more I am relishing the contented joy that comes with living fully and attentively in the here-and-now. Something shifts when we climb beyond our heads and back into our bodies. Life blooms when we are reunited with that natural intelligence that is larger than any one of us and that flows through all creation.

The practices of embodied wisdom - yoga, meditation, qigong, and modern somatic disciplines, too - soothe us, strengthen us, energize us. They cultivate warmth and light. They immerse us in the greater flow. They bring us back to life.

I hope you feel this, too. And I hope this 32-minute practice returns you to a deeper sense of vitality and ease. It is slow, quiet and improvisatory. It quiets the thinking, ruminating brain. It nudges us, little by little, toward steadiness and calm. And it slips us right back into the streams of light that flow within us all.

As always, I invite you to visit my home website for additional practices that cultivate steadiness and ease. If you enjoy what you find here at At Home in the World and would like to support this programming - and gain access to all of the offerings - please consider subscribing as a paid member. If you’ve already done so, a million miles of thanks. I’m so happy to share this adventure with you!

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit claudiacummins.substack.com/subscribe

The promise of spiritual practice is that it will help us find our way toward a deep and lasting sense of peace in ourselves and the world. Call it enlightenment or nirvana or wholeness or simply wellbeing. The hopeful proposition is that there is a way of being in the world that embodies profound wakefulness and also deep equanimity, even in the very same breath.

Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh called this inner sense of deep wellbeing the “island of self,” and he urged his students to return to this quiet refuge every day.

“If you don’t go home to yourself, you continue to lose yourself,” he wrote. “You destroy yourself and you destroy people around you, even if you have goodwill and want to do something to help. That is why the practice of going home to the island of self is so important. No one can take your true home away.”

Many different paths will lead us there. I find gentle movement, easy breathing, and a return to the experience of the here-and-now to be reliable friends as we continue to cultivate balance and equanimity within. These experiences nudge us in the direction of a little less confusion and a little more clarity. Sometimes that’s all it takes to shift the course of a day.

The ultimate teaching, of course, is that peace is already here, that we don’t need to go out searching for it. Making sense of this koan is advanced practice, for sure. How is it possible that the very thing we are seeking is already nestled deep within us, just waiting to be found?

My hope is that this 22-minute reclined practice will nudge us toward an answer, as we slip in the direction of wholeness and wellbeing. As always, please use my words as suggestions rather than instructions, and take care to feed your own body and breath in the best way you know. I hope you feel both soothed and enlivened by the practice. Thank you for sharing this time with me!

If you’re inclined, please visit my home website to explore additional essays about cultivating ease and peace, including this article about seeking refuge in the classic yoga posture child’s pose. 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. If you’ve already contributed, deep thanks to you. I am humbled by your generosity and your faith in these offerings.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit claudiacummins.substack.com/subscribe

Throughout the pandemic, my primary practice has been befriending the earth. I’ve spent a lot of time on my back, resting in savasana, practicing the deep meditation of yoga nidra, and sliding and gliding through quiet, earthy stretches and movements. In the midst of so many challenges in the greater world, settling back into the arms of Mother Earth has been a true balm.

I’ve learned, as I’ve become so happily earthbound, that the earth not only willingly 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.

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.

This 13-minute guided meditation explores just that possibility. 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.

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 earthsaves 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.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit claudiacummins.substack.com/subscribe

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!

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit claudiacummins.substack.com/subscribe

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.

As always, I invite you to visit my home website for additional practices to help cultivate steadiness and ease. If you enjoy what you find and would like to support this programming, please consider subscribing as a paid member. And if you’ve already done so, a million miles of thanks!

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit claudiacummins.substack.com/subscribe

Meditation instructions are simple: Rest your awareness with openness and ease in the experience of the present moment.

Simple, of course, doesn’t always mean easy. Often when we sit down to meditate, the mind rebels and we find ourselves spinning off into fantasies of the future or memories of the past. It takes patience and practice to train the mind to settle with steadiness into the here-and-now.

Many people give up when they encounter the restless mind of meditation. There are ways, though, to smooth out the process of learning to meditate - ways of sweet-talking the mind out of chaos and in the direction of peace. It’s well worth learning how.

My own mind, for example, finds it easier to settle into stillness when I slip into meditation through the doorway of gentle movement and breathing. Focusing on the sensations of the body moving, or settling into the rise and fall of the breath, somehow primes the pump of steadiness that allows the mind to begin to settle, too.

Sometimes I begin with a little movement, and then - as I settle - inject small gaps of attentive stillness into my movement flow. In the beginning, maybe I move for several moments and then “meditate” for two breaths. And then three breaths, and then five, ten, 30 or more, until eventually my mind has softened enough to truly stay, stay, stay.

In this 20-minute guided practice I offer a taste of this form of movement and stillness. We begin with gentle movement, with quiet gaps of stillness here and there. And then we slip toward gentle breath work, punctuated for longer stretches of quiet. And finally, we rest in stillness for an even longer stretch.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s all meditation, really. We start out with meditation in movement, and we end up with meditation in stillness. It works!

I hope you enjoy “moving into meditation” as much as I do.

Thank you so much for being a part of this adventure. If you’re interested, please visit my home website to explore additional essays about both movement and meditation, including an exploration of what meditation is all about and an article about how I finally learned to meditate.

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, which gives you access to more than 40 different guided movement practices. And if you’ve already contributed, deep thanks to you. I am humbled by your generosity and your faith in these offerings.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit claudiacummins.substack.com/subscribe

In recent years I’ve fallen in love with the qigong, a Chinese movement practice that is sometimes called Taoist yoga. The practice is gentle and rhythmic and guided by the breath. It seeks to cultivate harmony and balance, as practitioners explore movements that are sometimes more yang - sunny and stimulating - and sometimes more yin - quiet and grounding.

This fall I have been craving the slow, fluid movements of yin. These movements feel like moonlit nights and cool, cleansing calm. They are refreshing and restorative, and they nudge us back to a soft and settled way being. They feel like the perfect antidote to our loud, fast and over-caffeinated world.

I’ve found the qualities of yin slipping into my yoga practice, too, as I nestle onto the ground, exhale deeply, and rest in the quiet of pure being. My thoughts slow down, my belly relaxes, and my breath returns to its babylike freshness and ease. I feel drawn back home to my most steady and faithful self.

This 20-minute movement practice isn’t qigong, but it embodies the quiet and fluid qualities that feel like yin to me. In fact, all of these slow and earth-bound sessions are - in one way or another - explorations of slow, flowing yin. I hope you find them as soothing and restorative as I do.

You can learn more about all the many energies of embodied practice at my home website. If you’d like to learn more about qigong, this essay offers a primer, and this one offers a little more detail about the classic qigong practice of the Eight Silken Brocades. And feel free to join us for a Zoom class, where we incorporate qigong into our almost all of our mindful movement sessions.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit claudiacummins.substack.com/subscribe

The promise of spiritual practice is that it will help us find our way toward a deep and lasting sense of peace in ourselves and the world. Call it enlightenment or nirvana or wholeness or wellbeing. The hopeful proposition is that there is a way of being in the world that embodies both wakefulness and also equanimity, even in the very same breath.

Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh called this inner sense of wellbeing the “island of self,” and he urged his students to return to this quiet refuge every day.

“If you don’t go home to yourself, you continue to lose yourself,” he wrote. “You destroy yourself and you destroy people around you, even if you have goodwill and want to do something to help. That is why the practice of going home to the island of self is so important. No one can take your true home away.”

Many different paths will lead us there. I find gentle movement, easy breathing, and a return to the experience of the here-and-now to be reliable friends as we continue to cultivate balance and equanimity within. These experiences nudge us in the direction of a little less confusion and a little more clarity. Sometimes that’s all it takes to shift the course of a day.

The ultimate teaching, of course, is that peace is already here, that we don’t need to go out searching for it. Making sense of this truth is advanced practice, for sure. How is it possible that the very thing we are seeking is already nestled deep within us, just waiting to be found?

My hope is that this 22-minute reclined practice will nudge us toward an answer, as we slip in the direction of wholeness and wellbeing. As always, please use my words as suggestions rather than instructions, and take care to feed your own body and breath in the best way you know. I hope you feel both soothed and enlivened by the practice.

Thank you for sharing this time with me. Enjoy!

Get full access to At Home in the World at claudiacummins.substack.com/subscribe

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 gentle 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 the back and 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!

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit claudiacummins.substack.com/subscribe

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, though, and it can be such a relief to remember this truth 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.

And maybe, just maybe, for at least a few moments, we’ll even tap into the profound wisdom of the Zen masters, who taught that in the end “everything flows, nothing remains.” Enjoy!

Get full access to At Home in the World at claudiacummins.substack.com/subscribe