Find a Comfortable Seat

In almost every yoga class, before moving into the sequence of shapes, the instructor starts with a prompt to notice what you are sitting on or focus on your breath. These are different ways of grounding. In this first piece of Cultivating Inner Wisdom, I invite you to do just that: find a comfortable seat. This is a place for you to slow down, tune in, notice your surroundings, and take a deep breath. One of the first ways of doing that is to notice the place where your body is touching the ground (or your office chair) and feel into it. Scan your body for tightness, places where you are gripping, body sensations in your belly and chest and shoulders. You don’t need to do anything about those feelings–just breathe. 

At the very beginning of a yoga class, the intention isn’t to change, but to notice and accept. Change usually comes later with the practice, not with force or judgment.  One of the themes I will explore and revisit in this column is the relationship between acceptance and change, so I thought this would be a good place to start.

Cultivating Inner Wisdom is a weekly column of reflections all centered on the theme of returning to our own inner wisdom and finding joy in everyday experiences. Throughout life, and for a variety of reasons, women often lose touch with intuition. It’s easy to find ourselves overly focused on external cues and measures. Every choice becomes fraught with anxiety: am I doing the right thing? How do I know? Our practice here is to find ways of reversing that process and reclaiming our inner knowing. While there will be quite a bit of variation in our topics, some recurring themes include yoga as a tool for self-healing, healing your relationship with food and body, psychology and trauma recovery, spirituality, relationships, and parenting. 

Everything I offer here is an invitation to reflect, connect, breathe. Know that I am practicing with you, experiencing the same tight spots, the same resistance, and the same drive to find more happiness where I can. I write these weekly reflections through the lens of my own experiences, while recognizing that everyone is different. My “aha” moments might not be yours, but my hope is that the emotional truth of what I’m saying will resonate. I invite comments and feedback as I write this, as I believe that any form of writing is a relationship between reader and writer. 

Before returning to what you were doing before you started reading this, see if there is a way you can make yourself five or even ten percent more comfortable than you were before. Maybe a few shoulder rolls, or straightening your back, breathing in, and breathing out. I look forward to practicing with you again next week.