The Seasons Within

I am totally wrapped in the quiet of this Somatic Yin training, not quite ready to come back to the world yet.

We came here to learn, and the learning was beautiful and deep. But what I wasn’t expecting was how much of these two days would just be about receiving. Really receiving. Lying down, being guided, letting someone else hold the space while I finally... arrived.

I hadn’t done that for myself in a long, long time.

As teachers, we stop being able to enter a room without also holding it. Part of us is always tracking, always available, always on. We care deeply, you show up fully but we’re running on something thinner than we’d like to admit. (And as solopreneurs, we never quite switches off.)
And the things we teach and preach (embodiment, presence, empathy..) are often the first to go quiet in us when we’re running depleted.
That’s the strange irony of this work.
We end up teaching from memory rather than from feeling.

These two days gave that back to me.Not just knowledge but feeling.
The actual lived experience of being in my body, soft and unhurried. Of being met with care and real attunement and remembering what that feels like from the inside. Because that’s where empathy and true wisdom lives.
Not in what we know about it but in how available we are to actually feel it.

And as women, we carry so much without noticing. Receiving can feel almost uncomfortable, like something we haven’t quite earned yet. But this was medicine for exactly that.
I feel nourished in a way I’d forgotten was possible. Deeply grateful for and everything she’s holding in this training.
More of this, please. 🤍

For a long time, I practiced Ashtanga.
The same sequence, every morning, in the same order, beginning with the same breath. People who don’t know the tradition sometimes raise an eyebrow when I describe it, as though doing the same thing day after day so rigidly suggests a lack of imagination or a failure to keep things interesting.
But I was actually drawn to Ashtanga because of that. What I found in that fixed sequence was this deep, almost physical relief of already knowing what was coming next.

Life is unpredictable in ways we can’t always prepare for. The groundlessness of that can be exhausting, even when nothing is obviously wrong.
So to me there was something that felt almost medicinal about stepping onto the mat and knowing, with complete certainty, what the next 90mins would hold. Surya Namaskara A, then B, then the standing sequence unfolding in its familiar order.
My body knew the way. I didn’t have to think much or decide. I just had to show up, and the practice would receive me and carry me through, the same as it had the day before and the day before that.

Over time, so much was actually changing within all that sameness. Because the sequence never changed, I began to notice everything else that did.
Poses I had done hundreds of times could suddenly feel completely different because…well, I was different.

The sequence held still while I moved through it and in that stillness, I could actually see myself fully.

Ashtanga taught me so much and I am forever grateful for the tradition and its ethical guidance. I found so much ground and safety in it when I needed it the most.

I don’t think we talk enough about how much we need to feel safe before we can actually dive into our practice, in the real sense of that word. We arrive at the mat carrying everything and if the practice keeps asking us to figure out something new, part of us never quite settles.
What the repetition gave me was permission to land.
To be done deciding. And from that place, things could actually move.