Breath Upper Left

Day of equal light and shadow 🌗 ⁣
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We are sitting on the point of a fulcrum. We’re walking a high line over a valley, tethered to past and future. We are balanced on the apex of a great wheel as it turns, slowly.⁣
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To practice balance, we are not still yet not moving. We are held on the tightrope by a rich inner dynamism, one that is always with us, a coordinated dance of opposing forces, acting in unison to keep us right-side up and hold us in harmony with the living strands we are connected to.⁣
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Today on the Equinox we are invited to hang in the balance of what’s here and what’s not, what we are conscious of and what is shrouded in darkness still. What we are leaving behind and what we are moving toward. ⁣
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There’s a perfect breath practice for this week’s Equinox, or any time that you’d like to cultivate balance and clarity in your system. By breathing through alternating sides of the nose for equal amounts of time, we are purifying two of the main energetic channels, or nadis. These channels, Ida and Pingala nadi represent the yin and yang / dark and light / lunar and solar energies we witness everywhere in nature, and within ourselves.

If there are any obstructions to the natural flow of these energies, the breath will bring them to the surface of our awareness to be seen and felt. And sometimes, our infinitely wise body-mind organism flushes them out in ways that are beyond our waking awareness. We’re left feeling rinsed, lighter, with clearer vision to meet what’s being asked of us.⁣
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More on the Equinox + a guided recording of Nadi Shodhana in this week’s newsletter. Thank you for the inspiration in yesterday’s class of balance infused by this breath! 🙏🏼

“And I believe in love. And beauty. I believe that every single person has something they find beautiful and that they truly love. The smell of their child’s hair, the silence of a forest, their lover’s crooked grin. Their country, their religion, their family. And I believe that if you follow this love all the way to its end, if you start with the thing you find most beautiful and trace its perfume back to its essence, you will perceive an intangible presence, a swath of stillness that allows the thing you love to be visible like the openness of the sky reveals the presence of the moon.”
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- Geneen Roth

🌻♾ Lion’s Gate ♾🌻⁣
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Today I’m thinking about the invisible portals that connect us to other places in time. How the vestiges of an ancient empire which lasted 30 centuries continue to permeate our culture with myth and symbol. How every set of human eyes that ever looked up at the northern sky saw the same tapestry of stars. How we are rooted and connected through the epochs by the stories that gave the planets and stars significance. How they’re etched now in our collective mind.⁣
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And I’m thinking about the optical-radio-digital portals to the stars we have at this unique moment in history. We get to participate in this unfolding story of the cosmos, and us, in one of the current frameworks of our civilization, our science.⁣
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Happy Lion’s Gate, friends. May we choose the portals that shape our lives with richness, meaning, and wonder. May we orient toward the mystery with feet on solid ground.⁣
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More on this origins of this day + a breathwork practice for lighting it up ⚡️in the full post on Substack.

There is a profound shift that can happen inside when we start to feel on purpose.⁣
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When we breathe consciously, we give the mind something to focus on outside of familiar thought loops. We can shift out of the high-paced autopilot state of our modern lives and give our body the chance to really relax. ⁣
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When we slow down and pay attention to what’s going on inside us by noticing the breath, often we’ll come in contact with layers of stress and uncomfortable feelings that we haven’t been able to deal with.⁣
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For those of us who have experienced trauma or have a hard time relating to our bodies, entering the body can bring up physical pain and trigger difficult memories connected to grief, loss, abandonment, and fear.⁣
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No feelings are wrong or bad. They only want to be acknowledged and felt. 🤲🏼⁣
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With conscious breathing, we can actively engage with the not-so-friendly parts of ourselves because we create a container big enough to hold it all. It can feel like zooming out and having the ability to see your life from multiple different perspectives. This newfound clarity allows you to create separation between you and what happened to you.
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And that’s the space where new possibilities come into bloom. 🌸⁣
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Join for online group breathwork next Wednesday under the Cancer full moon. Register at the link on my page 🌖