Cue February

Feel better already, right? See ya January. You are so dark, quite gloomy and the pressures you load up for me to have a new me, a new word, a new habit are well, just a bit too heavy, especially when it's just so dang dark outside and all the time. Plus, it is winter! The whole world's creation downgrades and then there's us. New Years', new me's, should really be more of a spring thing! Anyone? February comes at me with all the feels. Valentines, of course and all things pink and hearts and love and hugging and chocolate, but also itty bits of nature's cue as early spring is slowly awakening. Ahhhhhhhh, slow. We all seem to long for it, it's in our nature to need it and Winter is the perfect time to cultivate it. When we become mindful, it's a start in helping us find slow. We set intention on the moment, in the moment. We become both the participant and the neutral observer to the whole range of our experience: physical sensations, our perceptions, feelings and emotions. We can begin to cue into this by setting a dedicated amount of time each day to do nothing. No checking your phone, or reading, or listening or painting your nails. Just allow being. 

Our yoga practice helps us hone our observational skills. Through asana, pranayama and meditation we discover there is far more to the practice than getting into physical shapes and refining our breath. We notice that with the practice we become increasingly skilled at noticing content of our mind and experiencing pause before projection of pattern comes into our bodies and the world. We slowly begin to break through our deeply rooted patterns of a lifetime of conditioning that have kept us unhealthy, ineffectual and, well, sort of stuck. Slowing down invites us to connect our mind and our physical body where we can then let go of anxiety due to tension between our projections and what is true. As we pay attention to what shows up, we may experience a sense of discomfort, a desire to get the heck away from that! But, if we slow and stay with an observational mind and we don't run away from the heat of discomfort, we gain the gift of insight into the fact that all things can and do change. 

In appreciation of slower…and you,

Jill