February Theme: Expect the Unexpected

What grounds you when the ground underfoot feels fluid and ever-shifting?

Do you turn to the golden thread of your breath - nourished and strengthened by your practice? Do you lean in and notice where you can cultivate ease amidst the effort?

This month, as we move in unexpected ways and connect courageously to core strength, allow your breath in like a spotlight to reveal.  Allow your breath to mold the pose on your own time and on your own terms, illuminating and inviting space, ease, activation, or release to imbalanced areas of your own body. Realize where you need to back off and where you need to turn up the heat.

This month we connect to the deep core. Lush, fluid, wave-like movement. Flow state. Fire up the core and ripple through the spine. Tap into your strength to open. Feel the scaffolding that holds and uplifts your expansion on the mat and off the mat.

Feel your roots: feet and legs and pelvis. Get steady.

Feel your branches: buoyant heart, radiant spine, sensitive limbs. what are you reaching for? What is your deepest longing? Why do you keep showing up? Go deeper in. What do you want from this practice? What does their practice want from you? What are your deepest longings? What do you want to feel, embody, move through you?

Feel your unexpected blooms: What unexpectedly ripens, opens and offers grace, invites delight for body, mind, and spirit? The more we can cultivate a mindset to feel not force, to enjoy the journey, not just the destination, to stop and smell the flowers, to delight in simple moments of embodiment and integration as well as the high voltage of peak postures, the more we can create sensitivity and open to delight that is always blooming all around us. When I first bought the house my family lives in, it was August. And that next Spring, when the garden came to life with all the bulbs and flowers the previous owners had planted I was reminded of this idea of unexpected blooms. Even if you don’t make it to the peak pose, what bouquet of delight do you gather along your way?

And as we move out of this current Omicron surge, as we move towards longer brighter days ahead, spring blossoms preparing their roots to shoot from snowy ground, as we feel into the past two years of grief and ache and loss and ordinary holiness, I am startled by how moved I am by these words by Mark Nepo:

Everything is beautiful and I am so sad.
This is how the heart makes a duet of
wonder and grief. The light spraying
through the lace of the fern is as delicate
as the fibers of memory forming their web
around the knot in my throat. The breeze
makes the birds move from branch to branch
as this ache makes me look for those I’ve lost
in the next room, in the next song, in the laugh
of the next stranger. In the very center, under
it all, what we have that no one can take
away and all that we’ve lost face each other.
It is there that I’m adrift, feeling punctured
by a holiness that exists inside everything.
I am so sad and everything is beautiful.