Being aware of your awareness, presence, and breath creates the most significant changes in your body, mind, and world, but sometimes your body needs extra support so that you can feel great living in it! If you have been releasing old beliefs, patterns, and energies to reclaim more of your pure light, physically opening up areas of your body will allow the energy to move with greater ease.
Part of my releasing the unconscious conditioning included letting go of patterns like strict schedules, controlling the body weight and diet, caring about what others' judgments, etc. I realized I already AM that I AM, and will always be, so "what now?". I certainly no longer wanted to fit in with a society that values effort, struggle, force, and superficiality. I no longer identified as this body, nor tried to keep it looking a certain way. In my old state of being, I had been disciplined in many ways, but it was almost all the result of fear, survival, and appearances. It was built of effort to feel better by gaining self worth from external things. When you step fully into yourself, you can no longer give your power away to any external source, so how do you go about finding your true, innate motivation?
For one thing, I spent a lot of time just feeling my presence, tuning into the true passion of my soul, directing it to arise and expand through me and carry me into my expressiveness. I have admittedly spent endless hours here, feeling and savoring this internal vibrancy and aliveness. You could say, this has been my guiding force. At times it would lift me up and off into adventures that the mind had not conceived. When you do this, among other things that are in alignment with your essence, it expands a great deal of light, source, pure energy through your body. The body can feel such an immense amount of stuck-ness and strangeness to accommodate all this light! First, you open the energy valve with your breath, presence, and awareness. Then, you open the physical valve with movement, so everything can flow through the body and radiate into the world. One of my favorite ways to open the physical valve was teaching chair yoga. I think the laughter in the room moved more energy than the physical poses! Even laughter is movement.
I was lucky enough to teach 6 yoga classes a week a couple years ago, mostly gentle styles. It felt amazing in my body. Since 2020, I have not taught classes and boy oh boy, I feel it. Not only that, but my body has been communicating constantly that it would love more movement - not as a health need per se, but as a way to enhance our relationship of enjoyment, expansion, and expression. I walk and breathe a lot, and sing and dance and swim, but when energy wants to really flow, that simply doesn't cut it. Not if I want to feel my energy flow with ease, and allow the physical form to rebalance, realign and continuously rewrite and regenerate itself as efficiently as possible. Oddly enough, it has felt like moving mountains to get back to my practice. Maybe you know this feeling.
Everyday now, I spend about an hour with easy and delicious stretching and breathing. My morning routine is about 3 hours for journaling, feeling my presence and walling there for a while, stretching, breathing, coffee, schedule, FaceBook, email check, and finally shower, sing and dance to begin my day. This could probably be done in 1.5 hours, but I savor it, so I look forward to popping out of bed most mornings without hitting snooze. It's my special time.
If you've released the old survival pressure to get up and go, getting back to your old actions may feel impossible without one of the worlds best motivators - fear. Fear and anger are some of the strongest energies that helped us MOVE. The determination to follow a "schedule" beyond fear is really about loving myself enough to do what it takes to feel great and enjoy life. It has been a constant reprograming of myself into what truly feels amazing. I have met tremendous amounts of resistance along the way, like a mob of unruly teens saying "hell no, you can't push me anymore! You made me workout every damn day so you could look good for the outside world!". It's taken a lot of awareness and conviction to realize these old voices are not relevant to my life now, and to keep stepping beyond them into action, even when it feels like a blanket of old energy is pressing down on me. When you feel that blanket, remember it is not real, that it is part of the illusion, and that you can absolutely walk right through it in the blink of an eye.
Everything I do now either feels great in the moment, or it supports something that feels amazing. Like starting a business... I don't always love the computer work or figuring out all the equipment, but it creates a platform for the best feeling in the world - letting my unique expression flow. I don't usually feel like starting my stretching, but I fully know it will feel great in the process. One of the best tactics for meeting the resistance of transformation has been doing it with others. When I lose my motivation, they are like bright, shiny stars, to highlight my inner knowing when it's been a little smothered with that blanket of old energy. I do my stretching and yoga along with YouTube videos, with soul friends I've never met, but I love to see every morning. Half the time I do my own stretches based on my body's tight areas, while they do their own, but something about doing it with others keeps me on track.
When I stretch every day, I feel the energy channels open, energy flowing into areas of the body that were blocked, and so much lighter in general. I'm finally doing it for the true enjoyment of how it feels, and full enjoyment of life. This is a journey of being very soft and very strong at the same time. It is important to be firm in our conviction to do what is truly best for us, but equally important to be kind to ourselves when we don't take the action. I have, many times of the past decade, slept until noon and I don't regret one moment. When your body asks for rest, rest. When your body asks for movement, move. While our physical bodies love movement, the most important discipline you can have is being without judgment. Whatever you do, or don't do... never ever, ever, ever, EVER judge yourself. Namaste ✨