10/07/2025
One thing that yoga can offer us is a way of coming to our center. What does this mean?
🌟 Centering is a process that brings awareness in your mind and body. Awareness puts some space between your consciousness and your thoughts and emotions. It's sometimes called conscious awareness, or mindfulness. It's like taking step back to observe your thoughts, emotions, and breath, rather than being attached to them. This is both a practice and a skill. It is quite difficult to do at first, but it does get easier over time. Once you gain more awareness of your thoughts and emotions, you can then gain more control over them.
🌟 There might be times when reaching a center might feel impossible, and that's okay, I want to normalize that feeling. If that's where you're at, you are not alone. There can be acceptance in this. It's accepting all parts of yourself. If there's a part of yourself that feels like you can't accept yourself, you're invited to accept that part, too. A lot of this practice is learning not to abandon ourselves. It's Presence. Connection.
🧘🏼♀️ The Practice: 🧘🏼♀️
✨ We can start by noticing, or becoming aware of, our external environment. We might look around, notice what we can see... hear... smell... and taste. You're welcome to stay there and practice the awareness of something more external. If you want, you can start to bring your awareness to internal sensations, noticing what you can feel. That might be the felt sense of your body on the mat or the chair. You might notice the felt sense of your breath, the sensation of the air coming in through the nostrils, and back out.
✨ You can then imagine a line through the midline through the trunk of your body, a center axis, like a channel that runs from the base of your spine up through the crown of your head. You might shift from side to side to slowly start to come into it. You might bring your hands to your midline in a prayer gesture to help ground you into that center. You're welcome to breathe into it. Maybe your inhale starts at the base of your spine and rises up to the top, then maybe your exhale starts at the top and then flows into the bottom. Pausing there, and noticing. Where is your center? Do you feel connected to it or distant from it, or are you still searching for it? What's it like?
