Chair Tutorial

Hello and welcome. We're going to have a practice, a series of practices where we're using the chair. So it's really important that we find a very comfortable chair, a comfortable physical body sitting in the chair. So we're going to start with our feet. For me, I'm going to have my ankles right under the knees. I'd like for you to experience that too. My knees are touching the floor while seated on this particular chair. If that's not the case for you, I'd like for you to find a blanket, a folded blanket or some folded towels and just pull it right underneath the feet. So each time we come to the seated practice, we want to feel very, very comfortable, but we want to feel very grounded and sturdy and safe. We're going to find our feet pressing down into the blanket or the towels or the floor. I'm going to remove this blanket now so that I can have my feet on the floor and I feel more stable. The other really important piece for safety is that our chair doesn't move around. So if you're on a mat, please make sure that at least two of the legs of the chair are on your mat or on a rug at home. This is to prevent any slippings. And then we're going to find our seat through our buttocks. So for me, I have a little extra flesh here. I'm going to pull the flesh out from the sides of my body underneath my buttocks. And I right there, I can feel those bony parts right there in the butt. It's the sit bones. So as you press down into the feet, you're also going to press down and up out of the sit bones. This can feel very, very nice. It creates a lot of space and it creates a lot of grounding. And I'd like for you to just gently pull the belly button back towards the spine and find some length within the abdominals. So it's this pulling back and stretching up. And it allows for that upward movement to happen. And as you exhale, you'll feel the feet and you'll feel the sit bones. There's also a little bit of a tilt in the pelvis. Again, that's just to find those sit bones and to sit down and up and out of them. And it just feels really, really good and really, really comfortable. Then we're going to find the shoulders. We're going to relax the shoulders without losing the integrity of the spine. And we're just going to allow for the head to be sitting right there between the shoulders. And just do this little body scan down through the feet, up through the legs, up through the spine, and out through the crown. And we'll have a soft jaw, soft eyes, soft shoulders. And we'll begin.