Get Comfortable

Hi, welcome. There are multiple tutorials on yoga anytime on how to find a comfortable seat. We'll link to those below in the description. Our first meditation together is on how to tune into your inner knowing of comfort. I'm sitting in a chair.

You might be sitting on a floor. With a few exceptions, the guidance is very similar. So step one, snuggle into your seat. Just kind of wobble a little bit side to side and just really allow yourself to plunk down into your seat. Maybe deliberate inhale and exhale everything.

Feel a settling. Do that again, inhale and exhale. This requires a certain amount of trust and willingness to feel health supported. If you happen to be in a chair, you might spread your toes a little bit so that you also feel the earth. Don't rush this step, maybe even right here.

Let your eyes close or softly find a spot to focus in front of you, just allowing the grounding to occur. Ease up in the belly. Ease up in the jaw. Even let yourself slump just a little bit. Just for the purpose of like, yeah.

Just here. Once this feels established, like once you feel like you're sitting for real, the purpose of this next part is to tune a quality of attention within this ease. While maintaining this quality of grounding, feel the region of your heart. What can help is if you even, as soon as you bring your attention to the heart, often the breath will naturally be inspired. You can feel how the inhale wants your heart to grow.

You might even let it carry you up a little bit. You can kind of feel this lengthening and lifting. It might encourage your shoulders to roll back a little bit. The difficulty here is if this becomes the static posture, you might notice how there's some tension in your low back, some hardening in the mid back, and you won't last here. Maintaining this quality of brightness that you have in your heart, feel an inhale.

As you exhale, let the low back widen again, and settle back in while maintaining this natural blossoming of your heart. See how that feels, nice. You'll know that you're trying to find the right alignment when it feels like it's been waiting for you to discover it, that it isn't so much something you're making happen as something you're revealing. And now the skull, so if your eyes are closed or they're softly focused out in front of you, start to become aware of the weight of the skull. And because for most of us, we make a living with our skull somewhat thrust forward, it tends to be where it sits.

And so as you're looking for the skull's balance point, because you're gently internally seeking where the skull can really be supported by the spine, most of us find that it helps to draw the head back a little bit. And we're looking for the place where the neck tension is no longer necessary. So you'll know you've found the proper alignment of the skull when suddenly it feels lighter, so light that it's not even really there. And to help that buoyancy, to help feel that buoyancy, bring your tongue to the back of your upper front teeth, slide the tongue back across the upper hard palate until it finds that edge right behind, kind of feel that edge is the beginning of the soft palate. Just let the soft palate begin to dome, widen, let the jaw be easy.

And so the play here is that you feel supported, grounded, generous in your heart, open in your mind. And now the arms and the hands want to adjust to support this alignment. So let your elbows be just a little bit heavier, and let your hands rest on your upper legs. You might notice that you've chosen palms up or palms down. And the play within these meditations, all of the meditations that follow, are going to start with the suggestion of be comfortable.

Heart is an inner guided place, and because self-trust is the advanced practice, if you can sense that something needs to shift, or move, or alter, if you can sense a change that would allow you to feel more supported and more alert, then you trust that guidance. We'll be here for a few more moments now, and together we'll be exploring comfort and ease and attention throughout the rest of the season. Thank you.