Ground in Yin

Welcome to Ground in Yen. I'm so happy to have you join me for practice today. Let's start in a comfortable seat. Let your palms be turned face up on your lap and just lightly touch the thumbs to the index finger pads. Take a moment to close your eyes.

Take a nice big breath in through the nose and exhale release. One more time. Inhale and exhale. Take a moment to just begin to witness the breath, to allow yourself to begin, to drop into a state of yen, a state of allowing a state of ease, So just notice what feels in the body like it's working too hard. Where might there be efforts?

Tension? Perhaps resistance? And can you allow your awareness to go there and invite that space to soften. Find yourself relaxing the shoulders. Relaxing your toes, relaxing all the muscles of the face, softening through the jawbone and letting the breath be quite natural, quite easy.

And as you are ready, just gently blink your eyes open. So now extend your legs out in front of you nice and long. And just shake out your legs. We're gonna bring the feet together so the heels and the balls of the feet come together as best they can for the butterfly. Make sure your heels are quite a ways away from the body. So there is a nice diamond shape between the legs.

From here, start to bring your hands onto your shins, lift through your chest. And you might choose to stay right here, or See if you can start to come forward, perhaps allowing the hands to rest and to wrap around the feet. We wanna find this first edge where we are feeling something. We are feeling the sensation of stress or of a stretch in the body. In particular, just opening up through the low back, through the upper back. And as we start to relax and release the head down, Perhaps we begin to feel an opening across the tops of the shoulders, all the way down the spine.

But once we find that edge, allow yourself to pause and to begin to embrace stillness. To notice the breath. And to allow the breath to be what moves, giving yourself this grounding gift, stillness in yen. Observe tension. A notice that when you just simply observe where we are efforting, where we are working, where there may be more active or young energy, We start to relax.

We ground in that awareness of just allowing. Not pushing, not forcing, but instead allowing, especially here for gravity, to begin to help us to release through the torso. With every exhale and you down further and further into the shape without effort. Let's take 5 more long inhales. And long Excels here.

Very slowly. Just allow yourself to roll up. Keep your feet as they are. Take a few breaths and just pause in stillness. Try not to move too much.

I'm gonna keep the feet together as best we can. And this time, we're gonna slide the heels in a little bit closer to the groin. So we changed the position here of the stretch. So it's reaching more of the inner thighs and the groin. Hands could wrap perhaps around the feet, pull back into the feet to just slightly lift the chest.

Maybe you stay right here or perhaps we come forward and you don't have to go too far before you start to find that edge here in this shape. So just allow yourself to come forward without pushing, without pulling, but finding that sense of allowing And we'll just take 8 long breaths here. Relax the head. Relax the shoulders. And then let yourself slowly rise up.

Just pause again. Take that in. And then bring your hands by your sides. Bring your knees in towards one another and just move the knees softly from side to side. We're gonna move into the Deer post.

So you're gonna take your right shin so that it is parallel to the outer edge of your mat. So your left shin is parallel to the top of the mat. Lyft through your chest. You might say right here. You might come forward over this front chin, kind of like crooked pigeon and find a bit of a fold.

And just stay here for about 10 breaths. Try to release into the heaviness of that back thigh. Again, embracing stillness and actually allowing the upper back perhaps to round. Toes are soft. And then slowly begin to press yourself up.

We'll swing our left leg around for fire logs so that our left ankle comes on top of the right thigh. Stack your fire logs try to really find stability and grounding through the buttock bones and the earth. And a little different, we're gonna walk our hands back and we're leaning softly back into the shape. Close your eyes. Move your awareness inside.

The belly stay easy and soft so that it's just moving up and down as we breathe. Just ten breaths. Let's continue to allow 3 more breaths. And then slowly bring the hands back up. We're gonna take this lesson forward swing your right leg around.

So left shin parallel to the side of the mat. Right? It shouldn't parallel to the top of the mat, so we find our deer pose on the side. And I feel quite different to lift your chest, and maybe you stay right here. Or perhaps we come forward and we fold over this left shin. Let that right thigh, right glued feel quite heavy.

And even though we are perhaps rounding through the upper back and giving over to that, can we soften the shoulder heads away from the ears? 10 breaths. And then slowly press Firelog, you're gonna swing the right leg around with the right ankle find the left thigh. So we think that we're sacking the fire logs as we can. And then bring your hands back behind you.

Lean softly back into the shape. So that we're allowing that left heel, that left ankle to give a nice little tractioning to that left thigh bone. Maybe close your eyes. 10 breaths. Allow. Don't worry about what the shape looks like.

How can we relax efforts and just let the body release? Two more breaths. Slowly walk those hands back up. Bring your feet onto the mat, windshield wiper the knees side to side. Come onto your back.

Hug the knees into the chest. Give yourself a gentle squeeze. And we're gonna swing our left leg over the right leg. Drop the knees over to the right for twisted roots. Opening the arms up nice and wide.

Let the left shoulder be heavy. Let the left rib cage melt down. Just five long inhales and exhales here. In how the knees to center unwrap that left leg. Bring the knees back in, wrap the right leg around the left, and drop the knees over to the left, twisted roots on the left side, 5 long breaths.

Bring the knees back to center. Windshield wipers and knees side to side. Hug the knees into the chest. Give yourself a big squeezed. Just a moment of happy baby, grabbing the outer edges of the feet, big toes, or backs of thighs.

Rock side to side. Just feel that freedom through the hip joint, through the low back, through the sacrum. And then squeeze the knees in one more time. Starts rock and roll forward and back, forward and back until you have the momentum that you can find your way back up into a nice, easy seat with the palm slipped up to the sky. Close your eyes.

Draw your awareness down to the heart space. Down into the base of the spine and just feel all the space that you have opened up. Hold on to that feeling of allowing that grounding through the essence of allowing, which is Ian. Bow the head in towards the hearts. Namaste.