Side body stretches! Today we start with a guided meditation to check in to our hearts, pause, and listen to our own wisdom — truths that are often drowned out by day-to-day overstimulation — and then end with a side-stretching flow and psoas stretch cool down.
New month = new theme! For June we’ll consider what it means to be open to possibility, new ways of thinking about and experiencing the world around us.
Today’s class moves at a chill-pace. We focus on stretching and opening hips & hamstrings, along with sidebends and twists.
“How I linger to admire, admire, admire the things of this world that are kind, and maybe also troubled…”
—MARY OLIVER
Today we round out our theme of embrace for the month. Using blocks for support, we experience familiar poses in new ways while trying to soften the harder edges of the places we tend to hold our lives so tightly. Take the recorded class for free at morningdharma.com
It is often described that our sympathetic nerve responses of fight, flight, or freeze can be attributed to our ancestors needs to quickly determine whether or not there is a threa – to save themselves from being eaten by a tiger. Today, most of us are not worried about tigers but our sympathetic nervous system still responds to daily stresses as though the threat is real. Our brains can not tell the difference between perceived threat and a real threat. Using the mantra “there is no tiger” can often be helpful to remind our body that a stressful work or family situation may be uncomfortable but it is not as dire as having to flee or fight a tiger. In today’s practice, we embrace BEING the tiger with a tiger series of poses and a contemplative meditation.
“Embrace the wisdom of uncertainty.”—DEEPAK CHOPRA
The overall energy today seems to be a little drowsy so we start out with some slow, floor based stretches and then move into a more invigorating flow. We focus on core, hips, and side bends. We also contemplate what it means to embrace the wisdom of uncertainty and to open up to new ways of thinking that may differ from our previous perceptions.