Drop into your body

It’s hard to feel present and powerful if you are mentally replaying the past or plotting the future. Blogger Maria Popova writes: “Our primary mode of relinquishing presence is by leaving the body and retreating into the mind — that ever-calculating, self-evaluating, seething cauldron of thoughts, predictions, anxieties, judgments, and incessant meta-experiences about experience itself.”

And while different traditions discuss various ways to get back to that state of presence, yoga has its own prescription: go through the body. Our bodies are vehicles of our mental-emotional states; they both reflect them AND affect them. This week practice anchoring your attention in the body to deal with incessant mental chatter.

HOW TO: Whenever you feel yourself becoming agitated or just busy, pause for a moment and drop your attention into your body. Check in – what can you feel in that moment? Pay attention to the inner workings of your physiology – sense your breathing, heartbeat, stomach grumble, and so on. Take few breaths experiencing the aliveness of your cells and sensing the quiet work that they do behind the scenes to keep your body humming along.