This is the first thing that we do.
We come in to a practice of awareness,
Of relaxation.
We notice what's here,
And the underlying reason for that,
And there's a lot of different ways that that works,
But one of them is that we're coming into presence,
Or into awareness.
Notice your response to those words.
One of the benefits of practice is that we come in and we work with our nervous system,
We work with our mind.
We develop more capacity to stay focused and present.
We relax our shoulders,
We stop clenching our teeth.
Our breath gets deeper and smoother.
From a polyvagal perspective,
We're coming out of fight,
Flight,
And freeze,
Which stays in the body as habits.
It's all of our experiences in our life come together and persist in our body,
In our nervous system.
So one of the things that we're doing in a practice is we're noticing those.
One of the things that we do is look around the room,
And we notice cues of safety.
So we're working directly on an unconscious body-mind level.
As we stop holding our breath and our breath gets smoother,
More continuous,
We might do practices of extended exhale,
Where we breathe out longer,
We soften our belly.
We stop clenching our teeth,
We relax our forehead.
Our shoulders start to come away from our ears,
The large muscles of the upper back,
Where we brace ourselves,
Start to soften.
And all of those are messages to and from the nervous system that it's safe right now to relax.
When we take it in with our eyes,
Our eyes directly communicate.
We don't have to use words.
And when we bring our attention to our shoulders and they start to soften,
It's a strong signal to our nervous system that it's safe enough to relax.
And then one of the things that might also happen is your arms and legs will kind of lose that restlessness and start to become more still naturally.
It's quite a miracle what it is that we do in just a few minutes of practice.
We have awareness,
We come in,
We pay attention.
As the nervous system settles,
The mind starts to become quieter.
That survival system-driven catastrophic thoughts and the busyness and chaos in the mind starts to settle.
So all of those have such huge benefits in terms of our daily life and our experience in our life that it would be worth doing it just for that.
Just to calm and regulate our nervous system.
It's worth doing it just to calm and regulate.
And as we do,
What also opens up is more access to presence.
As our nervous systems come out of fight,
Flight,
And freeze,
We can put our attention on what else is here.
It might be a sense of connection.
It might be this space of awareness.
We notice the space our body is occupying.
The space all around our body.
And we notice that we're more than what's in that space.
We turn our attention to our being.
So with this as the context,
We're able to appreciate maybe or acknowledge or really respect that we've come to do a practice.
What a wonderful thing that is to do.
To do a practice of connecting with what is bigger than just our personal experience in this moment.
And that we access it through our personal experience in this moment.
It's not separate.
Bring your attention to your whole entire body.
Notice your body from head to toes.
