Embodied Check In

Join me and check in with your body, breath, mind, and heart. This practice is very spacious, so it can be done as a standalone or while you are engaged in another activity. As always, if the invitations don't work for you or don't match your body or experience, no worries- feel free to modify or ignore as you need.

Transcript

Hello, Hello, And welcome wherever you're tuning in from, Whenever you're tuning in from, No matter the time of day. So grateful to be with you and have an opportunity to practice together. Today we are just going to drop in, Check in with our bodies, Our mind and our hearts in an embodied way. So you can go right ahead and find a position that feels comfortable and accessible to you in this moment. And if you need to listen to this while you're driving or engaged in some other activity, That's perfectly fine. We're going to begin by using our eyes to orient to the space. So bringing your gaze either around the environment that you're finding yourself in or bringing your gaze with conscious and intentional awareness on whatever it is that you are doing. Noticing the quality of light, The play of shadow, And then continuing this process, Starting to tune into the breath. So just checking in with the breath and noticing what you notice if you're engaging in a more intentional cortical breath or if you're allowing the breath to move and release in a more metabolic way. So marrying the vision and the breath and beginning to notice your experience. So allowing the deeper experience to move into your awareness, Checking in with the physical body. So noticing the portals, These end points of fascia, The feet, The hands, The pelvic floor, And the face. And then taking a moment if you're able to just shift and move and let these parts of you breathe, Perhaps sound in a way that feels really supportive and really juicy. Encouraging any unprocessed material to just move on through. And then taking a nice, Big, Conscious inhale through the nose, Filling up the body to the best of your comfortable ability, And then releasing the breath through the mouth, Perhaps sighing on the way out, Finding a little voice. And then continuing to ride the breath in whatever way feels good. So choose your own adventure. If you want to release the breath into doing its own thing, Yes. If you want to continue to really move that breath, Yes. But we're going to check back in with the feet and then move the awareness up through the ankles, The lower legs, The knees, The meat of the upper legs. So feeling into the thighs, The hamstrings, The inner legs, Hip flexors, And then taking a moment to really feel into this really sensitive and complex bowl of the pelvis. Maybe sending some breath, Feeling into the glutes, The low, Low belly, The bladder. And maybe if it feels safe in this moment to just check in with the genitals, The perineum, And the anus, That place where the core meets the root. So breathing here or in the low belly, Low back, And then moving awareness up, Feeling into the sacrum, Upper belly, The mid back, The chest, Allowing the breath to move the rib cage, The heart space, Noticing any breast tissue, And then continuing this adventure up to the shoulders and pausing here at the shoulders to really allow a lot of space, Give yourself a ton of permission to shift the body, To move, To breathe, Maybe taking some shoulder circles or neck circles, Shaking out the arms, And then pouring the awareness down the arms, Into the elbows, Wrists, Hands, And fingers, Before traveling back up the arms, Through the shoulders and into the neck. I'm pausing here at the throat and the neck, Perhaps letting out a little sigh or speaking some words. And on your next exhale, Go right ahead, Release that breath, And then continue the journey up into the jaw, The mouth, Base of the skull, Feeling into the eyes, The brow, The forehead, The skin of the scalp. And then from here, Just taking stock of the mind, Noticing any stories, Any to do's, Any movement, Letting the body be as it needs to be or move as it needs to be, Being mindful of any activity that you're engaged in. And then finally, Zooming even further in to the heart space, And just meeting any unprocessed or alive emotional material with compassion and permission. Breathing in and noticing the experience and breathing out, Allowing it to be here. And then on your next exhale, You can go right ahead and shift and move the body in a way that feels good. Perhaps changing up the breath and walking the gaze around the space again, Mindfully, Turning your attention towards any activity that you're engaged in. And noticing what you notice. Thank you so much for taking a little bit of time to practice with me. Take good care.