Recent world events have me meditating on cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance is alive in me when my values do not align with my actions.

Cognitive dissonance is also alive in me when another person projects their values onto me, demanding I act in the world in alignment with their values, at the expense of my own.

I have been wanting to sit down and synthesize these thoughts in writing for a long time.

As I begin, I feel the internal pressure and external responsibility of speaking to something so polarizing. It can be easy for a subject like this to overwhelm the nervous system, causing us to bypass it entirely. Which doesn’t motivate any positive change.

Natarajasana or Dancer Pose is furrowed with narratives of Balance; like riding the wave of life and feeling balance as a dynamic process.

As we stand on one foot and catch the other behind our head in an active backbend, we are challenged to stay afoot. A beautiful metaphor for the sentient experience.

For the past year I have been building my online studio Body Poetry Space. Aware of the inundation of wellness information and online studios out there, I wanted to craft Body Poetry to be beautiful, intentional, and digestible. It is not designed to replace community practice. It is designed to bolster it. So one of the ways I have been experimenting with this intentionality is to focus our practice on a theme of the month. And January’s theme is Space.

One of the technologies I specialize in as a somaticist, is the art of focus.

When we practice any somatic discipline, be it yogic, meditative, or psychotherapeutic, we are inevitably going to improve the capacities of our attention. Whether through tracking sensation, resting the mind on the wave of the breath, or articulating a movement through anatomical awareness; we are giving our mind something to focus on and carving fresh neuropathways.

A threshold is a place where one landscape transitions into another. Where the river flows into the sea, the prairie crescendos into the mountain, the woods part for the valley. In my experience, nobody articulates spiritual thresholds more artfully than Irish-Catholic poet and mystic John O'Donohue (1956-2008). This is an excerpt from his book To Bless the Space Between Us:

Resonance is a phenomenon that occurs when we receive input from an external force that matches our natural frequency. When resonance transpires we absorb a vibration from the external force we are in contact with, and our own vibration is amplified. Resonance in nature occurs through electricity (the movement of electrons between atoms) and can be potentiated through mediums like precious metals, woods, plants, and sentient beings like humans and animals.

our essence as blissful awareness

The word Soma has roots in both Greek and Sanskrit; translating vastly differently from East to West.

Soma in Greek is translated as Body. Soma in Sanskrit is translated as Nectar or Amrita.

Amrita is sometimes thought of as a juice of immortality. In Ayurveda we work with the poetry of Amrita as the Yin to the Yang of Agni.

on reclaiming responsibility and staying grounded in our practice

The term Spiritual Bypassing was coined by American Psychologist & Buddhist teacher John Welwood in the early 1980’s and his definition was:

“the tendency to use (exploit) spiritual practices, ideas, and teachings to avoid dealing with unresolved personal issues (attachment wounds).”