Easing Into 2022
I wrote a long treatise on creating ease in your life and then lost it to the internet gods. It's a lesson for me to take a huge dollop of my own medicine and create a better system for my newsletter writing. I've tried to recreate it here with - ha - ease. Because it's all we have.
In the now dead essay (RIP), I invited you into a relationship with ease. This past Monday, fresh off the heels of a day-long silent meditation retreat with my teacher, Leila Sadeghee, I decided that I would wake up at 630 am every day for the rest of the 21st century and Monday would be the first day of the rest of my life. A pretty lofty goal for someone who has a complicated relationship with sleep and early mornings. You can guess how that went: terribly. God bless morning people. I snoozed until 730, which is honestly a much more dignified time to wake up, especially in winter. Rather than admonishing myself for not becoming a naturally early riser overnight, I allowed myself the space to feel good about the extra hour of sleep.
Why am I banging on about ease? Because this is hard. I hear it from friends, colleagues, neighbours, people in the street (eavesdropping provides many gems). Overheard on an NYC street last week:
Dog loving lady: 'Is your dog friendly?'
Anti-social dog owner: 'Yes, but her owner isn't.'
Major tangent, but I had to share that with someone. People are having a hard time right now. And you may be tired, not only from the pandemic - but the holidays, and winter too (if you live in cold weather climes). It is hard to live through a pandemic. It is hard to have the goalposts moved on you so consistently. It is hard to find solid ground only to have the earth break and shatter beneath you. It is hard to live in the unknown, though it is what we're being asked to do, repeatedly. Plans are made only to have them scrapped and rearranged. You're let out in the world only to be ushered back inside.
Since we know this shit is hard already, we sort of have a leg up. How do you create ease in your day-to-day even within the difficult circumstances of your life? If your relationships are difficult at the moment, what does it look like to foster sweetness within them? If you're tired, what would it look like to sleep an extra hour, messing with the ideas you have about what a proper yogi meditation devotee is 'supposed' to look like and lean into the person you already are? Does ease mean baking cookies at 10 am in an effort to subvert the diet industry's siren call to go on a cleanse immediately? Does it mean being the first to reach out to an old friend because you miss their laugh and they remind you of who you once were? Does it mean picking up a childhood hobby long abandoned because it was no longer 'sensible'? Creating ease in our lives will look different for each of us, but it's worth testing the waters and seeing what works.
Ease doesn't just mean 'make it easier', though it may. It's about intentionally creating conditions that give you soft edges to bump into amidst the chaos of this time. It's about letting yourself off the hook and inviting in pleasure when pleasure is in such short supply.
With this in mind, I've created a workshop called Ease In: A Somatic Movement + Meditation class. We'll work with this exact idea and help you craft what ease-fulness looks like for you this year. If you're in A Real One tier in my Patreon, this is a part of your monthly subscription. I've opened it up to come also as a one-off if you'd prefer to sign up that way.
Last September I embarked on a training called Body Temple Dance, a movement practice created by Adriana Rizzolo. This method is a 3-phase movement practice that helps people move through disconnection through noticing your body, emotions and what's present. We work with trauma to help transmute it. I have been the recipient of tremendous healing through this method and I'm excited to incorporate it into my teaching now. This monthly class will be a mix of this movement, meditation, breathwork and writing - and I plan to offer many more classes like this both in-person and online this year.
Ease In: A Somatic Movement + Meditation workshop
15 Jan 2022 3 pm EST/ 8 pm GMT
Zoom
90 minutes
You can sign up to the Patreon here.
Or you can register for the class here.