Week 43 Update: Remembering to Ground.

For whatever reason, I found this week's challenge harder than I thought. Grounding - using the earth to support me - is something I thought I'd find reasonably easy. It's not something that's foreign to me - I practice it all the time on my yoga mat. Still, this week, my tendency has been to attempt levitation ... shoulders up around my ears, breath higher than it should be in my chest, muscles working to lift me up when all I want to do is surrender my weight down.

I'm not even sure why this has been so difficult. Perhaps it's the challenges I've faced in encouraging my son down for his sleeps, or the physical discomfort I've felt as my expanding belly expands even further (no doubt about it - that baby is a growin'!). Maybe the reason doesn't matter and maybe I'll never really know; but the truth is that even though it wasn't easy, even though I didn't find myself 'grounding' as frequently as I may have liked, the times I did 'succeed' (for want of a better term), it felt great.

I spoke a bit about this idea of grounding in my yoga classes this week. It's true that grounding can be a place of relative vulnerability - think of the way we 'expose' ourselves in a pose like Shavasana (lying down for final relaxation is what most of us know this as). When we ground, we surrender. And that can be scary. After all, we rather enjoy this illusion of control we maintain for ourselves. You can take a moment now to notice how easy or difficult you find it to surrender to your seat. Can you let the bits of your body that contact the floor (or chair, or earth, or bed or whatever it is you're in contact with) soften? What does it feel like to surrender, while at the same time maintaining a posture that is open, solid and fluid?

I remember someone repeating a quote to me once about having to surrender to get results. I don't know who said it or what quote they were referring to, but it struck me as rather profound. It can be so true: sometimes all the pushing in the world doesn't get us to where we want to go (though maybe sometimes it does). Sometimes we have to let go before we can go forward.

Enough rambling from me for now. Time to surrender with a cuppa for few minutes.