For the last year, I have felt this incredible aliveness in my body. I am in no doubts it is a combination of the yoga and mindfulness meditation I am practicing that is making me feel this way. With yoga, through movement and breath, you are decompressing joints and increasing circulation flow, allowing for a connection through the whole body. With mindfulness meditation, you are working on your “awareness muscle”, building up more and more awareness in order to find yourself more often in the present moment, which is where the mind can be still and less troubled with thoughts. I am loving this yoga-mindfulness combination!
My “aliveness feeling” probably kick-started with the meditation called Body Scan. In this meditation, you are lying down being guided through different regions of the body over a period of 15 to 45 minutes – it all depends on what you have time for! During the meditation you will be narrowing your awareness to a small region of your body such as your fingers on your left hand, and then expanding your awareness, moving on to a much larger region of your body such as your whole right leg. The practice can feel very relaxing too. However, the main purpose is to increase the awareness of your body and breath, and you will understand, on a deeper level, that you can always decide where you want to place your attention (narrowing or widening it, whatever is happening around you). The Body Scan is not about dozing off, even though I will admit it easily happens!
We are all energy, aren’t we? When I say I am feeling the aliveness in my body, I mean feeling the whole body as energy. A feeling of tingling and pulsation going on in various regions of the body. It is as if the whole body is buzzing, revealing its aliveness, whether lying down, sitting or standing up. You get there by giving yourself a space to simply notice the life energy within. It is available to all of us. We just have to move out of our busy minds and heads in order to notice it.
Lying down in savasana, corpse pose, the final relaxation at the end of a yoga class, I suggest to students to maybe notice how alive they are as they are simply lying down, breathing. Noticing the aliveness is perhaps most accessible at that time, as we have been practicing yoga postures, with a clear focus on what we are doing, consciously breathing through the postures, and arrived at a point where our minds can be calm and still.
Wishing for all to experience how alive, complete and whole we all are, at all times ❤️
