May has been big!

But not in ways you might expect

Hey friends!

How are you all doing? What is moving through you these days?

I’m so happy to be writing again.

May has been an expanding month for me. I was enrolled in an intensive course on The Female Body, with Kimberly Ann Johnson, where I learned that women’s nervous systems are wildly different than men’s (shock!). I learnt that the freeze and fawn responses tend to be more common in women, simply by way of our societal conditioning (good girl doesn’t take up space much?)

I also attended my first yoga retreat just last week, in the depths of a German forest. The theme was Rooted in Presence, and was a beautiful wrap up of the female body course I took, in that I had the chance to practice some of the concepts I had learnt.

For example, in the course we practiced perceiving ourselves and our environment through different channels, such as the thought channel, the sensation channel, the image channel or the movement channel.

We also discussed how being overly focused on our internal experience, as we often do in many spirituality practices, is not always what our nervous systems might need. And how orienting outwards and having a firm grasp on our environment is crucial for our sense of personal agency.

At the retreat, I learnt a new concept called sense foraging from my teacher Liina Tael, coined by neuroscientist Norman Farb. And I fell in love with it.

In short, it’s the idea that we can access various dimensions of perception when we engage with the world:

We can use our sense of sight and really take in what we are looking at.

We can engage our hearing, our smell, our internal sensations, our feelings, and notice how what we experience changes and shifts, based on where we place our attention— similar to the channels of perception that Kimberly taught in her course.

Being surrounded by exquisite natural beauty, with no phones and technology, and with the full permission to show up as I was, offered the perfect context to practice being, sensing and truly taking things in.

I learnt that there are so many anchors into presence, if only we dare to look outside what is known and familiar to us. This requires a beginners mind—another idea that gained a whole other meaning for me this month—

quite literally dropping the labels of the mind right down into the body, so that they become another language just waiting to be explored… The language of sense perception, that leads to a type of awareness that includes the unseen, the unspoken, the unknown—all encompassing.

We meditated, a lot. And contrary to my default orientation, which is one of inward focus, eyes closed and tuning in to my internal world, I kept my eyes open in almost every meditation—

something about craving a deeper connection with the environment I was a part of; and also a curiosity about exploring a new way to pay attention.

So yes, May has been a big month for me—in its utter return to simplicity.

in recognising that the truest luxury we have is presence.

in recognising that there is a deep intelligence moving through all things, including us right now—just waiting to be tapped into.

in remembering ourselves as sensing beings, not just thinking beings.

Now, I’d love to hear from you:

I’ll be back expanding on the things I briefly touched on today, so stay tuned for exciting explorations.

With love,

A x