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Moving through a sequence of energizing postures, we explore the muscles and traditional meridian pathways associated with the heart and lungs, opening the chest and inviting a fuller, freer breath.

And then, we are *swimming through the Pranic Ocean* — awakening the flow of life force within.

Disclaimer: Please pace yourself and honor your limitations. If a movement or pose does not feel right for you, please pay attention and listen to your body.

The full practice includes additional variations of Bow Pose, warming stretches, and flowing movements designed to deepen the experience.

Full Practice In The Soul Sanctuary

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What Has Changed Is The Shore.

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Perhaps one of the great disturbances of our time is not that the Other has suddenly appeared. The Other has always been there.

What Has Changed Is The Shore.

For much of human history, people could inhabit worlds whose boundaries appeared nearly absolute. Our gods were the gods. Our customs were the customs. Our story explained the world.

Human beings drew a circle around Us.

And beyond it lived Them.

The stranger. The foreigner.

The unbeliever. The enemy.

Technology has not created our differences, but it has brought the opposite shore astonishingly close.

People once encountered primarily as categories now speak for themselves. They tell their histories. We hear their music. We witness their suffering. They tell us what our history looked like from where they were standing.

Sometimes they move next door.

Sometimes we move next door to them.

The stranger ceases to be scenery.

The Stranger Looks Back.

And perhaps that is where the deeper work of Libra begins. Not with agreement. Not even with harmony. But with the recognition of another center of being.

Can Something Be True For Me Without Becoming Compulsory For You?

This may be one of the more difficult questions of our time.

Can I encounter another worldview without experiencing its existence as an assault upon my own?

Can I remain myself while allowing you to remain yourself?

Can I deeply love my culture, faith, history, people or way of understanding the world without requiring yours to disappear?

Difference Itself May Not Be The Danger.

The danger begins when difference becomes exemption — when your difference from me releases me from my obligation toward you. Once another person has been moved far enough outside the circle, what would have been unthinkable within it can begin to seem permissible.

Their suffering becomes less urgent.

Their children become statistics.

Their dead become consequences.

The face disappears again.

Discernment Need Not Become Dehumanization

To recognize our common humanity does not require us to surrender discernment.

History matters.

Power matters.

Actions have consequences.

There are injustices that should be named and cruelties that should be opposed. But perhaps we have too often attempted to resolve division from within the very categories that sustain it:

Our People and Their People,

Our History and Their History,

Our Suffering and Their Suffering,

Our Truth and Their Error.

These distinctions cannot simply be erased. But neither must they constitute the whole field of our perception.

We can condemn an action without condemning an entire people.

We can defend what we cherish without requiring another people to disappear.

We can disagree without making another human being morally disposable.

Perhaps some conflicts cannot be transformed until the field itself becomes larger. Until the face reappears.

Beyond Balance

Libra is so often described through the language of balance. But balance can suggest a perfect midpoint — a place where opposing weights finally become still.

Living relationship is rarely still.

It moves.

One affects the other. Something passes between us.

We approach and retreat, listen and answer, give and receive.

Neither pole needs to disappear for relationship to exist.

Perhaps This Is Better Understood Not As Balance, But As Circulation.

Sun at the crown, Moon at the feet,

A current descending, A current rising,

Two poles held within one living orbit:

Neither conquers the other, Neither must become the other,

Relationship Is The Orbit.

This is the movement we enter in the companion meditation for this Libra New Moon: Sun Moon Polarity | Guided Relaxation Meditation - a quiet circulation between Sun and Moon, crown and feet, one pole and another.

We do not ask one to prevail. We allow the current to move between them.

And perhaps this is one of the unfinished movements of human civilization as well — the gradual expansion of the circle within which another life is understood to matter.

That expansion is neither guaranteed nor irreversible. The circle can widen. It can also contract.

Fear can redraw its boundary overnight and return a neighbor to stranger, an opponent to enemy, a human face to an abstraction.

So perhaps the work is not to abolish every shore.

Difference is real. Distinction is real.

We need not erase conviction, culture, faith, history or individuality in order to recognize one another

Perhaps Libra Asks Something Simultaneously Simpler And More Difficult:

To stand upon our own shore without requiring the opposite shore to vanish,

To recognize the face looking back.

I Exist. You Exist Too. And Now — What Shall Pass Between Us?

See Also Aquarian Chronicles — You Exist Too | Face on the Shore (article)

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Crown And Feet, One Pole And Another

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Under the Libra New Moon, we contemplate the space between ourselves and the Other — the meeting place of difference, recognition, and relationship.

Perhaps balance is not a fixed condition, but a living exchange.

I Exist. You Exist Too. And Now — What Shall Pass Between Us?

See Also Aquarian Chronicles — You Exist Too | Face on the Shore (article)

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It was early one golden morning that I found myself once again wading in the water along the shoreline, walking toward a sunrise spanking the sea with sparkle. The tide was out. A faint breeze breathed in tandem with the gentle bowling waves.

I Paused In The Stillness And Noticed, There In The Now, A Moment.

The tongue and last lap of a delicately white-laced wave glided forward, stretching to its ultimate distance. For an instant it seemed to hover there, its fine edge curling across the wet sand, until the last softly crackling foam succumbed to the shore while the rest began its return — receding the distance it had come, disappearing again into the next break.

And There It Was.

For no more than a breath or two, sea and sand had drawn a figure together: one yielding into the other, one advancing as the other received, a curling line of white between them.

It Looked Like A Yin-Yang.

Not the familiar black-and-white symbol painted into a perfect circle, but something living and unfinished—drawn by water, erased by water. The sea had come as far as it could come. Some part of it remained behind, surrendered into the thirsty sand. The rest returned to itself.

Another wave gathered.

And I wondered whether balance had ever meant stillness at all.

A movement had reached its limit, and another movement had already begun.

The sea comes forward. The sand receives it. The water stretches itself almost impossibly thin until there is that exquisite lacework at the edge.

And Then Something Happens.

Some of the water surrenders into the sand. Some of it returns to the sea.

Almost as if to say: balance is not a position. It is a moment of exchange.

Nature holds its equilibrium dynamically. Day overtakes night; night overtakes day. Breath fills and empties. Weight transfers from one foot to the other. Relationship itself works this way: I approach you, yet retain myself. I yield something; I take something back.

Within the dark is the seed of light; within the light, the seed of dark. Complementary forces continually move toward, respond to, and transform one another.

A Boundary, Then?

Or A Wall?

The shoreline is one of the most intimate boundaries imaginable. Sea and land meet there continuously. They penetrate one another, reshape one another, leave their marks upon one another — and yet neither becomes the other.

Perhaps that is what a true boundary does.

It does not prevent encounter.

It makes encounter possible.

What Happens When The “Other” Is Not Sand, But Another Human Being?

How Great Was I?

I Moved On Impulse.

I Said It Out Loud!

I Struck A Blow!

There can be exhilaration in the unrestrained expression of self

— The Force of I Am, I Want, I Will.

Until, perhaps quietly and sometimes painfully, we discover the Rose.

A soft remorse arises for having hurt the innocent. There is a part of us that suffers when our power has injured something tender.

The Other Is Real.

You Exist Too.

And Suddenly Another Question Enters The Room:

What happened between us?

What was absorbed into the sand?

What did I leave there that I cannot simply gather back into myself?

Perhaps this is where strength encounters its own reflection.

Can strength remain strong without becoming cruel?

Can tenderness remain tender without becoming weak?

There may be no answer in choosing one over the other. Again and again, life brings them into relationship: the thorn and the blossom, assertion and reception, self and other, the wave advancing and the shore receiving.

And somewhere in that delicate white lace at the very edge of the wave, each discovers the shape of the other.

Perhaps The Rose Was Never Without Its Thorns.

Another Image Comes To Me Now: A Heart Encircled By Them.

Not a wounded heart exactly, nor an innocent one. A heart at some station along the long road of becoming human. The Rose had awakened us to tenderness; the thorns tell us something of what we spend and what it may cost to remain tender.

And yet something tender has survived.

Perhaps tenderness is not what we possessed before the world hardened us. Perhaps it is what becomes possible after we have known our strength, used it badly sometimes, suffered the strength of others, and discovered that the Other is real.

You Exist Too.

Your Tenderness Exists Too.

And perhaps this thorned heart marks something humanity itself is still working through — a difficult station on a road of sacrifice toward whatever we may yet become.

I Hope So.

I Am Standing There, Realizing In My Reverie That I Am Ankle-Deep — And The World Is My Shoes.

The Glittering Sand Around My Feet, And As Far As I Can Scan The Shoreline — The Stars.

Chattr Chakkr Vartee comes from the closing lines of Jaap Sahib, composed by Guru Gobind Singh. The prayer invokes the Divine Presence as all-pervading, compassionate, fearless and ever beside us. Its rhythmic sounds can support courage in the heart — not courage as force, but the steadiness to remain present amid change.

A Chanting Meditation For Heart And Courage At The Equinox And Aries Full Moon

Pronunciation Guide for English Speakers

See Also Aquarian Chronicles — Equinox and The Warrior Moon (article)

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For a moment, there may be quiet: the harvest gathered, the light and darkness brought to balance, a pause for completion and contemplation. And somewhere within the stillness, the ancient scales appear.

Divine Justice: The Heart Is Weighed

What, over the course of time — be it a day, a season, a lifetime — has one spent cultivating within oneself? Now there may be repentance. There may be a return, an alignment perhaps too brief, but one meant for remembering before the next turn around.

The true question was not, “Were You Religious?”

It isn’t, “Which God Did You Say Was Lord?” or whether you embraced one.

The Question Is Closer To: “What Did Your Heart Become? Was Your Heart In Accord With Truth?”

The ancient Egyptian principle of Ma’at carried an extraordinary proposition: maintaining creation was not solely the gods’ affair. Human beings had a part in keeping the world from falling back into chaos.

Catastrophe destroys our illusion that we control the scales. There are circumstances in which a human being has almost no remaining agency over what happens externally. We may find ourselves carried into some untenable extremity, asking:

“Why Is This Happening To Me?”

“Is The Universe Treating Me Justly?”

Even there, another question remains. Is there an order deeper than circumstance? And if there is, perhaps our participation in it occurs through what we become.

The question may belong to a single life, or to a people, a nation, a faith. What have we added to the balance? What have we cultivated within the heart?

When so much lies beyond our power, something may still remain within it: to make our way into the heart and live from there.

Whatever or whomever you worship, there remains the question of how you live. What weight do you add to the heart? What makes the heart lighter?

Rather than merely worshipping God, live to become more godlike. Not godlike in the sense of omnipotence — that old seduction of ego and power — but closer to its opposite,

Godlike As Mercy,

Godlike As Compassion,

Godlike As The Relinquishment Of Hatred,

Godlike As The Capacity To Remain Human When Circumstances Become Inhuman.

Perhaps another boundary is ready for dissolution: the one that allows another’s suffering to remain merely theirs. We have seen how readily the suffering of others can become an argument for superiority: My God is greater than yours. God is on our side — just look at what you have suffered.

But the suffering of another need not ask us what it proves. It may ask instead what it calls forth from the heart. It takes a warrior to cultivate such godlike agency — a heart capable of remaining open in a world that continually gives us reasons to close it. We can interrupt the ancient program of blame, vengeance and separation. We can turn toward rather than away.

Perhaps This, Too, Is The Work Of The Warrior.

The Shield Is Raised.

The Warrior’s Shield Catches The Light.

See Also ​Bliss Byte | Equinox and Warrior Moon​ | Chanting Meditation | From The Libra Container

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While Inviting Your Body Toward Greater Ease

Moving through head-to-knee curl, bridge, lower-spine and abdominal work, we combine steady movement with conscious breath to engage the core, mobilize the spine, and gradually soften into stillness.

A Grounded Practice For Those Days When You Want To Feel Stronger, Centered And Calm — Without Pushing Or Rushing

Disclaimer: Please pace yourself and honor your limitations. If a movement or pose does not feel right for you, please pay attention and listen to your body.

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Psyche faces the impossible task of sorting a bewildering heap of seeds and grains before nightfall. Then the ants arrive, and an ancient story opens into questions of appetite, discernment, digestion — and the small intelligences quietly at work within us that know how to sort what the mind cannot.

From The Sorting Wisdom Of The Body To Our Modern Relationship With Food, Harvest Baskets Asks What It Means To Nourish Life With Greater Attention.

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An Old Story Tells Of Psyche — Whose Name Means Soul

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This Bliss Byte works with the lower back and hip axis, gentle stretching and movement to support lymphatic circulation, along with arm movements that engage the abdominal region and digestive system. Breath and movement are synchronized throughout, encouraging circulation, mobility and a sense of internal clearing.

A Supportive Practice To Accompany Your Own Seasonal Cleansing And Renewal Rituals As We Move Toward Autumn.

Move gently, listen to your body, and make the practice your own.

See Also Aquarian Chronicles — Harvest Baskets | Earth Medicina (article)

Disclaimer: Please pace yourself and honor your limitations. If a movement or pose does not feel right for you, please pay attention and listen to your body.

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The Story is as old as our recognition of time, and there are questions now about our nature, about how we got here, and about where we are going.

Under this Full Moon Eclipse, perhaps we recognize more clearly what has truly run its course — the greater story, His story, Her story, your story, the seen and the unseen.

It has been a long and arduous dream, one that in these times may have been losing its meaning before we even realized we were already entering another story, another dream.

Face value doesn’t count for quite so much now. We have seen too many masks and moved through too many fogs. And as we enter further into the Age of Aquarius, some of our delusions are becoming harder to maintain. What we once mistook for truth may simply become more visible for what it is.

But Be Careful About Taking Everything You Are Facing Personally, Or Armoring Yourself By Searching For What You Must Be Against.

Just Be For: For Life, For One Another, For All.

There is enough “Us and Them” in the world already. Create a silent majority of self and observe.

If you believe we live on a plate, somewhere you will find a gathering of people who believe it too. Almost any idea can now find its echo and return to us sounding like confirmation.

So open your heart and lean into the thinking that arrives from your own center. Speak plainly about what you know without a ventriloquist.

Whose Voice Is Speaking Through You?

And just as importantly, what are you saying to yourself? What are you communicating within yourself, for you?

You may find yourself looking behind you more often now. Some of your solutions are in the past — if you learned from the past.

You will recant and recount. You may see an old experience differently now, recognize the lesson you couldn’t recognize while you were living it, and accept that you can never actually return to where you have come from.

The Past Can Teach You. It Cannot Become Your Home Again.

And those last-ditch efforts and quick decisions that rise suddenly out of emotion? Stop and BREATHE.

Intentional breathing creates an interval between emotion and action. Give the emotion somewhere to go before you give it something to do. Breath gives emotion room to diffuse.

Belly Breaths

Before you rise from bed in the morning, lie still. Breathe and reach for the stillness within you. 1-3 minutes. You Can Do It.

Count 1, 2, 3, 4 as you breathe into the belly.

Count 1, 2, 3, 4 as you breathe out, emptying the belly with a soft squeeze.

Come back to the practice two or more times during the day. Sit. Be still. Breathe.

If There’s Fog, Don’t Demand That The Fog Disappear. Just Become Still Enough To See What Is Actually Moving Through It. And Notice.

Give The Fog A Moment To Move.

Repose In Clarity Before Deciding What Comes Next.

And Then Take Deeply To Heart: What Dreams Are Worth Building?

Not Every Dream Is.

“If Only I Work Harder, I Will Succeed.”

At what? And at what cost? What value are you setting in motion?

What are you building through fear, urgency, longing, love, anger, habit or hope? Because eventually we become participants in whatever we repeatedly feed.

Perhaps This Eclipse Does Not Require Us To Have The New Story Figured Out.

Perhaps it asks us first to recognize the dream that has ended.

To Bless What Taught Us.

To Release What No Longer Has Life In It.

To Listen Beneath The Noise For The Voice That Is Actually Our Own.

And Then, Before Setting The Next Thing In Motion, To Ask:

Is This A Dream Worth Building?

Does It Make More Life Possible — Not Only For Me, But Those Around Me?

If The Answer Is Yes, There Is No Need To Rush.

Breathe. Begin There.

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A Story Involving Desire: And The Ink Of Its Writ Is Appetite

In the course of her awakening, Psyche is given an impossible task. Before her lies a great heap of seeds and grains — thousands of them, different kinds all thrown together. She is commanded to sort them, each according to its kind, before nightfall.

Psyche cannot do it. Then the ants arrive.

One by one, these smallest of creatures enter the bewildering heap and begin their work. Countless tiny intelligences accomplish what the individual mind cannot.

It is difficult for me not to see the body here.

We may consciously choose the food and lift it to the mouth, but beyond that threshold an extraordinary ordering begins without our instruction. Food is broken down, recognized, sorted, absorbed, transformed, relinquished.

We do not command this intelligence. We participate in it.

The heap looks chaotic only from a certain distance. Come closer, and something is sorting. And in the body, sorting is followed by transformation.

In yogic and Ayurvedic language, agni is fire, but not merely physical fire. Digestive fire is the transformative principle by which something arriving from outside us can be broken down, metabolized, assimilated — made available for life.

Psyche isn’t asked to conquer the heap. She isn’t asked to overpower it or impose something foreign upon it. She has to discern what is already there.

This is viveka: discernment, differentiation, the capacity to recognize one thing from another and enter into appropriate relationship with it. And this, too, is something the body is doing all the time.

The Intestines

In Virgo season, I find myself drawn toward the small things: daily rhythms, hidden workings, the quiet discernments that shape a life.

Virgo carries the harvest basket. And Virgo has traditionally been associated with the intestines — that long interior terrain where the world is sorted into what may be absorbed and what must continue on.

The intestines themselves fold and convolute through the body, strangely reminiscent in form of the brain’s own folded terrain — as though intelligence, too, prefers a little more surface upon which to work.

There is something astonishing about digestion when we stop treating it as ordinary.

Long before we had names for enzymes, hormones, acids, microbes, membranes, the body was already performing its intricate work in darkness.

A meal enters us as matter and disappears into mystery. It is broken apart, moved along, met, transformed. Some of it crosses the intestinal boundary and enters circulation. Some becomes available for energy, repair, and the continual making of blood, bone and tissue. Some continues through us and is relinquished.

Science begins in observation. And sometimes scientific knowledge, rather than removing the mystery, makes the mystery more intimate.

Consider An Apple.

It Begins Outside The Boundary I Call Me.

Sunlight, Water, Minerals, Soil, Root, Leaf, Fruit.

I Lift It To My Mouth.

Hours later, something that belonged to that apple has crossed into my body and entered the processes by which this body continually remakes itself.

Where does not-self become self? Perhaps there is no single place where it happens. Perhaps the boundary is more alive than that.

Eating is an exchange between inner and outer nature: sunlight stored in leaf and fruit, minerals lifted from soil, rain drawn upward through root and branch, becoming for a little while the substance of a human life.

Sunlight → Leaf → Fruit → Mouth → Digestion → Molecule → Cell

The body does not merely receive the world. It interprets it. And we do not accomplish this through conscious effort. The ants do the work.

Countless processes — small intelligences, if you will — meet what arrives. There is poetry in this precision.

Digestion is one of life’s oldest expressions of intelligence.

The First Harvest Basket

My own relationship with food began close to the earth. I was born into a world of small family farms, where food wasn’t yet something I thought of as “organic.” It was simply food.

Animals grazed. Vegetables ripened according to season. Things were pulled from the earth and brought to the table. And what could not be eaten fresh was stored, preserved, and put by for winter. That was my first imprint.

Then, like many of my generation, I entered another food world. Coke and Pepsi became ordinary companions. There was coffee at too young an age, candy in abundance, bright packages and foods increasingly removed from anything I recognized as field, orchard, animal, root.

I didn’t have language for this transition then. I only lived it.

Years later, in my twenties, I found myself moving back toward the foods of that earlier world: vegetables, simpler meals, health-food stores, periods of fasting, and above all a renewed attention to what happened inside my own body after I ate. I began noticing not only what I ate, but how.

A meal eaten late at night could leave me foggy and heavy the following morning. Certain combinations felt easy; others did not. Hunger itself had different textures. Sometimes appetite arose from the body. Sometimes it seemed to arise from somewhere else entirely.

The important discovery was not a system of perfect eating. It was attention. The body had responses I could learn to listen to. Something in me remembered the harvest basket.

What Are We Asking of the Ants?

But There Is Another Side To This Story.

I have been speaking of the body’s intelligence with something approaching reverence — and I feel that reverence. The more closely I look at digestion, the more astonishing it becomes. But reverence brings responsibility.

I live in a neighborhood with many college students. I know something about what they eat because I see what is left behind: fast-food cartons, cups, wrappers, brightly printed remnants scattered along the street.

They are young. Youth is generous for a while. The body can carry an enormous amount of contradiction and continue forward. But I sometimes look at those wrappers and wonder about the heap given to these young bodies to sort.

Not because an occasional hamburger or soda is a moral failure.

Not because there was some pristine dietary past to which everyone should return.

The Question Is More Interesting Than That.

Human digestion is ancient. Our appetites are ancient.

The organisms living with and within us are ancient.

But much of the food environment now surrounding us is remarkably new.

Foods can be engineered for intensity, convenience, shelf life, texture and color — and to keep us reaching for more. Some products now occupy a curious territory between food as nourishment and food as manufactured product — edible, certainly, but increasingly difficult to trace in imagination back to field, orchard, animal, root or seed. Perhaps this is part of the sadness I sometimes feel: a broken lineage between the living world and what we have come to call food.

Eating can become detached from season, place, hunger, preparation — from the relationships that once made the lineage of food visible.

And so discernment cannot belong only to the intestine. Something must happen before the mouth. Psyche, too, is learning to sort.

The body’s small intelligences must work with what arrives. This is where viveka becomes more than a beautiful philosophical word.

What Am I Looking At?

Is It Food?

Is It Nourishment?

Are Those Necessarily The Same Thing?

What appetite is being answered here? Hunger speaks from the body’s need for nourishment, while appetite may speak with many voices. Is this hunger — or something else? The senses seeking pleasure, habit keeping its appointed hour, a longing for comfort, an attempt to soothe or numb a feeling we would rather not feel?

And Whose Appetite Is It?

There is no simple purity in these questions. An apple can nourish one person and trouble another. A celebratory meal can nourish in ways no nutrient table can measure. Hunger changes everything. Economics changes everything. Culture, access, time, loneliness and pleasure belong at the table too.

Discernment is not judgment. It is attention sufficiently intimate to perceive relationship. And I wonder whether this is one of the more difficult conditions of modern appetite:

Our Powers Of Discernment Now Live Inside An Environment Designed, In Part, To Capture Our Attention And Stimulate Our Wanting.

Psyche receives one impossible heap. The ants sort it. But what happens when the heap is continually replenished? Late-night eating, grazing without hunger, highly palatable foods that keep us reaching, portions beyond hunger.

There is something poignant in contemplating the body’s extraordinary resilience while continually adding to the heap. Yet resilience is not inexhaustible.

But who tends the threshold? Who teaches a young person to distinguish hunger from stimulation, nourishment from mere consumption, appetite from advertising?

Who Teaches Any Of Us?

I think about the young bodies passing my house, still possessing so much resilience. And I think, too, about the profound distress being reported among younger generations.

I would not reduce that suffering to food. Human beings are far too mysterious, and suffering far too complex, for such an equation. But neither do I want to pretend that the body is irrelevant to the life of the mind.

We Are Embodied Creatures.

Sleep, movement, sunlight, companionship, food, belonging, fear, pleasure, isolation — all enter the mysterious ecology from which a human life emerges.

So perhaps the question is not whether food explains our suffering. Perhaps the question is simpler:

What Conditions Are We Giving Life In Which To Flourish?

Psyche was given an impossible heap. The ants came to help her. And this returns the task to our own hands.

Before digestion comes selection. Before selection comes appetite. And between appetite and action lies the possibility of attention. Before the ants begin their miraculous sorting, someone places something on the heap.

What Are We Placing There?

Appetite

We usually imagine eating as something we do to food. But digestion is something the body does to the world. And appetite stands at the gate.

There are appetites of the body, certainly. But appetite also carries memory, loneliness, habit, pleasure, belonging, stimulation, comfort.

There are things we hunger for because they nourish us. There are things we hunger for because we have learned to hunger for them.

And Perhaps There Are Things We Consume Because We Do Not Yet Know What Else To Do With The Wanting.

Here Psyche returns. Her heap is not evil. The seeds do not need to be purified of their seedness. The barley is not morally superior to the millet. The lentil is not at war with the wheat.

The Task Is Recognition. What’s In The Pile?

This is this. That is that.

Each according to its kind.

What an exquisite image for discernment.

Not rejection. Not purity. Not control. Relationship.

Perhaps this is why the intestines belong so beautifully in the Virgoan imagination. The body itself is continuously sorting, selecting, absorbing, transforming, eliminating.

It does not keep everything. Nor does it reject everything. Life moves through both. Taking in. Letting go.

Virgo Moonth

So Perhaps The Invitation Of Virgo Is Quieter Than Purification. Perhaps It Is Simply:

Pay Attention. What Is Here?

What Kind Of Thing Is It?

What Happens When I Take It In?

What Can Become Part Of Me? What Cannot?

And What Has Completed Its Passage And Needs To Be Released?

There is the food on our plates, and there is what life places before us each day. Both must somehow be digested.

We take in images, conversations, histories, griefs, ideas, other people’s desires. We inherit ways of seeing before we know that we have inherited them.

Some nourish. Some pass through. Some remain in us for years awaiting recognition. So I find myself returning to Psyche’s impossible heap.

Which Appetites Nourish? Which Merely Compel?

Which Voices Belong To Me?

Which Have I Swallowed From Somewhere Else?

What Shall Be Assimilated? What Shall Pass Away?

Psyche cannot answer by standing over the heap and thinking harder. The ants have to come.

Return

I circle back to the farm. Not because the past was pure. It wasn’t. Not because everything old was wise, or everything modern is mistaken. But because somewhere in my earliest memory is an experience of food before I had so many ideas about food.

Soil. Season. Animal. Vegetable.

Hands. Table. Hunger. Eating.

Perhaps what I remember most is relationship. And perhaps that is what Earth Medicina asks me to recover — not some imagined state of purity, but intimacy with the exchanges that are already taking place.

Earth becoming plant. Plant becoming food.

Food entering darkness.

The innumerable small intelligences gathering around it.

Sorting. Recognizing. Transforming.

Taking what can become life.

Releasing what cannot.

We call this digestion because we have to call it something. But sometimes, when I contemplate what is actually happening, the ordinary word seems inadequate. Somewhere inside us, Psyche’s ants are still at work.

The Heap Looks Chaotic Only From A Certain Distance.

Come Closer. Something Is Sorting.

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Beginning with the Adi Mantra, we move quickly into Breath of Fire and a strong Stretch Pose practice, followed by rhythmic bouncing and stretching to awaken the navel point and bring the energy firmly into the body.

From this grounded center, the practice travels upward into the heart and upper triangle. Repetitive arm movements, Gyan Mudra, crossed-arm movements and circular motions through the shoulders invite strength and mobility while encouraging energy to circulate through the chest, shoulders and upper body.

There is fire here — but the intention is not simply exertion. It is to discover the difference between **forcing ourselves forward and drawing upon a strength that is already present**.

The Navel Gives Us Center.

The Ground Gives Us Support.

The Heart And Upper Body Give That Inner Strength Somewhere To Move.

A Practice For Those Moments When We Need To Remember That Our Deepest Source Of Strength May Not Be Something We Acquire From Outside Ourselves,

It May Be Something We Return To.

Disclaimer: Please pace yourself and honor your limitations. If a movement or pose does not feel right for you, please pay attention and listen to your body.

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