keep it simple

After each exhalation there is a yawning release that happens in the body, right through to the palms of the hands and down to the soles of the feet. You just have to let it happen.

It's not about doing, but letting these tiny little messages travel as far as the hands and as far as the feet allowing you to feel fully in contact with the ground.

(Source: Daniel Minnick)

Don't forget

"Don’t forget that you’re a real, living person. Try to feel gravity holding onto you, try to feel the water and the bones in your body, try to feel the ways you’re held and anchored in your own world."

-- Madame Clairevoyant 

"Just don’t give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don’t think you can go wrong."

-- Ella Fitzgerald

(image of Ella Fitzgerald at the Downbeat Club, 1949.)

At first you may only be able to progress this far by Joseph Staples / Office Supplies Incorporated

Splittings

1.
My body opens over San Francisco like the day –
light raining down      each pore crying the change of light
I am not with her     I have been waking off and on
all night to that pain     not simply absence but
the presence of the past      destructive
to living here and now      Yet if I could instruct
myself, if we could learn to learn from pain
even as it grasps us      if the mind, the mind that lives
in this body could refuse      to let itself be crushed
in that grasp     it would loosen      Pain would have to stand
off from me and listen     its dark breath still on me
but the mind could begin to speak to pain
and pain would have to answer:
We are older now
we have met before     these are my hands before your eyes
my figure blotting out      all that is not mine
I am the pain of division      creator of divisions
it is I who blot your lover from you
and not the time-zones or the miles
It is not separation calls me forth      but I
who am separation      And remember
I have no existence      apart from you

2.
I believe I am choosing something now
not to suffer uselessly     yet still to feel
Does the infant memorize the body of the mother
and create her in absence?   
or simply cry primordial loneliness?    
does the bed of the stream
once diverted      mourning       remember the wetness?
But we, we live so much in these
configurations of the past      I choose
to separate her     from my past we have not shared
I choose not to suffer uselessly
to detect primordial pain as it stalks toward me
flashing its bleak torch in my eyes     blotting out
her particular being     the details of her love
I will not be divided      from her or from myself
by myths of separation
while her mind and body in Manhattan are more with me
than the smell of eucalyptus coolly burning      on these hills

3.
The world tells me I am its creature
I am raked by eyes     brushed by hands
I want to crawl into her for refuge     lay my head
in the space     between her breast and shoulder
abnegating power for love
as women have done      or hiding
from power in her love     like a man
I refuse these givens      the splitting
between love and action      I am choosing
not to suffer uselessly      and not to use her
I choose to love      this time      for once
with all my intelligence.

-- Adrienne Rich

(found via crop-marks)

Stop minimizing and discounting your feelings. You have every right to feel the way you do. Your feelings may not always be logical, but they are always valid. Because if you feel something, then you feel it and it’s real to you. It’s not something you can ignore or wish away. It’s there, gnawing at you, tugging at your core, and in order to find peace, you have to give yourself permission to feel whatever it is you feel. You have to let go of what you’ve been told you “should” or “shouldn’t” feel. You have to drown out the voices of people who try to shame you into silence. You have to listen to the sound of your own breathing and honor the truth inside you. Because despite what you may believe, you don’t need anyone’s validation or approval to feel what you feel. Your feelings are inherently right and true. They’re important and they matter — you matter — and it is more than okay to feel what you feel. Don’t let anyone, including yourself, convince you otherwise.

-- Daniell Koepke

(image source: thedeathofcool, via awelltraveledwoman)

Practice.

When moving what do you chose to  focus on?
The small details or the bigger picture?
Watch how your attention shifts between the two.
What happens to the movement when your focus is broken? Can you keep bringing it back to the task in hand?

It is the moment by moment focus on how you feel as you are feeling it that will keep you safe. 

(Illustrations by Lauren Nassef)

Etereas / Animation Shortfilm from Flaminguettes on Vimeo.

"Each one of us has lived through some devastation, some loneliness, some weather superstorm or spiritual superstorm, when we look at each other we must say, I understand. I understand how you feel because I have been there myself. We must support each other and empathize with each other because each of us is more alike than we are unalike. "

--Maya Angelou

Dialog

Dialog, 1977 by Rudolf Bonvie

I feel, therefore I am.

In the middle of the 17th century, Spinoza took on Descartes and lost.

According to Descartes' famous dualist theory, human beings were composed of physical bodies and immaterial minds. Spinoza disagreed. In ''The Ethics,'' his masterwork, published after his death in 1677, he argued that body and mind are not two separate entities but one continuous substance.

As for Descartes' view of the mind as a reasoning machine, Spinoza thought that was dead wrong. Reason, he insisted, is shot through with emotion. More radical still, he claimed that thoughts and feelings are not primarily reactions to external events but first and foremost about the body. In fact, he suggested, the mind exists purely for the body's sake, to ensure its survival.

For his beliefs, Spinoza was vilified and -- for extended periods -- ignored. Descartes, on the other hand, was immortalized as a visionary. His rationalist doctrine shaped the course of modern philosophy and became part of the cultural bedrock....

Read the full article by Emily Eakin in The New York Times.

Kiki Smith, Coming Forth, 2008

Feel it.

Quote from From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. by E.L. Konigsburg.

(Found here)

Feel!

images found here and here.

Favorites...

I don't have a favorite yoga pose, i have a favorite feeling and i sequence my practice to find that feeling...it changes everyday!

“I can dive", Sophia said. "Do you know what it feels like when you dive?"
Of course I do," her grandmother said. "You let go of everything and get ready and just dive. You can feel the seaweed against your legs. It's brown, and the water's clear, lighter towards the top, with lots of bubbles. And you glide. You hold your breath and glide and turn and come up, let yourself rise and breathe out. And then you float. Just float."
And all the time with your eyes open," Sophia said.
Naturally. People don't dive with their eyes shut."
Do you believe I can dive without me showing you?" the child asked.
Yes, of course", Grandmother said.”
 
--Tove Jansson, The Summer Book

found here