Get Out of Your Head with a Simple Embodied Practice
Get out of your head and become grounded and present with this simple embodied practice. I use this practice as a way of starting my classes and it helps participants ground themselves after their busy day. The practice draws on Indian dance "constellation" approach which invites you to move from thoughts towards sensation using "weight sensing". This is a very effective way coming into mindfulness while embracing our senses and feelings. It is very useful to help you get out of your head.
Indian dance is based on the "constellation" approach which invites the experience of our body as a sensation rather than as a sum of parts or as a story or thought. This approach is very powerful as it allows us to be inclusive of the totality of our beings which includes our feelings and our sense experiences. Through the constellation experience, you are able to get out of your head and be present and grounded
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Get Out of Your Head with a Simple Embodied Practice
SPEAKERS
Padma Menon
Padma Menon 00:00
I just wanted to share with you a very simple, embodied practice, which help you to get out of your head and get back into your body. So I call this the constellation practice. And this is something I use in my classes. As a start when people come in from their busy schedules and work and whatever it is they're doing, it's a really effective way of just coming into the body and coming into the present moment - and to get out of your head. So I'll step a little bit further back so you can see my feet. And the first thing we do is we just bring our complete weight on to our feet. So we open the feet, we plant them, just beneath the hips not sticking together. So just beneath the hips, then we drop our arms so that they're just hanging beside our bodies really like two garlands gallons, they say in the Indian text, two garlands gallons floating next to your body, we drop the chin and retreat the head a little bit. And then we slightly lift and open our chest. And then we gently start dropping all the way from our body right from the top of our head. Like As if they are sand in an hourglass, we just start dropping the tension, the weight holding anything that we have that's about weight, we just start dropping it right into our feet. And the feet then begin to feel like it's the base, you know, it's like a heavy base, from which our body can just float up like a balloon. And now we take our attention to the lower half of the body from the hips to the feet, and we loosen up the hips, we loosen them up, and we loosen up our tail bones, we just soften and loosen up the tail bones. And now we start softening through the legs. So it could be that your knee is released and softens, it may well be that some of us, for us will have to shift the weight to one hip or the other. The important thing is to get out of muscle get out of effort. It's like your legs turn to water. But we still keep our attention on the arms just floating at the side, the chin, the chair. So now we're slowly starting to diffuse our attention across the whole body. So from the feet where our weight is, you know the arms that are just floating there, the open chest, the chin that's retreated, the hips that are loose the tailbone. So we start sensing the whole of the body as a constellation. So rather than the mind going to one part of the body or the other part of the body, we just stay with that sensation of the rate in our feet. And from there, it's like that allows us to sense the rest of the body. And gently we can slightly make our heels a bit heavier. It's like we open the depth of the body rather than just experiencing the body as two dimensional. When we gently do that shift towards the heel, it kind of opens up the depth of the body and just continuing to breathe. We don't have to stand still. We can move the legs in this is this is already a movement in Indian dance. It's a movement. So as a movement, it means there is we are moving. We're not standing still. We're not standing rigidly we're breathing. We're moving and with Sensing with sensing the whole feeling of the whole body, as if we're not standing by ourselves, you know where someone is holding us as we stand, we don't have the sense, I am making myself stand. Just sensing that constellation sensation. So this is a really simple start that I use in classes. Now, you can use it at any time, you know, if you just want to come to your self come to your body come to that sense of grounding and the weight. This is a really simple thing to do. And I find that it's a wonderful way of just getting out of the business of the head and the thoughts. So I hope that it may help you sometimes to get back to that sense of self in the middle of our busy lives.