Mostly we lead lives of distraction, bouncing from one thought to another. We spend a whole lot of time in our heads - thinking, ruminating, planning. This endless parade of thoughts can easily lead us toward a deep sense of depletion - sometimes even exhaustion. We get so tangled up in our small-minded preoccupations that we lose touch with the greater flow of life.

It’s good to have a brain, of course. But it’s also good to remember that we are so much more than simple thought machines. We have bodies that move and breathe and reach out toward one another. We have hands that create and legs that carry us and hearts that keep life flowing into every cell of the body. We have eyes that take in beauty and ears that listen to the sounds that tell us we are here, now, awake and alive.

The practices of embodied wisdom - yoga, meditation, qigong and modern somatic disciplines, too - have the power to return us to a wider range of human experience. They remind us how to enter the stream of deep awareness, of heartfulness, of love, so that we can feel awake in each moment and at home in the world.

This 32-minute guided practice offers a taste of the ways that embodied presence can cultivate vitality and light. It is slow, quiet and improvisatory. It nudges us, little by little, toward steadiness and calm.

Through practice we unearth the deep and life-giving vitality that comes with living fully and attentively in the here-and-now. Something shifts when we climb out of our heads and back into our bodies. Life blooms when we are reunited with the deep and natural intelligence that flows through all creation.

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