Val was not here. Taking this opportunity, I hosted a session last Friday at our meditation club.

I called the session: "Listen to your body, it knows."

In the very beginning, we chose a comfortable sitting posture and allowed our breathing to find its own rhythm that was coming naturally.

Following that, we did our session in two parts.

In the first part, the intention was to find out what our body wanted at a specific moment.

We dynamically moved our body through a couple of simple yoga postures. Starting at a resting posture, we moved to a moderately active posture, and then transitioned into a more active posture. At each posture, we tried to note whether our body wanted to stay how it already was, stretch more, move to a more active posture or come back to a resting posture. We learned to decouple what our body intrinsically wanted from what our top-down commands might have been demanding. The idea was to remind us, we are learning to witness the truth that is already present in our body at that moment, to not use our body as an instrument to achieve a prescribed posture that our mind might imagine.

For example, we started in a child's pose, moved to a cat-cow, moved to a prone lying-down position, and finally we did our cobra.

We kept our breathing natural and stayed mindful towards it during the entire process. Breathing guided us to find out whether our body-parts were liking certain postures and the transitional movements.

In the second part, the intention was to invite an integration of what we had witnessed about our body into our awareness.

We wanted to do a short natural meditation, to mediate that.

We wanted to find out a mediation posture that is aligned with the states of our body that we just discovered. So, we allowed our individual body-parts to choose relatively more opened or closed states, by folding or unfolding themselves how much they want. Once we found out a resting state where our body felt the most accepted, we stayed there and did a ten minutes of "non-doing". We allowed all the worries and thoughts to come and flood us, kept our eyes open or closed how it felt more natural, attended sounds and images when attention brought us to them, and took an absolute rest in that experience. We used the metaphor of taking a break from our life and from the constant demand of taking care of tasks, to sit at the bedroom window and take a soothing cup of tea. In our case, we tried to take this ten minutes break where we didn't even have to sip the tea. :D

We allowed subtle movements when there was a need, to allow us to find a more resting posture.

Later in the discussion, we talked about how different body-parts could have coexisting needs of actively expressing and staying closed.

So yeah, in a nutshell that was it!