As with this Tuesday’s Meditation Experiment, I’m offering this week’s Yin Practice Lab freely to all subscribers. If you’re not yet a paid member and find value in these practices, you’re warmly invited to upgrade and join us each week in the full rhythm.
I’m writing this from a place of in-between—still in a liminal space—awaiting the ability to return and reclaim my home. I’ll spare the details, but say this: the waiting, the not-knowing, the groundless-ness… it gets to me.
In these uncertain stretches, I can see again and again how my mind wants something to grab hold of, how it spins its projections—about tomorrow, next week, and about how it should be by now. But every time I chase those projections, I lose my footing. The only peace I’ve been able to find is by coming back—again and again—to the simplicity of the present: a cup of tea, a piece of toast, a hum, a breath, a pose. In other words, peace and starting from scratch are synonymous.
In this week’s Yin Practice Lab, I draw on tools and experiments that I’ve been finding helpful: vagal resets, humming, and inquiry. In each pose, a few slow rounds of humming seem to soften the surface tension of my psyche—it tills the soil, and into that loosened ground, I plant the question:
What is the sound of listening?
The phrase itself doesn’t make immediate sense—which is exactly the point. Like a Zen koan, inquiry into the “sound of listening” momentarily interrupts the torrent of thoughts in my mind and opens to something quieter, deeper, more direct. And Yin Yoga, embodied and receptive as it is, becomes the perfect setting for this inquiry.
Of course, long-time readers will know that I don’t encourage going to war with thoughts, ever. But sometimes, it’s helpful to have tools hanging from one’s belt that help re-establish a different relationship with those thoughts.
🪷 This week's Yin Practice sequence:
Sphinx | Vagal Resets | Humming | Side-Flexion Cat-tail | Shoelace | Half Shoelace
As with Tuesday’s Meditation Experiment, I’m offering this week’s Yin Practice Lab freely to all subscribers. If you’re not yet a paid member and find value in these practices, you’re warmly invited to upgrade and join us each week in the full rhythm.
May this practice be a companion in whatever liminal space you find yourself in. And may you hear, in the stillness, the sound of listening.
Here’s a haiku to play with, too:
Nothing left to grasp,
just my breath and my body
tuned to what hears back.
With care,
Josh
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