#sugarpopunicorn says it’s a Yoga Snow Day! No Lunchtime Yoga today – stay safe and cozy and we look forward to seeing you for our next Saturday morning yoga, Monday evening yoga, or next Tuesday’s lunchtime yoga class. #mindfulmovement #yogacatskill #movedifferentlythinkdifferently
On descent, rest and how winter “teaches the roots how to deepen”…
As December arrives, along with our first snow of the season, the wisdom of descent arrives as well. It arrives in the beautiful words of Brigit Anna McNeill; it arrives in the sweet embrace of practice guided by my beloved friend and teacher Sondra Loring of Sadhana Center and Moving Potential.
Sondra begins class with a deep pause – Corpse as beginning rather than ending. Fae reminds us to descend into the quiet depths of stillness, reminds us that sperm whales, diving into darkness, come into their bones. Land inside your bones Sondra invites us…
And within my own bones, i recall that right here in Catskill, we live by the oldest known fossil forest, dating back 385 million years. In a limestone quarry in Cairo, NY lay the fossilized imprints, not of the flowers or even the bones of that forest, but fossilized imprints of the roots – the life that thrives in darkness, and even more – requires darkness to sustain the eating of light.
…So for a home practice today, we may consider finding our way to Savasana, finding our way deep into that fossil forest, into those oceanic depths, find our way into a different experience of time – fossil time, geologic time, breath time, root time…
December asks us to remember what our culture forgets.
That darkness is not a failure of light.
That slowing is not a deviation from the path,
but part of the path itself.
We live in a world that praises the bright, the busy, the blossoming, the forever-spring of productivity and performance.
But the living world whispers something older.
Winter is the season that teaches the roots how to deepen.
The season that gathers the stories we were too hurried to hear.
The season that turns fallen leaves into nourishment and creates the rich, dark soil that makes all future blooming possible.
Nothing in nature rushes through this threshold.
The trees soften into stillness.
The fox moves with deliberate economy.
The seeds rest, carrying whole futures inside their quiet bodies.
Even the light withdraws in gentle increments,
as if showing us how to tend ourselves with patience.
December is not a void but a womb.
A place of brewing, composting, gestating.
A time when the unseen work is the most powerful of all, the kind that reshapes us from the inside out.
As we enter the deep of winter, may we remember that darkness has its own kind of beauty, its own kind of truth.
And that every bright, blooming April
is rooted in a December that dared to rest.
-Brigit Anna McNeill
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