Tending to the Soil

Friends,

Fresh off the first weekend of my Ayurveda graduate program--I am so pumped up about it.

New pens and notebooks, a new online learning platform, and new student colleagues, and I could not be giddier. (Nerd alert!)

Delving right into Sanskrit (again), as well as the History, Lineages and theory of this ancient healing system, and I am FULL UP with information.
Planning lots of time and space this week to integrate and digest the knowledge.

Correspondingly, I'm organizing delicious and nutritious meals to take care of my gut to help this digestion.

Think of the stomach as your soil, your gas tank, how you fuel yourself up.

We need a good soil (microbiome) to digest both our food and our life experiences. Good health requires that we digest all that we ingest and assimilate both the nutrients in our food and the lessons from our experience, and finally, let go of what we do not need.

I am sure that you have heard that the gut is referred to as "the second brain." Or you know the expressions "gut feelings" and "butterflies in your stomach."

This is your body, your mind, your intuition speaking to you.

Coincidentally, my Ayurveda rich weekend fell on the 20th anniversary of 9/11.

Watching the tributes on the news on Saturday evening brought tears to my eyes and a heavy knotted feeling in my belly. I was living in the East Village in 2001 and watched the second tower fall while walking my dogs. I spent many days over the following weeks after 9/11at Ground Zero, handing out masks and waters to the first responders.

So many of us have those images indelibly in the white matter of our brains. Yet, for me, being there, living through it, smelling it for months afterward, I realized this past weekend that there was still a part of it that I had not fully digested.

Blockages lead to stagnation which can lead to disease.

So, in addition to slowly digesting all the rich Ayurveda theory, I will be extra compassionate with myself as I go back and assimilate and release all that residue from 9/11.

In Katonah Yoga® theory, we say that the stomach represents our ability to think, chew, ponder, and exercise good judgment.

How are you tending your soil? What foods, experiences, energies are you ingesting? Are you digesting these? Or are they sitting somewhere in your gut--your second brain?

What is one small change that you can easily implement this week to help you ingest, digest, assimilate and release all you take in?

With so much love,

Kari

***

Join me this week for live classes that focus on DIGESTION.

Also this week on Kari & Co. a class focused on Apana Vayu - one of the 5 subtle winds in the body that governs digestion, elimination, and menstruation.

Restorative poses:

-Vipariti Karani set up

-Supta Virasana with a body scan for the digestive system.