From the Ground Up
Starting the new year with the basics.
As a full-time yoga and meditation instructor, it’s really important to me that my classes are more than fitness - that every single class and offering is deeply rooted in the ancient eight-limbed path of yoga. Yoga classes that do not incorporate the philosophy of the practice are not truly yoga classes. They may be inspired by the third limb, asana, or the physical postures we practice as part of the eight-limbed path. But taking a yoga class that’s just the postures is like eating the skin of an apple and tossing away the fruit inside. You’re missing so, so much, everything that makes the apple so delicious.
At one of my favorite Seattle studios, Drift Yoga, we select a theme based on the philosophy of the eight-limbed path of yoga for each week of classes, and every teacher offers classes that incorporate that theme. I really appreciate this aspect to class at Drift. It ensures that even if our students first come to class for the physical benefits (and that’s totally fine, and how most people first discover yoga), they’re going to receive more than just an exercise class. I was really excited when we got the email with the theme for the first week of the year, and saw that we’d be starting at the beginning of the chakra system and working our way through week by week.
My Substack isn’t a yoga-specific one, and so to catch all of you non-yogis up, the chakras are essentially energy centers in your body, starting at the base of your spine and going up past the crown of your head. This way of looking at the body and its energy is as ancient as yoga itself. You can read more about the chakras here (and I definitely encourage you to check it out, it’s really, really fascinating).
So, over at Drift we’re starting off the year talking about muladhara, the root chakra, located at the base of your spine. Like its name suggests, this is the foundational energy of your body and your wellbeing, the part of you that’s correlated to safety and survival. It is believed that if this energy is off, we will not feel safe, we will not feel secure, and it will be difficult for us to exit fight or flight mode and experience rest or relaxation. In short, if your root is off, your nervous system is probably in overdrive. If this part of the body is energetically balanced, you’ll feel sturdy, secure, and ready to take on the challenges ahead. If this energy of off-balance, you will…not feel those ways. You’ll feel stressed and anxious and on high alert.
The start of a new year is a perfect time to explore the energy of our root chakra - again, whether or not you’re a student of yoga, this applies to all of us. The root chakra is associated with the element of earth. This, too, makes sense. In order to feel safe and secure, we need to feel grounded. This means feeling physically rooted to the ground beneath our feet. This can be felt in the form of having a secure and safe home, enough money to pay our bills, enough food to fill our bellies, warm clothes to keep us cozy. When those basic needs are met, we will feel inherently more at ease.
But grounding is also a physical feeling. It’s the feeling of your body being held by something permanent. We can enhance this feeling, nearly immediately, and cultivate this energy by putting our bodies close to the earth. In yoga, when we want to help students feel grounded and boost their root energy, we practice postures that bring them into contact with the floor, or that make us feel as if we are growing out of the earth itself, with steady foundations beneath us. Off the yoga mat, we can go outside and sit or lie down on the ground. We can hug a tree. We can sit next to a campfire. We can get into the water and swim. If we can bring our physical bodies into direct contact with nature, we will feel more grounded.
Each January, we arrive at the start of a new calendar year, and the messages we get from the world around tell us to start fresh, set goals and resolutions, and jump-start new things right. now. But, in many parts of the world, January is still the start of winter, and even as The World Around Us screams to start, the ground we stand on and everything that grows from it is dormant, sleeping, hibernating, resting. Replenishing. Isn’t that a conundrum, to try and force our bodies into new, challenging projects while the ground that supports us is sleeping?
(And for the rest of the world that isn’t in the middle of winter, it’s the middle of summer - so everyone’s hot and in need of a siesta. Also not an ideal time to jump-start new projects).
If we’re starting the year off at the root, we need to ground. We need to look at our lives from the bottom up, and make sure our houses are in order. We need to nest. We need to connect with our family and friends. We need to nourish and warm ourselves with delicious, nutritious foods. We need to sleep and rest and we need to spend a lot of time thinking about the future, making plans. We need to get outside and breathe the fresh air, even when it’s cold and gray outside, and touch grass. Take a walk. Hug a tree. Cold plunge. Sit by a campfire (or one of those nifty outdoor fire pit tin can things). Connect with nature. Let the ideas for what’s next percolate for a little while.
It’s okay to start slow, to gear up. This week, I’ve been at the start of a new schedule that I’m really excited about, and also recovering from yet another round of illness. As much as I might have liked to also take a bunch of yoga classes and go for my daily walk and dive right back into therapy, I decided not to take on every single thing this week. I decided to start my weekly classes back up, and focus on sleeping enough and staying fed and hydrated and getting well, and then add something else next week, and something else the week after that, til I feel like I’m in the groove I’m imagining is going to feel great in the very near future.
Why does this feel so rebellious, in a way? Why is it so hard to prioritize this root energy, if it’s so needed? Maybe because it’s unglamorous, and it feels a little bit like tidying up your house or getting your chores done on the weekend so the week feels a little easier. But I’m noticing how nice it feels this week, to sleep, to make myself a nice breakfast and spend a couple hours at my desk, then head to my classes, reconnect with students, start falling back into a pattern one step at a time, noticing how it all feels along the way because I have the time and space to do that. To notice.
Whatever your new year looks like, whatever wishes are on your to-do or to-make list, maybe this week you can give yourself some permission to slow down, to go back to the basics and take care of your root. Ground yourself in the things that make you feel safest, coziest, and most yourself. Trust yourself to arrive where you’re meant to be, right when you’re meant to get there.
xo,
