Morning Practice on Softness
Be soft with yourself. Cradle your inner child with gentleness and solid reliability.
Be soft with your adult body. It is serving you every day in myriad ways, ways you are not aware of as well as ways you are aware of. It is letting you know what feels good, what feels better than good. So, ask your wise body...What feels safe, easy, effortless? What feels richly challenging? But also... What feels too challenging at this moment? What feels effortful, uncomfortable, or rushed?
It is letting you know what it wants.
Your body always wants movement. To be alive is to be in movement. Movement is aliveness. As long as you are alive, there is something moving in you, something you can participate with, something you can amplify, some flow you can invite into another channel.
Be soft with yourself. This does not mean weak or disinterested. This does not mean tentative or nervous or sloppy or sluggish. This does not mean being lazy. Be soft with yourself and keep moving.
Keep active in your life while being soft with yourself. Take yourself by the hand and guide yourself into pleasurable, new, interesting activities. Don’t abandon yourself on the couch, or let it stew in a self-imprisoning funk. Coax yourself down into your feet, so your feet can take you for a spin around the dance floor or an amble down the trail by the creek.
Make it easy for your body. Give it a safe rug or a smooth wood floor. Give it a grassy meadow in the summer sun. Give it a playground with swings and slides. Give it a warm bed with clean sheets and just the right amount of pillows and blankets.
Let it play alone. Sometimes your body loves to play alone, to wander and explore and find its own tempo. And also give it ample chances to play with another or dance in rhythms with a group. It is uplifting for the spirit to feel itself connected to community through music and laughter and wild rhythmic joy.
And by all means, let your body play softly in contact with another body, both of you fully present. Maybe one of you is touching and the other being touched, one of you being moved, and the other doing the moving. Or maybe it is a back and forth, mutual kind of thing.
Play softly with their skin. This could feel deliciously erotic. That is to be enjoyed when it happens. Erotic sensation is exciting and life-enhancing. Be soft with this excitement and guide it into play that is deeply safe for both of you.
You are a magician. Conjure the world inside allowing the soft animal of your body to perform its magic. As Mary Oliver so eloquently wrote in her poem “Wild Geese”… You do not need to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Set your cells on a swirling, enlivening, vibratory path through inner space. Let more and more of your animal body become evenly soft and available. Softer inner space and softer tissue allows more movement everywhere. A softer body communicates better with itself. A softer body is more resilient. A softer body is healthier, happier, more at ease in the world.
Follow the road your body wants to travel today, in this movement, in this moment, at this stage in your life. Choose more life, more liveliness, more awakening to the movement your body wants right now.
