Switching Off For Summer

When the body asks for something and three yoga practices for summer....

‘Let the soft animal of your body love what it loves’

Mary Oliver

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I was going to write to say that I was planning to go a little more underground for the summer, but it has already happened. The unusually and relentlessly hot weather has brought the harvest forward by more than a month, lending the landscape an end of August palette. That, and an early holiday because for the first time in twenty years we are not beholden to school holidays, seems to have taken the scaffold from everything, my days and my thinking alike. I find myself in an early torpor. It’s a place I usually end up at the end of summer, but here I am already. And it feels like a good place to be, when you have the luxury of letting it.

Our holiday this year took us across continents, to the wilds of Canada where we lived for ten glorious days fully immersed in friendship and nature; sleeping amidst pine forests, swimming in peaty rivers and washing in a lake. We were also blissfully devoid of technology because we were almost entirely off grid for most of it, and entirely so for three days. Given the choice, this is how I would stay for the duration of summer’s baggy days, for the predictable but also arresting impact it had- and almost immediately - on my nervous system.

Technology holds us in a state of constant agitation, wedded to the incessant need to call or respond. Retract it and we quickly normalise, returning to not just a mind but a body that feels more immediately spacious. More unstrung. The feeling was compelling in the way that something altogether familiar is, like well worn shoes or the smell of home. It made me think that it is not just the way our bodies and minds long to be, but remember being. Relieved of the unnatural centrifuge of modern life, devoid of the roller coaster of dopamine, aware only of news that travels at a human pace, the body literally exhales back into a more primordial state; a place of spacious poise, of balance, of equilibrium.

We so often assume that all growth, that any altering, requires the addition of things but of course it’s mainly subtractions that we need. Mainly we need to get out of the way of things so that we might return to our much more fundamental nature. Of course I vowed that once home it would be different, determined that I would throw my phone metaphorically even if not actually to the wall. And of course as soon as I returned the habits of home did too; checking for news, checking for messages, checking for anything at all, just checking and checking until within days I was rendered hyper vigilant once more.

Twice in the last two weeks my youngest, who is nineteen has referred - in passing - to feeling and knowing something with his body. The comments seemed so fleeting, so assumed and ordinary, that he didn’t feel the need to explain it any further and I didn’t think to ask. At the time I took it as unremarkable and we simply carried on chatting. It was only later that I thought of it as unusual and especially for a nineteen year old, well known for his rationality. But what he said, both times and quite rationally, was that in each instance his body had been part of the conversation. That his body, ahead of his mind, had been doing the articulation. Which is how it is. More often than not our bodies lead, and we - if we are sensible- might just follow.

In it’s ten days of softening my body offered a ready and easy answer to a question I didn’t realise I had been asking. Released from the structure of linear living, it pushed out against its own limits, became more boundless, assumed a fuller and more breathable shape. And that it felt so ordinary, so entirely natural- like it had been squeezed into something else and now had the room and the relief to return- was its own answer.

In its days of extended light, in its release from some if not all of the strictures of ordinary living, summer offers us a rare chance to lay things down; our technologies of course, but also the rigours of the rational mind, the need to have things done in any particular order, or even at all. It is an invitation that we might feel a pull towards, a bodily pull. And having had a little taste of how it is to go there, my plan is now wholeheartedly to return.

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I am still planning to write all summer, though in a disordered and easy way. If something makes it to the page that feels of some note then I will send it to you all, but it possible I might go quiet until the pull of structure- which is also a thing - returns. To that end I am switching off paid subscriptions for the summer and a little beyond. But I am also offering you all three yoga sessions that are my favourites from the summer term. They will all be downloadable, so that if you have the luxury of being off grid, or even just simply want to take them to the quiet of the garden then you can.

Regular writing and yoga classes will all resume in early September- but I will message well in advance of then as a reminder so that we might all come back to more ordered living together.

In the meantime, I hope you are able to steal moments within these apex summer days for yourselves, even if that just means lying on the grass of an afternoon or evening, feet bare and mind unharnessed, and listening to the now quieter but still busy meanderings of the birds.

xx Nicole

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THREE SUMMER YOGA SESSIONS - For Everyone

Finding Your Flow

Paying Attention

Feeling Connected