making room for the soul

It’s so much harder for the mind to work up a stressful frenzy when the body has been properly exerted. To be clear, I’m not talking about the physical fatigue that comes with pushing yourself through life too hard, for too long, with too little care. In fact, that kind of depletion will tend to only make fear-based thinking worse.

In this case I’m referring to the total physical and neurological release that comes from a period of distinct and deliberate action. This can look like running, dancing, hiking, hot yoga, biking, etc. For me this weekend it was primarily powering through the first round of procrastinated fall clean up.

The fresh air, the sunshine, the mental simplicity of the activity, the moving of the body, the muscle tension and release… all facilitated a mental exhale when I was done. Once everything was put away and I sat outside to enjoy the view, the internal noisy narrator shut off and simultaneously I felt my heart center open wide.

Ahhhh. Bliss.

When the mind is relieved by way of the physical body it tends to quiet and still itself, ostensibly with little to no effort on your part. In that resting moment of the mind, there is all the room in the world to connect with your soul and hear your guiding intuition.

This stillness and alignment with our highest consciousness is much of what we seek in meditation, but often it requires a great deal of wrestling with the tenacious energy of the mind on the front end. Embracing a whole body-mind-soul approach of combining attention to the physical as well as the spiritual often yields the greatest and most powerful fulfillment.