Tag: yoga

Triangulating the Heart, Head, and Hands for Justice

This spring I’m teaching a new course titled “Contemplative Writing.” I’ve visualized the course design through triangulation, or three intersecting points that rely on the others for fuller understanding. Like a compass, triangulation helps with navigating complicated terrain. It shows locations (or ideas) in relation to each other, highlighting multiplicity. In the case of “Contemplative Writing,” triangulation brings together three semester-long focuses, audiences, and goals:

  • 3 intersecting focuses = writing, justice, and contemplation/mindfulness
  • 3 audiences (or spheres of interaction) = self, others, and institutions
  • 3 goals = rhetorical flexibility, self-awareness, and courage in writing/speaking

To cover this complicated terrain, the students and I are journaling and doing regular (almost-daily) contemplative practices, while also pursuing “Projects That Matter” (research and activist writing). To keep me writing and practicing alongside the students, I’ve been doing some form of contemplative journaling, meditation, or movement daily.

Some days, I’ve been responding to the writing prompt that gives this blog its name, checking in with my heart, head, and hands:

  • Heart: What am I feeling?
  • Head: What am I thinking?
  • Hands: What am I going to do?

Through these check-ins, I have been triangulating intellectual, emotional, and embodied knowledges.

Recently, I discovered a yoga-asana (movement) video that essentially asks the same questions through a 25-minute “Head & Heart Reset”:

This Yoga with Adrienne video has resonated with me because I want to build physical strength to carry a hiking backpack, and it includes several strength-building poses. While I typically prefer gentle and super slow asana, this flowing practice seems to be opening the energetic pathways connecting my heart, head, and hands (as well as my gut, tear ducts, and held-within knowing).

The practice opens with wrapping arms around the shoulders, giving myself a hug, as I’m striving to do daily. It ends with deep breathing to carry energetic connectedness off the mat and into all communication.

While in the past I’ve practiced yoga through writing, now I’m channeling writing through yoga. I’m reminded of the importance of nurturing my body and its wisdom in order to create and share wisdom through writing.

Such realizations are also showing me that triangulation is much more than a navigation tool, research method, or course design. Triangulation is why I understand writing as connected with embodiment and everyday living. It’s why I associate yoga and other contemplative, spiritual practices with the work of countering injustice and investing in more equitable relations. And it’s why I strive to connect the heart, head, and hands.

Said differently, triangulation helps me not only navigate complicated terrain but also remember that no guiding principle stands alone. May I continue to learn and make meaning in multiple ways. May I continue to open to what emerges through varied contemplative practices. May I continue to weave triangulated webs of striving (with an attitude of try-try again) to live a life for justice.

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This post is written by Beth Godbee for Heart-Head-Hands.com. For more posts like this one, you might try “Gentle Yoga for Releasing Burdens,” “40 Days of Yoga Nidra,” and “Practicing Yoga Through Writing.” Please also consider following the blog via email. Thanks!

Snapshots of Support

This week I’ve felt stretched thin—waking up earlier and heading to bed later than I’d like. One moment, I’m reviewing students’ midterm portfolios. The next, I’m scripting a hard conversation. While attending to microaggressions and facilitating tricky online and in-person conversations, I’m also sharing hopeful-yet-emotional announcements with family, friends, colleagues, and students.

In the midst of such frenzied and frenetic activity, I’ve been finding support through everyday practices and joyful reminders that past-me put in place for present-me. To give a sense of what I mean, here are some views into what’s keeping me grounded in gratitude this week:

For re-centering and re-committing —

My practice space: yoga mats, blocks, and foam roller.
My practice space: yoga mats, blocks, and foam roller.

For doing self-inquiry as a daily practice —

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Journal for the 40-day Lent practice I’m leading for a local, predominantly-white church on “Building Resilience for Racial Justice.”

For healing the cold that’s been holding on —

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“Initial Defense” herbs recommended by my acupuncturist.

For everyday divination —

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Divination apps I use for guidance throughout the day.

For a breakfast that feels decadently sweet —

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Banana, chocolate, and peanut butter mash.

For inspiration and imagination of the “ought to be” —

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Books I have positioned around the house for visible inspiration, even when not reading.

For prioritizing art and play —

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My coloring book and some recent creations.

For remembering the love of family and friends —

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Kitchen wall with photos, poetry, artwork, and prayer flags.

Certainly, there are other snapshots I might take, but these are a few for which I feel particular gratitude. And slowing down enough to recognize and experience gratitude is its own sort of healing, energizing practice.

I’m curious: How do you create support for those times when stretched thin? Perhaps this post gives some ideas, and I hope you’ll share additional suggestions through comments.

With gratitude and love! ~ Beth

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This post is written by Beth Godbee for Heart-Head-Hands.com. For more posts like this one, you might try “Exploring Exhaustion and Energy Loss,” “Gratitude for/on Earth Day,” and “Imperfect Meditation and the Desire to ‘Slow Way Down.’” Please also consider following the blog via email. Thanks!

My Journey with Back Pain

Back pain. It’s a friend who’s accompanied me through most of my life, beginning in my early teens and really intensifying during graduate school when I had an “emergency surgery” after losing muscular control of my right foot. In 2006, when I had this surgery, I experienced intense pain: burning sensations that radiated from my low back down my right leg and into the toes that I couldn’t lift. It was a scary experience.

The last decade has taken me on an unexpected journey though understanding, managing, and healing chronic pain. Early on, I tried allopathic medicine: from pharmaceuticals that left me nauseous to injections that increased my stress and, therefore, my pain. I consulted specialists, worked closely with physical therapists and counselors, and even attended “back school” through a local pain clinic. And after a LOT of trial-and-error and a LOT of searching, I found my way to more integrative, holistic, spiritual means of healing.

This journey underlies why I so deeply value embodied knowledge and believe that our bodies have much to teach us. It’s also why I see a commitment to justice aligning with a commitment to healing—healing that involves not only the physical body but also internalized inferiority and superiority, dehumanization, and systemic oppression.

This journey has also been shaped by my embodied positioning within the United States, where economic privilege allows me access to holistic therapies that draw from many lineages and knowledge systems. My embodied positioning has meant, too, some really awful interactions with physicians (especially white men), which linked physical pain with emotional trauma and disempowerment. Instead of unpacking embodiment—the focus of many blog posts (and many more stories to tell)—I want to think now about managing moments of acute or especially intense pain.

Every few months, a friend asks for recommendations for pain management. I share my experiences not as a healthcare provider (I’m not!) but as someone who’s negotiated pain that has truly laid me low.

Here’s what I’ve turned to time and time again, doing many of these at once, depending on the degree and type of pain:

  • Sleeping with a pillow between or under my knees.
  • Sitting on an exercise ball or with cushions, a lumbar roll, and heating pad. Also, standing, lying down, moving throughout the day, and limiting time sitting.
  • Soaking in warm Epsom salt baths and gently floating/swimming in pools.
  • Applying essential oils and balms to the primary site of pain and wherever nerve pain is radiating.
  • Applying castor oil and a heating pad over the site of pain.
  • Using a TENS unit, which took me several years to learn about, but has become a real lifesaver whenever sitting for several hours (e.g., when traveling by car or airplane).
  • Receiving acupuncture and cupping, and consulting my acupuncturist about which herbs may help. I tend to take just a low dose of turmeric, as my stomach is sensitive, but my acupuncturist always has suggestions.
  • Taking homeopathic tabs and/or applying homeopathic rubs, such as Rhus tox and arnica. I particularly like Community Pharmacy’s homeopathic blend “Injury,” and they ship across the United States. Community Pharmacy also has knowledgeable staff who can make recommendations for other integrative therapies, and they make customized flower essence blends, which can be combined with homeopathy.
  • Becoming way more mindful about my eating, and sticking with an anti-inflammatory diet. It’s taken me YEARS of working closely with a naturopath to learn which foods increase my inflammation, so I recognize this is a long-term investment.
  • Increasing my intake of potassium and magnesium through bananas, avocados, and coconut water toward calming muscles and my nervous system.
  • Minimizing activities that create flare-ups: for me, these include driving and attending meetings.
  • Increasing activities that support the body: examples include slow walking and gentle yoga (the sort where I’m lying on the floor for asana practice).
  • Adding essential oils for relaxation to my pillow and dehumidifier at bedtime.
  • Meditating, especially with Deb Shapiro’s “talking with your body,” body scans, and chakra meditations, which I now couple with self-Reiki.
  • Repeating mantras suggested through Louise Hay’s Heal Your Body A-Z app. Some regular ones include: “I love and approve of myself. I trust the process of life. I flow freely with life.”
  • Reviewing and integrating into my daily routines the movements suggested in Pete Egoscue’s Pain Free—building strength slowly and only after the most acute pain passes.
  • Working out sensitive and sore spots with a foam roller—essentially, giving myself a massage.
  • Noticing which of these therapies feels right at a given moment, and remaining open to other therapies, as there’s always more to try and learn. At times, massage or craniosacral therapy has felt right; at other times, I’m talked about stressors with friends or returned to physical therapy. It feels important to remain open to what healing is needed and how healing evolves over time.
  • And if the pain is really bad, then taking ibuprofen, acetaminophen, or other pain relievers.

Managing back pain has meant befriending pain. Instead of cursing it, I’ve learned to get curious and ask, “Pain, what do you have to tell me?” Often enough, pain acts as a messenger, asking me to notice what I’ve been avoiding/hiding or to make changes that involve confronting fear, anger, and other emotions. Truly, in Deb Shapiro’s words: “Your Body Speaks Your Mind.”

I’ve only come to this place of befriending pain after embarking in 2011 on a process of self- and spiritual-discovery with Reiki. With the willingness to undo years of trauma to my body—from the surgery, taking medications to numb/dull the pain, and storing emotions as physical tension and rigidity—I’ve learned that pain is part of the heart-head-hands connection. As a friend, pain has ushered in daily yoga practice, a commitment to live a more contemplative and justice-oriented life, and the realization that I really love being in (feeling, experiencing, and moving) my body. From a place of gratitude, I can now say—12 years after back surgery—that I’m deeply grateful for the pain and its reminders to show up as I am: messy, human, and truly me.

From this place of gratitude, I hope that sharing what’s worked for me—how I respond to acute pain and what I’m learning through my healing journey—offers some insights or ideas for others facing pain. With love, may you/I/we heal ourselves and our world.

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This post is written by Beth Godbee for Heart-Head-Hands.com. For more posts like this one, you might try “Attending to Anger,” “Gentle Yoga for Healing,” or “Playing Through the Pain.” Please also consider following the blog via email. Thanks!

Expect Miracles

Of the many lessons I’m still learning, an important one is to trust life as it unfolds. I struggle with trust because I struggle with letting go of perfectionism and perceived control. Despite these struggles, whenever I soften attachments to my preferred timing and open instead to possibilities, miracles occur. And the more I open to miracles, the more I find HOPE, which is so greatly needed on the long haul toward justice.

Recently, I’ve had an important reminder to expect miracles (or at least miraculous timing) in everyday life:

A few weeks ago, I lost a mala that Marty Tribble custom-made for me after several Reiki sessions of discussing my desire/need for greater grounding, spiritual connectedness, and trust in divine protection. Marty created this garnet bracelet and shipped it in a box with stenciled arrows, at the same time that I’d had an arrow drawn onto my hand during a summer retreat (pictured here).

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I took the arrows to be a sign of the mala’s significance for decision-making and directional guidance.

The mala must have been helping me trust, because when I lost it, I trusted that it was where it needed to be and would reemerge at the right time. I was somehow sure that the mala wasn’t lost to me, but just buried from my view or consciousness.

This loss happened about a month ago, before I started 40 days of yoga nidra—a meditative practice that I’ve been doing at bedtime. I often fall asleep during the guided practice, and I’ve been having especially vivid, symbolic dreams. These powerful dreams, I believe, have been a continuation of yogic sleep in actual sleep.

Through this process, I’ve become more aware of how much self-work and self-healing happen through dreams and sleep. I’ve also become aware of the mala’s hiding place.

Just before leaving town for a full month’s travel, I changed my bed sheets and moved my mattress away from the headboard. That night, when practicing yoga asana on the floor, I saw the mala under the bed. It had likely been tucked within the bed frame, near my head for the past weeks of yoga nidra. Despite my perception of having “lost” the mala, it was exactly where it needed to be: physically in my bed, supporting yoga nidra practice, and present for self-work during sleep.

The timing of its re-emergence has felt divinely orchestrated, too. Since I’m now traveling for a month, my home bed is no longer my practice space. By making its presence known, the mala is able to travel with me. I’m again wearing it as a bracelet during days and keeping it near my bed at nights.

I share this story of the lost-and-found mala because it’s the sort of everyday miracle that gives me hope at this time. It’s a reminder, especially in this week of the winter solstice and many religious celebrations, of the importance of trusting divine timing, especially when choosing to tread another path.

I share this story, too, because it’s opened for me a series of new questions:

  • What needs to change in my approach to everyday living if I am to act as though miracles are already present and possible?
  • What does it mean for miracles to be present at this time of great injustice? Might the recognition of miracles help with recognition of other often-dismissed phenomena like microaggressions, systemic racism, and epistemic injustice?
  • How do we undermine or block ourselves from noticing miracles and other magic that can give us life, even in the toughest times?
  • How might the expectation of miracles (or at least miraculous timing) aid in building resilience, commitments to justice, and long-term staying power?

I am excited to see what emerges as I learn to expect miracles. I hope you, too, will look for the miraculous in everyday life.

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This post is written by Beth Godbee for Heart-Head-Hands.com. For more posts like this one, you might try “Everyday Divination,” “Attending to Anger,” or “Sieving Life: Keeping What Nourishes and Releasing the Rest.” Please also consider following the blog via email. Thanks!

40 Days of Yoga Nidra

A year ago, when launching this blog, I wrote about welcoming winter by looking within—resolving “to tune into how I’m feeling, what I’m thinking, and what I can do,” resolving “to be true to my truths, my commitments, and my joys.” These resolutions have accompanied me through the year and are now re-energizing the desire for introspective hibernation.

As luck (or divine intervention) would have it, Marty Tribble (my Reiki teacher) is offering a community practice of 40 days of yoga nidra, starting November 22. To learn more or to participate in this practice, see Marty’s website:

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As I’ve experienced it, yoga nidra, or “yogic sleep,” is guided meditation that invites active participation in deepening self-awareness. This practice integrates embodied, emotional, mental, and spiritual knowledges. It truly brings together the heart, head, and hands and asks us to know ourselves so that we know our commitments.

I am excited for this 40-day practice as a means to create new rituals. It was during Marty’s 40-day commUNITY Sadhana in 2014 that I put into place my daily asana practice. By doing the same 7-minute movement sequence for 40 days, I transformed a belief that “daily yoga practice is good” into the experience of truly practicing daily. This formative experience has stayed with me as I’ve continued to do at least some gentle movement, meditation, or other contemplative activities every day.

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To check out Marty’s free yoga videos or to make a love offering, visit http://www.martytribble.com/podcast.html.

I share these experiences because committing to a practice can be significant, especially at this time of year when seasonal shifts are inviting critical self-care. I will be participating in Marty’s 40 days of yoga nidra, and I’d love to share this experience with you. I’m excited about the possibilities that consistent, committed practice can enact. Perhaps you’ll join me. If you do, please let me know.

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This post is written by Beth Godbee for Heart-Head-Hands.com. For more posts about yoga and self-care, you might try “Gentle Yoga Practice for Healing” and “Gentle Yoga for Releasing Burdens.” Please also consider following the blog via email. Thanks!

Gentle Yoga for Releasing Burdens

I’ve recently noticed how much tension I’m holding in my neck and shoulders. It feels as though I’ve been burdening myself with the weight of the world and carrying this extra weight in/on my body. The burden shows up in rounded shoulders—the physical manifestation of shrinking—rather than standing TALL with upright posture so that I can courageously be seen and take up space.

To change this pattern, I’ve been using this simple and slow yoga video:

I appreciate this simple practice because it somehow magically releases the tension and reminds me of the value of releasing, not carrying, burdens. Of allowing instead of trying to control. Of flowing with the rhythms of life. Of remaining open, aware, and still flexible.

I feel grateful that my body speaks my mind and that I can learn from my body’s intuitive cues (in this case, stiff neck and tight shoulders). It’s not by chance that hunching over gadgets (phones and computers) causes neck and shoulder tension, yet it’s not just the hunching that my body is asking me to address.

Rather, my body is signaling the need to address my intake of news, my response to emails, my emotional engagement in communication, and my response-abilities to myself and others. The more I can let go of false ideas that I can control or correct situations, the more I can release this tension. And the more I release this tension, the more I am poised to truly respond, as I can flexibly turn from side-to-side, from issue-to-issue.

So, I’ll keep playing this gentle yoga video with appreciation for my body directing me to s-l-o-w self-care yet again. And I’ll work on releasing what’s not mine so that I’m flexibly attending to what is.

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This post is written by Beth Godbee for Heart-Head-Hands.com. For more posts like this one, you might try “Attending to Anger” or “Gentle Yoga Practice for Healing.” Please also consider following the blog via email. Thanks!

Mantras to Stand TALL for Justice

This week I returned to teaching First-Year English (FYE), a course focused on information literacy, academic writing, undergraduate research, and the first-year college experience. This course helps students in making the transition to college, asking research questions, and navigating academic disciplines and the larger university system. The goal is for students to see themselves as critical readers, writers, and researchers—agents with response-abilities to make change.

With the start of this new school year, I’ve been thinking about who I was as a college student and who the students I teach might be. I’ve been considering what hopes I hold for the students and myself and what I might say to encourage students to conduct inquiries that really matter in the world. Teaching at this time feels especially important and even urgent. How might I spark students to social action? How might I play a role in helping others identify and act on their purposes? How might I teach in a way to inspire speaking and writing UP?

And wouldn’t you know that in the midst of such reflection, I come across a poster that speaks to me (and in a gas station bathroom, of all places):

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I can’t count the number of times I’ve repeated mantas about grounding and growing tall:

“I am grounded. I am safe and protected. I am securely rooted.”
“It is safe for me to be seen. It is safe to speak my truth. It is safe to be me.”
“Even when scared, I show up. I stand TALL.”

Stumbling upon this poster felt like confirmation that there’s value in sharing these mantras as wishes, hopes, and goals for students. There is real power in standing TALL—steady and true, like trees—in our commitments … in acting as our best selves, witnessing injustice, speaking truth, countering dehumanization, honoring ourselves and others, asking for more, and demanding justice.

Standing TALL, as I understand it, includes more than physically standing as part of a protest or demonstration. Yes, that physical presence is important, and it helps us see how presence—where and when to put one’s body, words, and actions—is always already political action.

Two examples:

For a student of color, attending the predominantly white university already makes a claim of one’s right to belong within that space. Attending classes already involves standing TALL. It already involves resilience and courage in the face of everyday microaggressions.

For a white student, choices to speak against microaggressions, to study white supremacy, to build cross-racial relations, to embrace marginalized stories, and to rethink one’s worldview similarly involve standing TALL. To shake up/off what’s been inherited and normalized involves the groundedness to be true to one’s self, while striving for change.

In other words (words I’ve encountered through yoga asana practice):

To stand TALL, we must “root to rise.”

This wisdom is more than metaphor. The deeper the trees’ roots, the taller, wider, and more expansive trees grow. Similarly, the stronger the feet and the firmer their planting, the higher humans can stretch—literally, becoming taller.

Growing roots can be hard because it requires stability and resolve—and at a time when students are uprooted. Transitions can feel especially unsettling, as though the ground is constantly shifting and the horizon always unknown. The transition to college, whether from high school or work or parenting or another place in life, can take us to new ground, too, literally and figuratively.

When so much is shifting, it can help to come back to grounding, again and again. And it can help to remember why we’re needed in the world, standing tall among others, a voice against racism and tyranny and violence and what’s wrong.

To the students in my FYE courses and, truly, to all of us as writers, speakers, and actors in the world, I share some mantras for finding the courage to speak, write, and act:

May we get rooted in what’s true, what’s peaceful, what’s equitable, and what’s humane. May we be grounded and courageous in our commitments. May we write-speak-act for justice. May we stand TALL. May we root to rise. May we rise to what is asked of us at this time and in the times to come.

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This post is written by Beth Godbee for Heart-Head-Hands.com. For more posts like this one, you might try “Answering the Call for Artistic Activism: Yes, I’m an Artist!” or “Disrupting the Mind-Body Split.” Please also consider following the blog via email. Thanks!