Grounding, Organization, Focus

As I enter into my third year of intentional focus on ayurveda practices, I am starting to find clarity in my work for each season.  The resonance of what I need to keep working on as autumn continues has strengthened over the past week.  

Grounding, Organization, Focus

Challenging practices for me in this season.  

What became clear over the past week was that my coping strategies for stress deteriorated.  I could feel myself fall into a vortex of self-critique and numbing.  Older residual habits that I've managed to avoid over these years.  And that is the issue.  I have out run some of those old habits, all the time fearing the moment they come back to dominate my life.  That means those habits are far from gone; they leave me reactive and at times responding in ways that are not always true to who I am now.

When I sat in that revelation for a few days, I could almost feel another layer of my older self peeling off of my body.  And what I realized was that I had to admit that those deeper fears of myself still had a pretty firm hold on me.  Bringing those fears out of my unconsciousness and into my conscious, intentioned self, I knew I needed to develop ways to handle that process with awareness and clarity, so I do go into reactive mode.

Grounding, Organization, Focus

Muscles I need to locate and strengthen.  

Grounding: To place on a foundation; to fix firmly; to settle or establish.  This is probably one of the hardest practices for me.  It is easy for me to loose touch with all that is beneath me. I forget to feel the earth. Attempts at settling down often produce greater unsettling. I can remember to ground in my yoga practice, but off the mat, it easily slips out of grasp. Yet, I know that in order to pay attention to my reactivity, I must stop and actually feel the ground.  Feel the world around me.  Feel the hardness of the ground. Feel the soft carpet tickling the bottoms of my feet. Feel the pointed tips of the grass between my toes. Feel my feet shuffling through leaves as I walk through my backyard.  But how do I remind myself of grounding in the moment? That will be my challenge.  


Organization: The state of being organized.  But what does it mean to be organized? I found an interesting definition: "to give organic structure or character to."  I like the idea that organization emerges organically, responsively to what is happening.  But not reactively. It means, for me, that the practice of organizing has to be done intentionally and with awareness. And even in the past few days, even the tiniest task to organize with intention has provided me calmness and relief.  Clearing out my dead and dried annuals and putting the planters under the deck provided the space for me to observe the way nature prepares for and responds to the changing seasons. Organizing my deck helped me embrace the end of a season of outward growth and welcome autumn's preparations for pulling inward. 

Focus: An act of concentrating interest or activity on something. To have focus on something, for me, means finding flow. Finding the zone.  Finding total absorption in something always puts me in a euphoric space.  I want to get in that zone with my research and writing.  Not simply to do the work in order to soothe some arbitrary ego requirement, but to feel the joy in the work.  I want to keep myself attuned to those spaces that bring me joy.





This is my work for the season. I have to stay awake and intentioned.  Focus, organization, and grounding. They all work together. They reinforce one another.  They feed and work on one another.