{"id":4685,"date":"2021-02-02T16:11:59","date_gmt":"2021-02-02T21:11:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wellspringsuu.org\/new\/?post_type=ctc_sermon&#038;p=4685"},"modified":"2021-02-02T16:12:01","modified_gmt":"2021-02-02T21:12:01","slug":"the-practice-of-yoga-and-embodied-movement","status":"publish","type":"ctc_sermon","link":"https:\/\/www.wellspringsuu.org\/new\/messages\/the-practice-of-yoga-and-embodied-movement\/","title":{"rendered":"The Practice of Yoga and Embodied Movement"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>This week, Rev. Lee begins with telling us a story about how pandemic stress has affected some friends of hers, and how, in a moment of intense pressure, her friend as able to think &#8220;I&#8217;m alive right now and with the people I love.&#8221; The idea of &#8220;Coming Home&#8221; to your own body might not be something we think of often, but it&#8217;s an important practice. During this message, yoga instructor Gael Alba takes us through some gentle guided movement and breathing. All you&#8217;ll need is some comfortable clothing and either a space on the floor or a chair.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Yoga and Embodied Movement<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>NAME<br>DATE<br>February 2, 2021<br>DURATION<br>36m 28s<br>Yoga and Embodied Movement Audio.mp3<br>START OF TRANSCRIPT<br>[00:00:00]<br>The following is a message from Wellspring&#8217;s congregation, so a few weeks ago, a friend of mine got some news<br>that nobody wants to get these days. He found out that his family had been exposed to covid-19. They had all been<br>in close contact with someone who they knew was now sick.<br>[00:00:25]<br>So whatever their plans were for that day, they got dropped and my friend rushed to figure out how and where to<br>get himself and his partner and his kids all tested for the virus. They were juggling three different insurance plans<br>and contradictory information, he said, from really well-meaning health care professionals who were just trying to<br>do their best.<br>[00:00:52]<br>But it was frustrating.<br>[00:00:56]<br>And scary.<br>[00:01:00]<br>They&#8217;re all OK now, but they didn&#8217;t know that then, and I&#8217;m aware, as I tell this story, that odds are some of you<br>have had this exact same thing happen to you. I know some of you have or maybe this story feels a little bit like<br>your experience just in recent days, trying to figure out where to get a coronavirus vaccine. But my friend told me<br>the whole day was just a blur.<br>[00:01:28]<br>He said it was Blur&#8217;s day, but not in a usual pandemic, Blur&#8217;s day kind of way. It wasn&#8217;t a numb, dull, boring, fuzzy<br>kind of day stuck within the same walls. This one, he said, was an anxious, frantic Blur&#8217;s day.<br>[00:01:45]<br>He said, I&#8217;ve decided that one is not better than the other.<br>[00:01:50]<br>They&#8217;re just different kinds of blurs. The one thing that helped you noticed was his family, his regular practice.<br>[00:02:00]<br>At dinnertime, they pulled a frozen pizza out of the oven finally at about eight p.m. and they sat down and they<br>began the simple practice that they do together every night as they sit around the dinner table, they each share<br>something that they are grateful for from that day.<br>[00:02:20]<br>And he said it wasn&#8217;t anything that was said. There wasn&#8217;t any profound gratitude expressed that shifted his case of<br>the Blur&#8217;s.<br>[00:02:27]<br>It was just a simple rhythm of doing the thing that they have done hundreds and hundreds of times before, of<br>realizing, OK, we made it, we made it back to this moment, to this anchor, and he noticed his body settling his heart<br>rate, slowing his breathing a little easier.<br>[00:02:55]<br>In that moment, he realized instead of projecting out into the future and trying to plan or remembering the chaos of<br>the day, all he was thinking about was that he was still here and he was alive with the people that he loves.<br>[00:03:13]<br>Our message series this winter Coming Home. It is a way of reminding us all that spiritual practices really can do<br>this when we are able to find a practice that works for us and commit to it.<br>[00:03:32]<br>Just like Chris Groppe said last week, not with perfection, but with honesty and regularity and intention, we can find<br>some peace and clarity even on the bloodiest and scariest days. And we&#8217;ve heard so far in the series about<br>different kinds of practices that you might try practices that help us grow our generosity or experienced life<br>mindfully, practices that can help us create and kind of get what&#8217;s inside of us out on paper. And over the next few<br>weeks, we&#8217;re going to explore practices for meal times and nourishment for reading.<br>[00:04:12]<br>Today, we&#8217;re going to try a practice of movement and embodiment. That&#8217;s why I&#8217;m in my comfy clothes for this<br>message.<br>[00:04:22]<br>Now, I try to be careful any time I say that anything about us is universal. But one thing I can actually say with<br>certainty is that all of us who are here this morning have a body.<br>[00:04:34]<br>Personally, for most of my life. Maybe this is true for some of you. I always associated that word, talking about the<br>body or my body, any conversation about the body I associate it with how the body looks on the outside or how it<br>performs. Right. Talking about my body always connected back for me to the external thing, what other people<br>saw. And so when I thought or talked about movement practices or tried them out like dancing, exercising for me,<br>they all became things where I didn&#8217;t even notice. But I was so preoccupied with doing it right, with how my form<br>was, with how it looked on the outside, rather than with the internal sensation of movement itself.<br>[00:05:26]<br>And that&#8217;s what that word embodied, if you haven&#8217;t heard it before, really means it&#8217;s about being in our bodies.<br>[00:05:33]<br>An embodied spiritual practice helps us remember that this body really is our home. But everything that we<br>experience in this life starts within and lives at the edges of our bodies. It can be a really empowering thing in a<br>world that often tells us what&#8217;s on the outside of our bodies is what really matters to take back our experiences of<br>our own bodies and appreciate ourselves from the inside out rather than standing back and looking back from the<br>outside in.<br>[00:06:18]<br>Now, there are a lot of different ways to try out embodied movement practices and a lot of different practices to<br>you might have heard of a field called Cymatics that&#8217;s become more popular in recent years. It&#8217;s from the Greek<br>word, Soma for the body. It&#8217;s being incorporated into research by a lot of therapists, people who&#8217;ve got books out<br>right now that a lot of you are reading, people like Bessel van der Coke Rezma Menicum, both of whom study how<br>the body holds trauma and how our emotions show up in our bodies over time.<br>[00:06:52]<br>And embodiment is present in spiritual practices. Of course, the practice of the whirling dervish in Sufi Islam, there<br>are Buddhist forms of walking meditation that are all about embodied movement.<br>[00:07:04]<br>There are Christian practices like tracing or moving through a labyrinth, but also there are more mundane,<br>everyday spiritual practices that we may not think of as embodied, but are all about that connection with our<br>physical selves, the postures of prayer in Islamic tradition, the practice of taking communion in a Christian church,<br>whether they&#8217;re religious or secular. All of these practices have in common that the movement is not just about the<br>physical work of moving the body. It&#8217;s a movement that connects us to our inner experiences and to that<br>experience of something greater than ourselves, whether that&#8217;s God or the Earth or community or connection for<br>you, just something greater that holds us, literally holds our bodies. So I&#8217;m going to turn this message over actually<br>in a few minutes. I thought about trying to walk you through an embodied movement practice myself, but it<br>seemed a little silly considering, you know, about 10 percent of Wellspring&#8217;s members are yoga teachers.<br>[00:08:15]<br>I thought I would turn this message over to a wellspring or who has real experience in this. Many of you know, Gil<br>Alba, who has been teaching a particular kind of movement practice for decades and who has led small groups and<br>retreats here at Wellspring&#8217;s. Gael is a yoga teacher. And when I say the word yoga, I feel like I can already hear<br>some of you. Right. Some of you some of you have already got your crystal quartz points arranged and you&#8217;re ready<br>on your mat. You&#8217;re all set to go. You&#8217;re excited. And then some of you are like, oh, yoga. OK, I guess it&#8217;s time to<br>make lunch. Now, when it comes to yoga, you might be, you know, on team love the pants, not the practice. Or<br>maybe you have tried yoga and you think you&#8217;re not good at it or maybe the opposite. You&#8217;ve tried yoga and you<br>feel like it&#8217;s slow and it&#8217;s boring and it&#8217;s touchy feely. You know, it&#8217;s funny.<br>[00:09:11]<br>In his book, My Grandmother&#8217;s Hands, Rezma Minicam, who I mentioned before, is a therapist. He says if this stuff<br>sounds touchy feely, that&#8217;s because it is touchy feely. Right. And body practices are about touch and sensation and<br>getting out of our heads. This past year, we have lived in our heads a lot, even more than usual. We spend so much<br>of our times, our time literally as talking heads like this on screens.<br>[00:09:44]<br>These days, when our bodies are vulnerable, when we feel physical threats for so many different reasons, we need<br>these gentle and compassionate ways to tend to our bodies more than ever.<br>[00:10:01]<br>So before I turn it over to Gael, I will say, if you are a yoga skeptic, I was with you for most of my life until I realized<br>how limited my understanding of yoga really had been, mostly by the fitness industry, which is how most<br>Americans have come to know anything about yoga.<br>[00:10:23]<br>If you&#8217;re curious to learn more about this, I recommend checking out a podcast that another Wellspring&#8217;s member<br>turned me on to Called Yoga is Dead. It&#8217;s hosted by two Indian American yoga teachers, Bajo Patel and Jessell Parik.<br>And it&#8217;s sort of an uncovering of how yoga wound its way through both the fitness industry and then later kind of a<br>consumer spirituality industry in America and in the process, yoga got farther and farther away from the fullness of<br>the ancient practice in South Asia.<br>[00:11:00]<br>The yoga that you might learn at a gym or even a typical yoga studio is typically an athletic sized version of just<br>one part of the yoga practice. It&#8217;s the asanas that&#8217;s the Sanskrit word for pose, right?<br>[00:11:17]<br>Asana is just one part of the eight different parts or eight limbs, as you&#8217;ll hear Gael say, of yoga and yoga is really<br>an entire way of life that tries to help us unify what we experience in our bodies and in our thoughts and in that<br>connection to something larger or greater.<br>[00:11:41]<br>So just be aware, if you are a yoga skeptic that go into a yoga class and saying, I&#8217;ve tried yoga, I didn&#8217;t like it.<br>[00:11:48]<br>It&#8217;s sort of like taking communion at a Catholic church and saying, I tried religion. I didn&#8217;t like it.<br>[00:11:55]<br>Right. There&#8217;s a lot more to religion as a category and there&#8217;s also a lot more to yoga.<br>[00:12:03]<br>So Gael is going to give you a little taste of that more today.<br>[00:12:09]<br>I&#8217;ll give you a moment to change into your comfy clothes if you haven&#8217;t already. And of course, if you would just like<br>to observe the practice, that&#8217;s fine.<br>[00:12:17]<br>But if you do try our embodied practice today, I really encourage you to try to think of it a little bit differently, to not<br>push yourself, to not worry about getting it right. One of the nice things about being at home right now is that<br>nobody else can see you. Right. Just notice what feels good in your body as you move notice and get curious about<br>whether any of the movements help you feel calm or grounded or more alive.<br>[00:12:53]<br>That&#8217;s what we need right now. I&#8217;ll let I&#8217;ll take it from here.<br>[00:13:01]<br>Oh, and be aware that you may see me on screen from time to time, because I&#8217;m going to do girls practice along<br>with you so you can see what it looks like to do it imperfectly and also so you can see what it looks like to modify it<br>for sitting in a chair is going to be on the floor.<br>[00:13:17]<br>And so you can feel a little less alone, if that&#8217;s helpful for you.<br>[00:13:23]<br>Thank you, Reverend Lee. Hi, everyone, I&#8217;m Gil Alba, and I&#8217;m going to bring you some tools and techniques drawn<br>from the eight limbs of yoga. The word yoga itself means to yoga or bring together the powers of body, mind and<br>spirit power. And that is it brings a coherence into our everyday experience that all the parts of us are moving in<br>the same direction. I&#8217;m going to do today&#8217;s physical practice from the floor. I invite you to come on down with me<br>either on a straight floor.<br>[00:14:07]<br>If you have a mat, that would be great. I&#8217;ll give you a minute to to get it and get set up. If sitting on the floor doesn&#8217;t<br>feel really great for you and you need to be bolstering a pillow is one that I often use. But you see it right in the<br>middle of the pillow or a straight back chair. They&#8217;re all great. I&#8217;m going to sit in the middle of my mat just like so<br>you are going to cross your legs however it works for you. Much of what the eight limbs of yoga really teaches is<br>about ways of being. Practices that we can do in our mind and for our hearts. So the first thing that we recognize is<br>that you do the best you can with your body. The point of doing anything at all with your body is to sort of get it out<br>of the way for the rest of what you&#8217;re up to. And by getting it out of the way, we do that by taking care of it, by<br>changing it, by massaging it into ways of being that create ease in the ease, there is self care and self-love. So this<br>is all part of the mind, body, spirit, practice. So you&#8217;ve got yourself settled in. I might go a little off frame here. No<br>bother. You&#8217;ll understand what I&#8217;m doing. You&#8217;re seated and you feel as comfortable as you can be right in the<br>middle of your body.<br>[00:15:46]<br>Your spine is uplifted. Nice and tall. Your shoulders are down. Let your head just rest in the middle of your body,<br>neither too far forward nor back side to side. And be aware that you have become aware of how you&#8217;re feeling.<br>Sitting up straight with your legs crossed is in yoga, and Asana one, only one of the eight limbs that we draw from<br>in our daily practice, everything that we do that&#8217;s movement is going to be underneath the limb of Asana. So I&#8217;m<br>going to invite you to take your arms and stretch them way, way up tall, as tall as you can, and feel your aliveness<br>all the way to the tips of your fingers. Notice that you&#8217;re breathing. I&#8217;m going to use my right arm and take it down<br>to the side as I bring myself over, stretching the whole of my waist and shoulder and upper arm all the way to the<br>tips of the fingers. And then if you can look up. Why didn&#8217;t your elbow and breathe? Allow yourself to know that you<br>are opening up possibility on the left side of your body, on the left side of your being, that you can see further and<br>be more simply through the stretch, exhale, arm down, arms up to the sky. Same idea. Bring the hand down to the<br>side. And reach turning the face, look up toward the elbow and feel the stretch all the way from your seat, up to the<br>tips of your fingers breathing in and breathing out.<br>[00:18:18]<br>The simplicity of the hold allows you buy time to settle into something that&#8217;s probably new for you in this day, even<br>though it isn&#8217;t difficult or complicated. This is something that we normally do. So you might be finding places in<br>your body that you are not in touch with before you did the stretch. And that really is the point. Coming back to<br>center, going to take our hands. You can fold them like this or like so and bring them under your chin. Breathing in.<br>Your elbows go up.<br>[00:18:58]<br>Breathing out your elbows, come down, drop your chin to chest. We&#8217;ll do that four times, breathing in.<br>[00:19:09]<br>And now.<br>[00:19:13]<br>Again, in and out.<br>[00:19:21]<br>Again, in and out, my eyelids tend to drop closed yours, might as well, last time in. And out, drop your arms.<br>[00:19:40]<br>Breathing in and breathing out. Still sitting in your Asana, your breathing is pranayama, another entire limb, but<br>anchored to something so simple as a breath that invites you to take lifeforce in as deeply as you can and then<br>release it all the way out. I&#8217;m going to ask you to put your hands to your knees and create a circle with your body.<br>[00:20:13]<br>So you&#8217;re creating a moving Asana.<br>[00:20:17]<br>And you&#8217;re breathing and you&#8217;re feeling and you&#8217;re feeling yourself here.<br>[00:20:33]<br>Ramdas, as a teacher, you might have heard of, and he wrote a book that had a saying, Be here now. It&#8217;s really a<br>big part of this practice to be here now and to be here in a way that releases judgment, and for me, the releasing of<br>the judgment is the biggest part of the practice. Releasing judgment is the biggest part of the practice. There are<br>yamas in yoga, another limb. There are a whole series of practices that we undo, things non doing&#8217;s one of the<br>Yamas that&#8217;s a non doing, it&#8217;s a practice of nonviolence. And I&#8217;m going to bring that onto the mat today for us. What<br>is the most nonviolent way that you can be told yourself in your practice?<br>[00:21:37]<br>I&#8217;m going to invite you to lift the spine, as we did before, turn from your waistline toward one of your thighs. You&#8217;re<br>sitting in a chair. It&#8217;s going to look different. But up here, it looks the same. You&#8217;ve turned your body toward one of<br>your thighs and you&#8217;re going to bring your belly toward that thigh. That&#8217;s going to look different than dropping your<br>head.<br>[00:22:05]<br>You stay uplifted, you bring your belly toward your thigh and you&#8217;re breathing in and you&#8217;re holding that posture.<br>Some of you can go all the way down. If I do that, I&#8217;ll go off frame. That&#8217;s OK. You can see that the back is flat as<br>you can make it, and you&#8217;re wherever you can be, you&#8217;re going to hold that and breathe for a moment. So the<br>practice of ahimsa or nonviolence, which we often think of as being nonviolent to the world outside of us,<br>something that most of us. It would simply be part of us, we wouldn&#8217;t wish to be violent to the world outside, but<br>I&#8217;m inviting us on the mat to really look at what&#8217;s going on inside of our minds. And an act of nonviolence toward<br>yourself in your yoga practice means that you are clearly an absolutely in love with yourself in the way that you can<br>be in the movement right now. Your breathing, your fullest breath, it&#8217;s filled with life and you&#8217;re happy with that. It<br>is your maximal ability in this moment and you allow yourself to be happy with that. And if you are so relaxed and<br>so release that your movement is all the way down wherever you can imagine it to be.<br>[00:23:31]<br>That&#8217;s great. But you still have more to go. And the ahimsa of the mind, where can you go and release yourself from<br>judgment? So I bring you back up with that back into the center of your body, because we&#8217;re going to go to the<br>other side in a moment. About you to do this circle again round and round and maybe your loser. I&#8217;m going to put<br>in parentheses here for those of you that have, oh, long term. Stuck places. In my own body, it was my low back for<br>many years. It is no longer my back and I can only credit the simple movements like this, spinal rotations and spinal<br>twists that unlocked the experience of pain in my back, even though my x rays will still tell you that it didn&#8217;t really<br>fix itself at all. But I&#8217;m not in the perception of pain because my body moves freely and this is something that you<br>can do for you. So you come back to the center of your experience and you lift your body up and you turn your core<br>toward that opposite, like breathing in, lifting up, breathing out flat, back very flat back, pressing body toward the<br>thigh.<br>[00:25:05]<br>You might be coming down a little bit, you might be coming down a lot.<br>[00:25:11]<br>A side note, I feel my body adjust already mentioned my lower back. I feel the adjustments. It sounds like a little bit<br>of a quick, quick, quick, quick, quick as I go down inch by inch. And you may find that for yourself. Something<br>unwinding some of the fuzz that collects around our adjuncts where muscle meets bone.<br>[00:25:40]<br>Just releasing and you&#8217;re breathing in and out. And again, I invite you. What&#8217;s going on in your mind? The practice<br>of ahimsa is the nonviolence toward yourself, but what might you put in its stead? I blast. Breathing in, breathing<br>out.<br>[00:26:22]<br>The universe has my back breathing in, breathing out.<br>[00:26:33]<br>I am appreciative of all that I am breathing and breathing out and allowing yourself to come back up again, sitting<br>in the middle of your circle.<br>[00:26:52]<br>I&#8217;m going to ask you to put your hands behind. You are on the sides wherever you can adjust yourself that you&#8217;re<br>feeling balanced. I&#8217;m going to take our legs up and out, see if you can do it by contracting and supporting your<br>movement with your belly up and out.<br>[00:27:14]<br>Shifting weight, lifting the rib cage up.<br>[00:27:20]<br>Similarly to what we did on each side. We&#8217;re going to bend forward. This is just called the seated forward flexion.<br>That&#8217;s the Ossana, the movement. The breath is a deep, balanced breath, the same that you&#8217;ve been doing,<br>breathing in and breathing out and let your body come down as close as you can, belly toward the thighs. I&#8217;m<br>giving you this one, because for most of us, this is a practice that you can bring with you. Over time. Your belly will<br>get closer to your thighs, your heart will get closer to your knees and your chin will get closer to your shins with<br>time. It&#8217;s rather fun to bring this to your mat every day and see how long it will take before where you are today is<br>simply no longer. You&#8217;ll be further further forward in a rather short amount of time if you simply give yourself the<br>time to do the practice.<br>[00:28:26]<br>So with that in mind, coming back up, we&#8217;re going to bring our legs back into cross position comes overhead behind<br>you are on opposite leg.<br>[00:28:41]<br>Turn toward the back and breathe.<br>[00:28:45]<br>Going to invite you to simply know that we can count eight counts and each of these movements, you can do that<br>to keep your own point of focus coming back. I&#8217;m up around and behind you.<br>[00:29:10]<br>Give yourself a little eight count going back to center a last breathing technique.<br>[00:29:24]<br>We&#8217;re only going to do this a couple of times, but I invite you to take about five minutes after this practice. And<br>when you&#8217;re on your own two fingers at the base of your eyebrows, the ring finger and the thumb are tamps<br>breathe in through your left.<br>[00:29:43]<br>It&#8217;s called alternate nostril breathing tap. Breathe out through your right now and again through your right to<br>breathe out through your left and left. Tap out right in right, tap left again and left, tap out right. Out in, right.<br>[00:30:30]<br>Tamp and release, alternate nostril breathing, you can look up some of the science of it connects left body side to<br>right brain functioning right body, side to left brain functioning. It is the most magnificent tool for creating<br>emotional balance, something so simple. All that I released is released from me, all that I need I bring toward me<br>and you balance that left side and right.<br>[00:31:16]<br>The last thing that I want to share with you is a little bit on this day.<br>[00:31:23]<br>The limb of Naoma is a limb that invites us to add rituals of practice, and I would invite you to what are your rituals<br>of practice, the ones that we did today and ones that might come forward from what we did today. And the one I<br>want to give you is Steyr. Non stealing, and it is the nyama that invites us. In non stealing to not steal from others.<br>The the piece that I&#8217;m going to bring forward is the not stealing of piece. To just not be about stealing other<br>people&#8217;s peace, but in that same Nehama is the non stealing of your own peace, the non stealing of your own<br>peace. I truly wish to leave you with that, to practice that and whatever any of these practices have meant to you.<br>It can be fun if you share them in the comments. Which one works for you? We&#8217;re still innocent. While I&#8217;m speaking,<br>you can repeat something that we did today or add something else on to your practice when we&#8217;re still here. And I<br>want to read to you a little bit. One of the books that I&#8217;m reading, one of many dying to be me, Anita Marciani.<br>[00:32:53]<br>By expanding our awareness on an individual level, we will be effecting change on a universal level. Each one of us<br>is like a single thread in a huge tapestry woven in a complex and colorful pattern. And we may be only one strand,<br>but we are all integrated in the finished image. We affect the lives of others just by choosing whether or not to be<br>our true selves, our obligation to others. Our only purpose is to express our uniqueness and allow others to do the<br>same. Realizing that the light, the magnificent universal energy is within us and in us will change us.<br>[00:33:43]<br>Because we are open and ready. That doesn&#8217;t express the essence of no day, I don&#8217;t know what does.<br>[00:33:55]<br>So the spirit in me season salutes the spirit in you enjoy your practices and I send your blessings.<br>[00:34:04]<br>Namaste.<br>[00:34:09]<br>Gael, thank you so much.<br>[00:34:13]<br>I want to invite us all to close out our practice this morning by taking a moment to join me in the spirit of prayer.<br>Maybe you want to close your eyes and rest. Relax your shoulders, back your head.<br>[00:34:35]<br>God, who formed us.<br>[00:34:39]<br>Who created all of the matter and material that is in this whole universe and in our bodies?<br>[00:34:50]<br>May we feel that electricity? When days are blurry or scary. When the world seems big and we seem small and<br>numb inside. Maybe we remember that our bodies are literally connected to everything else, that we are made up<br>of the same stuff as the moon and the stars and the trees and the people around us. And may we remember when<br>we feel that real vulnerability of our body is that tenderness, even the threats to our safety and our health? May we<br>remember that we can practice noticing and appreciating and loving a different story within our own bodies when<br>where we are alive and at rest and safe one where we know that we are whole, just as we are, and where this<br>moment and this body can feel like enough.<br>[00:36:06]<br>For these prayers, I&#8217;ve spoken out loud and for the prayers each of these people with us this morning carries on our<br>hearts with our men.<br>[00:36:16]<br>If you enjoy this message and would like to support the mission of Wellspring&#8217;s, go to our Web site.<br>wellspringsuu.org That&#8217;s Wellspring&#8217;s the letters. UU dot ORG<br>END OF TRANSCRIPT<br><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This week, Rev. Lee begins with telling us a story about how pandemic stress has affected some friends of hers, and how, in a moment of intense pressure, her friend as able to think &#8220;I&#8217;m alive right now and with the people I love.&#8221; The idea of &#8220;Coming Home&#8221; to your own body might not be something we think of often, but it&#8217;s an important practice. 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