Finding the Inner Yes is a way of making decisions that feel light and joyful. No matter the question, no matter the activity, there is the opportunity to check within to discover what the body is expressing about our choices. There is a certain quality associated with an Inner Yes that has been described variously as a softening, a lifting of vibration/frequency, a spaciousness, or even an effervescence felt from within. Begin to investigate what your Inner Yes feels like. Perhaps it’s a bodily sensation, such as “chills” or “goose bumps”.

This concept of the Inner Yes is intended to inspire you to use your body’s messages as the “inner GPS”. Where is your true north, i.e. your inner guiding light? Get to know yourself. Take this moment as an opportunity to begin by reviewing your body posture. Is your body comfortable? If not, make slight adjustments to see if you can find more of that place where it just feels easy, or easier. The point being that from our Inner Yes we can make decisions that are generative, and through this process we come back into soul alignment. When all of the bodies – physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual, which are all within our energy field – come together into coherency, that is the Inner Yes. It’s unmistakable.

In contrast, an Inner No might feel like tightness, tension, heaviness, hesitation, strain, or even a constriction or contraction felt from within, which the body then expresses as stress. These are signs that provide an opportunity to take an inner inventory and ask oneself, “What is this? What is going on? Somewhere in my system I’m not in alignment with this.” It may be just a quick decision to return to alignment at that point.

There is a signature experience of the Inner Yes in Gentle Somatic Yoga that is beautiful, exquisite, and undeniable. You can observe it in the contrast before and during a class. Before the class begins students are excitable as they find their places, and the energy is somewhat less coherent; then, after one or two Somatic Movement Flows, body scans, and meditations there is a sense of the individual somas connecting into a collective soma. By the last class meditation there is a palpable peace that has settled into the group. This is representative of our natural state, to embody peace and well-being.

The body is always the barometer of our Inner Yes, at that point where our energetic field reaches coherency and we are free. Thus, rather than something we search for outside our self, finding the Inner Yes is a matter of returning to our true nature by going within to remember who we are at our essence. It’s the place of our Inner Knowing. The Inner Yes is a place of self-love, and once we have found it, everyone in our world benefits.

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Something is afoot in the world of yoga today, the makings of a mini-revolution, and it’s arising out of a reflexive response of sorts. A response to pain being caused from pushing a body beyond its limits, beyond its capacity to adapt and evolve – beyond its generative sweet spot. The body’s Somatic Intelligence Quotient™ -the innate intelligence of the Whole Self- is seeking a New Reality. It requires us to go within, through felt perception (i.e. interoception), and discover our somatic sweet spot from which our Soma (body) can reset and continue to evolve.

According to Tom Myers, there is a level of our intuition that is tied to our somatic reality. To the degree that we’ve lost connection with our Soma, we’ve lost access to the hunches and intuitive feelings it constantly communicates. We’ve lost access to our somatic sweet spot. From Myers’ perspective, broadening our movement range is an effective way to enhance intuition, and is very much tied to our somatic reality. Enter interoception, through the practice of Gentle Somatic Yoga.

The truly wondrous thing with Gentle Somatic Yoga is that this art-of-movement practice allows our body’s somatic awareness to deepen through interoception, and we are continuously able to discover new areas in our body that were forgotten. This forgetting is known as Sensory Motor Amnesia. Through the process of engaging interoception via the practice’s Somatic Movement Flows, we’re able to tune into those forgotten places and bring them back into our brain’s (somatic) awareness. As a result, the brain is able to resume its role in overall muscular function and coordination. We call this Somatic Awakening, and freedom from pain is its gift.

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