Know Thyself
Manipura, the solar plexus chakra, governs more than will and power. It’s also the seat of identity - not in the philosophical “who am I really” sense, but immediate and physical. This is how I breathe. This is how I balance. This is what my body does when I ask it to hold a certain āsana.
This week we explored what makes your practice yours. Your breath has a different rhythm than the person next to you. Maybe you’re rock-solid on your right leg and a disaster on your left. Whether you owned it or felt ridiculous about Lion’s Breath (Simhasana or Simha Pranayama), that was useful information. Maybe Shiva Squat was your moment; maybe it absolutely wasn’t.
All of that - the breath pattern, the wobble, the pose that clicks and the one that doesn’t - is data. Your practice showing you who you are, not who you should be.
Identity isn’t fixed. Your breath today. Your balance this week. The pose that worked Thursday might feel impossible next month. When you stop trying to make your practice look like someone else’s, you get to see what yours actually is. Not dramatic. Just: this is me, right here, right now.
We’ll dive deeper in Wednesday’s newsletter, with a few ideas on how to work with Manipura to strengthen our sense of self and confidence.
LOOKING AHEAD
Next up is Anahata, the heart chakra. Not the heart you think you know - not the one that aches and swells and keeps score - but the one behind it. The one that has been quietly holding you upright for years, doing its work without acknowledgment, protected by bone and habit and the accumulated weight of a life lived mostly forward-facing. This week we turn around. Not to fix anything, but to look - the way you might finally look at something that has been faithful to you for a long time.
WEEKLY SCHEDULE
Anahata arrives this week gently - only two classes (Friday YinYasa and Saturday Chill The Flow Out) as I take a few days off to celebrate an anniversary. Twenty-four years ago my partner took up residence in the neighborhood of my heart, and he’s been taking care of it ever since. Which feels like exactly the right thing to be sitting with as we begin this chakra. The heart doesn’t ask you to perform or push through. It asks you to show up for what you love. That’s not a break from the practice; that’s the practice.
CLOSING THREADS
Derek Walcott's "Love After Love" lives right at that intersection of manipura and anahata: you have to know yourself before you can love yourself, and loving yourself requires seeing clearly who that self actually is.
Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.Sit. Feast on your life.
You can read the full poem here.