This Week's Mindful Morsel 🍪 | July 9, 2025 — Vary your menu
Happy good Wednesday đź’ś
This might sound silly, but I didn’t realize for a long time that I needed to stop following certain yoga cues off the mat and let my body be soft and body-like. I can’t remember being told this explicitly, and I think it really does need said: Stop trying to refine your body shape all the time.
There is a time and place for yoga cues to help you explore your body but there is also a need to drop those so they don’t lead to injury or imbalance. Exhibit A: my shoulder joints.
Many years of what I thought was refined posture has been contributing to hurting my body. I often experience a significant amount of mobility limitation in my shoulders, as well as tension and muscle imbalance, and a good bit of that is because I have taken the common posture cues to some extreme.
I remember being told as I was growing up, specifically because I was a girl, that I needed to keep my shoulders down and back — present myself to the world in this fashion (even writing that makes me feel a bit sick). And then enter yoga refinements where we’re often told to drop our shoulders away from our ears with little explanation or time to explore all the nuance that comes along with that.
Every body is different. You’ve lived an entirely different life than I have, and while we certainly have overlapping commonalities, what you experience or how you can express that is widely different thanks to interpretation and physical composition.
We could all benefit from more variety. Please don’t make your yoga refinements life habits off the mat all the time. We need variation and softness and even “poor posture” sometimes. Without those things, we invite in frozen joints and weak or over-developed muscles.
It’s not even a great idea to do the same yoga practice all the time. Introduce new things. Spend some juicy time really discovering the nuances within your own body (they’re interesting, I promise!). Also take time away from your mat to do something different.
Flirting with variation squashes the dull staleness that comes with exhausted routines. We don’t flourish if we eat the same things all the time, and the same applies to our physical movements. Vary your menu. Not only will your body thank you, but so will your brain, and that’s a hot time 🔥
Sending energy to revitalize and invigorate your energy fields,
