This year, for the third time, A Day to Breathe gifted us with deeply and precious body’s experiences.
Let me start by saying that I am very lucky to have always lovely and inspiring participants at my activities. People willing to challenge themselves, people able to follow my instructions and to trust their body.
I need to mention this because it may seem evident but it is not: I felt, once more this year, honoured for the privilege to lead such a nice and committed group.
Even if I am practicing bodyattention and bodyawareness since more than 20 years, I keep being surprised and impressed with how many information we find enclosed in our bodies. And how many tools are potentially accessible thanks to the fact to have a body.
It is so obvious that it has become unnoticed. Theoretically, we know that moving and engaging more the body in an activity will provoke – most likely – a change in the mental and emotional state. However, when we are in certain states, to change them can result extremely difficult. It is like we would be prisoners of them.

What are these states I am referring to? Feeling stuck, feeling the urge to self-protect by being defensive and closed… Tiredness, helpless, unfocused, unmotivated are all potential obstacles that make difficult to change our inner state. But, paradoxically, they provide us with a familiar experience. A known and even a strangely comfortable experience.
We may suffer from it but the familiarity is comforting and gives a false sense of control: it gives the impression that we know who we are and what is happening. It may confirm the belief of being unloved, insufficient, not enough. That we should be in charge of what happen around us. That the world is only betrayal and hostility. That we are unlucky.

In these moments, to engage in movement – breathing, exercising or actively change our focus – it is entering into the unknown. It requires courage and motivation – qualities that my participants manifested – and practice.
In fact, it becomes almost impossible to change our inner state when we miss the practice to connect with the body.
Without practice, we end up being stuck and experiencing negative emotions. This is not only a sad repetition of the past, but it also provides an experience where the source of stress and unpleasant sensations sits into the body, instead of a source of empowerment and of feeling alive.

Finally, this is the main goal: to feel alive and to be in the flow in order to enjoy to have a body. A body allowing us to notice that we are constantly experiencing new situations, teaching us about ourselves.
The practice I recommend to follow is also an invitation to offer to our body more gratitude and respect, independently from our personal aesthetic, history and conditions.
Everything about us – even thinking – manifests thanks to the fact that we have – and we are – a body allowing to change our inner state.

Picture WWF park close to Capalbio, Tuscany