What if the secret to healing isn’t doing more—but doing less?
In this episode, we explore the 7 Invitations of Organic Intelligence, a revolutionary somatic framework that helps you unlock your body’s natural ability to heal, adapt, and thrive. These invitations aren’t about fixing yourself—they’re about creating the conditions for healing to unfold effortlessly.
You’ll learn:
🔹 Why doing less is the key to nervous system regulation and trauma recovery
🔹 How orienting to your environment fosters calm and connection
🔹 The surprising role of enjoyment, improvisation, and positive perception in healing
🔹 How to stop overriding your body’s wisdom and start listening
If you’ve ever felt stuck in your healing journey or exhausted from trying to “fix” yourself, this episode will inspire you to embrace a more intuitive, compassionate, and sustainable path forward.
🌹 Download my somatic sequences & playlists for teachers https://www.brettlarkin.com/somatic-sequences/
📝 Download the Yoga For Self Mastery Syllabus => https://www.brettlarkin.com/yoga-for-self-mastery/
Learn more about Organic Intelligence and Steve Hoskinson: https://organicintelligence.org/steven-hoskinson/
FREE Practice: Everyday Morning Yoga to Feel Incredibly Good | YOGA FOR WOMEN
Relevant Blog: Somatic Yoga for Trauma: Techniques to Reclaim Your Body
Relevant to Today’s Episode:
🐍 Yoga for Self Mastery
🎧 Also Listen to:
#357 – Your Emotions Want to Move: 3 Ways to Let Them
#369 – Nervous System Masterclass with Kristin Leal
#372 – Can the Sutras Make Space for Pleasure? (Sutra 1.15 Explained)
© 2025 Uplifted Yoga | BrettLarkin.com
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Transcript:
Brett Larkin:
Welcome to the Uplifted Yoga Podcast, where ancient yogic wisdom meets modern business strategy. I’m Brett Larkin, creator of Uplifted Yoga, where I’ve certified thousands of yoga teachers, built a multi-seven figure business, and guided over half a million students on YouTube. Here’s the truth, you don’t have to choose between embodying deep yogic wisdom and building a thriving, freedom-based business.
This podcast is your space to integrate both, because yoga isn’t just what you do on the mat, it’s how you show up in every part of your life. Whether you’re here to deepen your yoga practice, grow your teaching career, or align your energy with your purpose, you’re in the right place. Let’s dive in.
Welcome back to the Uplifted Yoga Podcast, and today’s episode is one that is going to resonate deeply if you need this do less message, especially if you’ve ever felt stuck or overwhelmed in your healing journey. Today we’re diving into the revolutionary framework of organic intelligence, and exploring the seven invitations that can completely transform how you approach trauma recovery and nervous system regulation. Here’s the thing, what if the secret to healing isn’t about doing more, but actually about doing less? This is what your body and nervous system are secretly whispering to you and craving.
What if it’s not about fixing yourself, but about creating the conditions for your body’s natural wisdom to unfold? That’s exactly what we’re unpacking and looking at today. We’ll talk about why orienting to your environment fosters calm and connection, and how enjoyment and improvisation play a surprising role in healing, and how to stop, stop overriding your body’s wisdom so you can finally start listening. Before we dive in, I don’t want you to miss this week’s free gift.
Grab my free somatic sequences and playlists for yoga teachers or enthusiasts at brettlarkin.com forward slash somatic dash sequences. This is also in the show notes. These are perfect classes to help you integrate today’s insights into your practice or teaching.
Now let’s get in to this week’s episode. Hello, my friends. Welcome back to the show.
Today, we are going to nerd out together on something called organic intelligence. If you’ve never heard of organic intelligence, it was developed by Stephen Hoskinson. He developed something called post-trauma growth.
This is a framework, and he also has courses for mental health professionals to explore the therapeutics of organic healing as part of their recovery or as part of somatic coaching or as part of recovering from trauma. I like to take a couple new credentials every single year in the area of yoga and somatics. When I came across organic intelligence, I got especially excited and interested, I think mainly because it reinforces so much of what I already love to talk about and teach, which is this idea that the body is self-correcting.
It’s the self-healing mechanism, if given the right conditions, that without safety, no healing can occur. And if you’ve taken any of my training programs, you know I’m also obsessed with the fascia and myofascial release. And I saw so many principles from myofascial release, specifically as taught by my teacher, John Barnes, overlapping with a lot of the key concepts I was seeing in organic intelligence.
So if you’re interested in somatics, healing, coaching, recovering from trauma yourself, I think you’ll really love this episode because I’m just going to give a high-level overview of my favorite pieces of this methodology. And then I’m also going to share with you the big seven invitations that organic intelligence offers us or teaches us. And you’re going to see how much these resonate with things we already talk about here on the show, or if you’ve taken Yoga for Self-Mastery, which is sort of my first step or tier into the world of yoga-informed or body-informed coaching.
It’s open to everyone, so you can just take it and use the principles to sort of coach yourself. And we also have live calls throughout the year and are super fun. But I was just starting to see so many correlations.
And sometimes it’s like hearing about something with someone else’s words or in a different way can help you have an aha moment or help you go deeper with material that you’re familiar with. So I’m super excited to share with you some of my favorite pieces of this methodology and see if any of it resonates with you. So the meta concept behind organic intelligence is that we want to increase our capacity for what’s called auto-organization, or what they call AO for short.
And auto-organization is based on this idea of self-organization. And this basically is saying that in order to auto-organize, your biology, meaning your body, must be exposed to the right amount of intensity. Not too much, not too little.
So it experiences intensity and then gets to come back to baseline. This is a very simple concept. We see this in polyvagal theory.
You see this in yoga when we talk about the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems and how we want to swing like a pendulum between the two. And here’s the connection, though, that I thought was interesting. So it says there are cycles of pleasurable arousal, where we’re experiencing more intensity, saying we’re working or we’re playing an athletic sport, or something stressful happens.
But then after that, we need to go into de-arousal and ideally do that before we become overcome with intensity, before we go over our intensity threshold. You might think of this as the window of capacity in the polyvagal world. But what organic intelligence is really focused on, based on my understanding, is that the sign that a biology, meaning you and your body, is prone to not go over the threshold is related to how much it’s connected to the immediate environment via the senses, meaning seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting.
And they call this orientation. Orientation means connecting to the environment through your senses. And a great way to think of this is like daydreaming.
Do you remember when you were little or in the car or before we had technology all the time, you just kind of stare off into space, look at the trees? We really stopped doing this because of smartphones. And it’s so tragic because orientation, which is connection to the environment through the senses, just sort of looking around and doing nothing, is a natural impulse of our bodies. And by default, our biology will be oriented to the environment unless we get distracted because our interior experience is too intense, or maybe something happening outside of us is extremely intense.
So let’s say you’re seated in your garden and you’re not doing anything. You’re gazing off, looking at the clouds form. You’re taking in the sun.
You’re looking at the trees. Your animal body totally understands that you’re just not doing anything right now. You’re decompressing and that you’re in a safe space.
You’re feeling your chair underneath you. You’re feeling your feet on the grass of your garden. And if we want to think percentage-wise, percentage-wise, our senses are extremely connected to the environment.
Now, let’s say your phone dings with a text message. Your phone was in your pocket. Now you pull it out and it’s some terrible news, like you’re going to lose your job, let’s say.
All of a sudden your percentage of attention, instead of being focused on the outer environment, is now jacked up in intensity and your attention is drawn inside and you’re no longer seeing the clouds or hearing the birds or feeling the grass underneath your feet. You’re much, much less oriented to the present moment. So your interior experience was so intense that it overtook your natural connection to your environment.
So the premise here is that as human beings, we have this natural, what they call a biorhythm. So just like think of the circadian rhythm. You’re supposed to be awake when it’s light out and ideally sleep when it’s night out.
We have a natural biorhythm of work and rest. And what organic intelligence says is that when we are out of sync with these biorhythms, we suffer. In other words, we’re naturally meant to shift between parasympathetic and sympathetic.
We’re designed to get aroused and then decompress. But of course, most humans, most of us are stuck in the work side of things and we neglect the rest side. And I think technology has played a huge role in this where we don’t just orient and daydream and do nothing.
But here’s what gets really interesting is that what organic intelligence is saying is that if you can rest and orient your environment and get back in sync, you can experience integration of any experience. Basically, your body really knows how to handle and process things if you just create more space for rest. And this is a very simple concept, but it’s profound.
If your biology is not responding to your immediate environment, meaning the senses, what you’re seeing, feeling, touching, aware of in the present moment, and instead it’s responding as if it’s somewhere else or responding to something abstract, something that might happen, that could happen, we’re creating unnecessary stress for ourselves. In the somatic yoga course, we talk a lot about faulty neuroception, something that we see in people who’ve been through trauma, meaning that even though the current situation is safe, their body, their soma is still acting as if it’s not safe. It’s almost like signals from the past have got crossed, wires crossed with signals from the present.
But what I really liked about this methodology is that it’s saying if you can just come back to the here and now, not the here and now as in I’m closing my eyes, I’m going inward, I’m having a meditative experience. No, a real grounded tactile here and now of scanning my environment, feeling my clothing on my skin, sensing what I’m sitting on, what I’m smelling. The more that you’re just doing nothing, the more natural integration of whatever’s bothering you or past trauma will be able to slowly integrate and get sorted in your system.
So one of the big seven concepts or invitations from organic intelligence is this idea of orientation. This is the idea that very often your biology, your body is not responding as if it’s in the here and now. Like in the here and now, you’re probably in a car listening to this podcast, which is somewhere safe, or maybe you’re in your house folding some laundry, which is probably somewhere safe.
But instead, our biology is responding as if it’s somewhere else, somewhere threatening. Like we’re thinking we’re in that meeting with our boss about to get fired, or we’re thinking about something bad that could happen. And this is resulting in stress on our system.
And that’s completely unnecessary if we’re in a safe enough and comfortable enough environment. And if you’re like, how is this different from mindfulness? Like, just keep listening because I’m gonna get there. But the invitation here is that one of the biggest skills you can practice, and it’s a skill that I’m practicing constantly these days, is just doing nothing, looking around my environment and letting my animal body just discharge, just like your house cat or your dog just kind of sits and looks around and does nothing.
And coming back to this biological presence is what they call it, takes so much practice. But as you do it, you actually feel your system beginning to stabilize. So those of you who are in the Yoga for Self-Mastery course, we have orientation practices in there.
That nourished in a moment practice is a classic textbook example of orientation. And if you’re in the Uplifted Membership, there’s gonna be a lot more guided visualizations that walk you through orientation coming because this is my favorite thing to do right now. The next big principle that I wanna talk about from organic intelligence is called signals from home, signals from home.
And what this means, and this is where I think it’s a little bit different from, you might just be thinking like, this sounds like mindfulness, this sounds like everything else. The idea with signals from home is that your body is constantly actually sending you resourceful signals through what they call your isoma. They use that acronym to mean image, sensation, orientation, meaning, and affect.
So let’s call that big principle three. We’ll talk about two and three together. But OI, organic intelligence says, your entire experience of the world arises from your biology and manifests in the channels of your experience.
And the channels of your experience is this isoma, image, sensation, orientation, meaning, and affect. Affect means like your feelings. So this is similar in some ways to yoga, right? Where we’re talking about Maya, right? This plane of consciousness where everything’s really an illusion.
Like I’m wearing rose colored glasses, you might be wearing orange colored glasses, someone else might be wearing green colored glasses, and we’re all looking at the same thing, but having a totally different experience. And so coming back to signals from home, what organic intelligence is saying is that your biology is constantly actually sending incredibly resourceful, helpful signals to stabilize you through your isoma, through your image, sensation, orientation, meaning, and affect, your feelings. But we’re missing all of these helpful signals because we’re distracted by what’s wrong and by what’s intense.
And they call this the, in quotes, the what’s wrong attention. So basically if we just orient and really fully be in our present environment without our phones, without distractions, without notifications, if we could just look at the walls and see the texture of the floor and maybe cook a meal and really feel the food and just be present in the here and now and rest, naturally our biology would stabilize a great deal because we’d be in harmony with our environment and would realize that we’re safe. We’d have a lot of information from our senses which would override our what’s wrong attention.
And so they invite in, and this is the next big principle, something called SUP, S-U-P, which does not stand for stand up paddle boarding in this instance, but strategic use of perception. So this principle is talking about how most of us, really all of us who are human, our attention is chronically drawn to what’s wrong due to the negativity bias, which many of you are familiar with. We talk about this a lot in 300-hour teacher training, but due to our need to survive, our brain is hardwired to focus on the negative rather than the positive.
Our brain wants us to stay alive and therefore it’s always going to focus on what’s different or what’s wrong. It’s always going to prefer to do the same things over and over again because we know we’ve done it and we didn’t die, we’re safe. So let’s just repeat the pattern.
But the fact that our attention or our reptilian brain as we break it down further in training, our reptilian brain is chronically drawn to what’s wrong due to this negativity bias, also caused by what we tend to focus on in society and maybe what happened in early childhood for us or past trauma, but this results in suffering. If we want to bring balance to a biology, to a human ecosystem that’s addicted to what’s wrong, we have to be strategic and cultivate other perceptions, aka we have to get really, we have to cultivate the opposite, tapas. This is exactly what I talk about in Yoga for Self-Mastery.
We have to cultivate the opposite and get rid of the what’s wrong attention and focus instead on pleasure. And in Yoga for Self-Mastery, we call this self-care, svadhyaya, the self-awareness to know what would be nourishing or pleasurable for me in a given moment. So those of you who are in the Yoga for Self-Mastery course or thinking of taking it, one of the biggest pieces is that we’re really trying to educate you on how you can care for yourself, how you can use and do the strategic use of perception, although that’s not what I call it because I think that’s kind of a formal title.
But again, sometimes like different words or different phrases help ideas click in a new way, which is why I was excited to share this. I think it helped deepen and strengthen my understanding of a lot of the key principles that I’m already teaching about, but from a more yogic lens. So we have this negativity bias.
We have this what’s wrong attention and the muscle that we actually need to strengthen, the tapas, is in cultivating the opposite. Tapas is that heat, that fire, that alchemy of doing something differently, going against your natural pattern, which is going to be, especially when you’re stressed, to focus on what’s wrong and instead we need to orient towards pleasure. So what we call svadhyaya or self-care in yoga for self-mastery, if self-care doesn’t resonate with you, it’s like we’re orienting towards things in the environment or things that we can control that are nourishing, that are pleasurable, that are soothing for our biology.
And I love that they call this strategic use of perception because you have to be strategic about it. You have to cultivate and reinforce these perceptions, strategically in the direction of orientation and in the direction of pleasure. And it is very, very hard to do alone, which is why we have our yoga for self-mastery live calls and wins threads and all the different things.
So you can really practice lowering your what’s wrong attention and increasing your focus, redirecting your perception towards all the things that are pleasurable and present in the isoma, in our image, sensation, orientation, meaning and affect. And let’s just get practical here, like image, the nourished in a moment meditation, those of you who’ve done that, in the portal is like, I could think about something stressful right now, or I could use strategic use of perception and orient, and I’m actually doing this right now, to looking at the imagery of the blue sky out my window. And I’m seeing some green leaves next to the sky, and it’s really this beautiful color.
And that’s in my isoma right now. And I can turn just like a volume dial, my attention up on that and really take in and just look at and feel nourished by the blue sky, if I choose to, if I have that strategic use of perception. Same thing with sensation right now, as I’m talking to you, my hand is on my head, my elbow is kind of resting on my knee, but the texture of my palm on my hair feels incredibly pleasurable, soothing.
But again, an untrained isoma that’s just has what’s wrong attention, isn’t gonna focus on that. But do you see how, what they call the signals from home, your biology, your environment is sending you all these resourceful things that you could tune into. We just don’t have practice doing that.
I’ve heard OI practitioners talk about how affect feeling, even like the feeling of sadness. If you’re fully with it and don’t want anything to be different and don’t label it as wrong, that there can maybe even be some pleasure in just sitting back and like relishing in the feeling of things feeling heavy and denser and sadder right now. So this requires talent.
This is an undeveloped talent that we are actually capable of developing. And it requires nuance and specificity and training. All right, and then the last three big concepts from organic intelligence are really, really fun.
So the motto, they say the organic intelligence motto is easy does it, easy does it. And they use this motto of easy does it as like this is a way to come back into sync with that I’m getting aroused and then I’m having this de-arousal. Premise is that integration of any experience happens when we’re not doing so much.
Think about if you’ve ever gone on vacation and all of a sudden you’re not doing so much and that either feels really uncomfortable and so you want to do something or you have maybe like a start freaking out or having some big emotional outburst because all the stuff you’ve never had time to integrate is now suddenly present and overwhelming you. And so I visualize this as like, yes, hunt as if we were cavemen or cavewomen, you know, like go hunt the bear and then gaze at the stars all night and do nothing the next day as you recalibrate. It’s this sort of up and down or I think so many of us, especially women, like we naturally feel this like throughout the month, right? We have a cycle of having more energy and then having less energy.
And so the idea with organic intelligence is to follow your own impulses to work and especially, especially to rest. And to overall, when in doubt, do less. And the reframe here is that this is biologically helpful. This is a good thing, because the more you rest and the more you’re in sync with your bio rhythm of when you want to work and when you want to veg and when you want to work and when you want to play, the more your biology, your body can stabilize you and integrate experiences, even if those experiences were intense and overwhelming.
So I’ve loved playing with this motto, this easy does it, it’s like, do I want to rush and, you know, slip in a bike ride before my next call, I probably could do it, but I don’t have that much time. And when I think like, easy does it, it’s like, maybe not, maybe I’ll just lie down instead, or have a cup of tea. Instead, I don’t want to feel rushed.
For any reason later, that’s not good for my soma, my body. So I invite you if it resonates to play with this easy does it motto and see what comes up for you. And then the sixth big concept, we’re almost at seven, is that the job is enjoyment.
The job is enjoyment. And so what organic intelligence says is that we’re likely already very, very good at knowing how to deal with a lot of discomfort and a lot of intensity. What we’re not so good at is our capacity to experience enjoyment, to experience pleasure.
There’s a meditation I uploaded for all of you recently called taking in the good, which is based on Dr. Rick Hansen’s work, but that we need to orient towards what’s good. But then the problem is a lot of us don’t have a lot of practice actually feeling what’s good. So even if something good is happening, we don’t process it through our eye soma.
We just don’t tune into it, or we don’t feel it, or we don’t get the benefits from it. So again, just like going to the gym to make your muscles stronger, it’s like we need to increase our capacity to experience enjoyment, to experience pleasure. And this 100% fits under the skill one in yoga for self-mastery, this idea of self-care, this idea of pleasure, this idea of nourishing yourself.
They say that you should orient towards simple, healthy, non-addictive, non-intoxicant related, not too intense, wholesome human pleasure. And the more that you do that, the more you build your capacity to experience this whole spectrum we have in the human experience in a way that’s easeful, in a way that’s enjoyable. So the job is enjoyment.
This is a phrase, kind of like easy does it, that’s biologically helpful. Do your job, enjoy things, a hot cup of tea, gazing at the sunrise, or taking in the sunset, just looking around your environment, undistracted, feeling a beautiful piece of fabric on your skin. I love this mantra or motto of the job is enjoyment, because I think so many of us are indoctrinated with that’s lazy, that’s selfish, that’s not safe.
I coach so many people on this in yoga for self-mastery, right? It almost feels selfish or unsafe to enjoy the healthy pleasures of the human experience. Great food, beautiful sunshine, being in awe of nature, taking some time to stare at the sky and do nothing. It’s like our nervous systems have been so wired away from that.
And then especially if you’re in the yoga community, it’s like so many of our nervous systems, I feel like have been wired towards the inward experience, right? Okay, well, I need to go in and I need to raise my energy or circulate my energy or do specific pranayama or control the breath or control or contort the body in some way. And what I love about organic intelligence is it just invites us to break out of that paradigm. And this is what all somatic work is doing as well, by the way, and instead orient to this perspective that simply by doing less, by orienting to where I am in space, the here and now, amping up the five senses, understanding where my body is in space, where my body ends and the world begins, feeling more grounded, that if I can stay there, there’s this natural integration, this natural healing.
Again, the body is a self-correcting mechanism that can take place. Again, this is going to be over a long period of time, but the more we can keep orienting towards pleasure, the more we can keep orienting towards rest and relaxation, the more we can do easy does it. And remember that our job is enjoyment.
The more we’re going to be in the present moment, instead of worrying about the future or thinking about the past and experiencing unnecessary stress. And the more we can get clued in to things in our isoma, feelings, images, sensations we’re experiencing that are actually really nourishing. It’s almost like we’re missing out on all these nourishing things around us all the time, just because we’re not clued into them.
We’re not using our strategic use of perception to focus on them. We’re just being lazy and sticking with our what’s wrong attention. Okay.
And drum roll. Are you ready for the last, last and final big principle from organic intelligence, which I also love so much. And this is in quotes, the plan is improvisation.
The plan is improvisation. How do you say that word? I’m not sure. But the idea is that as you begin to live in the present moment, more and more, you start to realize that we really have no idea what’s going to happen next.
And this ties into Yoga for Self-Mastery skill number three, relinquishing control and the idea of Ishvara Pranidhana. The added context that organic intelligence is offering is it’s basically saying that given the right conditions, human beings have this incredible biology that’s designed to actually be incredibly spontaneous and adapt to a whole variety of different environments. I mean, think about how adaptable the human biology is.
We went from being hunter gatherers to now being like glued to little technology devices 24-7. And somehow we’re still breathing and digesting our food and procreating. So organic intelligence is really emphasizing that human beings are incredibly adaptable.
They are incredibly spontaneous. And that we want to approach life with this curiosity and pleasure or enjoyment to be our guides. And that the overall tenor of our life should feel playful.
I really love the plan as improvisation because really, you know, what’s that phrase they say? Make plans and God laughs. We can’t control things. It’s such a myth that we can.
I love the Yoga for Self-Mastery videos. Those of you, you might want to review the skill three videos where we talk about the things you can control and the things you can’t control. And what’s so funny is the video on what you can control.
It’s actually very, very few things, but I’m like, you know what? If you want to control, I teach you how to control as many of the things you can control as possible. It’s like, let’s optimize those. So you feel as nourished as possible.
But then the rest of the curriculum, we’re really like, okay, how do I relinquish control? How do I just keep relinquishing control more and more and orient towards pleasure instead? In Yoga for Self-Mastery, we talk a lot about being on your own paper, right? Staying with yourself. But the plan is improvisation is such a different, I think, brilliant way of talking about all of this. Because even if you don’t believe the plan is improvisation, that always is the plan, right? Because we don’t know what’s going to happen next.
I mean, I could back out of my garage after recording this podcast to pick up my son from camp and get hit by a truck, or an elephant could fall from the sky, or my neighbor could jump in front of my car and start screaming at me. What’s so much more beneficial than making all these closely laid plans and constricting and tensing your biology, trying to control everything, is to be in as diffused, open, adaptable, spontaneous, pleasurable state of energy as possible. We call this your goffel in Yoga for Self-Mastery, your goddess of fun and light energy.
And from that place, you’re very adaptable. You’re very go with the flow. You’re ready to improvise.
You turn on your car and it doesn’t start, you’re like, okay, maybe I’ll bike to get my kid instead. It’s a beautiful day out. And something that’s not one of their key principles, but I think maybe should be is this idea that the number one thing you can do to help you with all of this is to really be picky and choosy about your environments.
Because the high-level idea here is that given the right conditions, and if you choose strategic use of perception, your biology is going to be regulated, and therefore you’re naturally going to be able to integrate difficult emotions, past experiences, whatever it is that’s bothering you. But the conditions need to be supportive. So for example, if you know you hate the cold and hate loud noises, we’re just using me as an example, right? But like being in New York in the middle of winter would probably not be supportive for me.
And no matter how much I use strategic use of perception and all my other tools, I’m going to be in a really challenging spot. So another thing organic intelligence talks about is like the more that you can really wisely choose your environments and really get clued into how much your environments affect you. And I’d add into this, like your schedule as well.
So I’ve been working a lot on my schedule. How much do I want to teach live? How much do I want to have completely off and free time? What environments are truly nourishing and supporting for me? Is going to that big party that I got invited to going to be a supportive environment to help me regulate? Or would going for a walk in the woods be a better choice? You have to know yourself, right? For different types of people, different types of places, colors, textures, activities. Again, this is all the work we do in Yoga for Self Mastery, where we redesign your closet and we’re focusing on all the things you can control, like the clothes you put on your body, like all of these different pieces so that what’s literally on your body is not only as nourishing as possible, but pulling you forward into that energy that’s adaptable and spontaneous and go with the flow, right? Not the controlling energy, but your natural, grounded, pleasure-oriented self.
Who guess what? Everyone wants to be around that person. Everyone likes that person. And you actually change other people by being in that energy and then naturally inspiring them.
So I will wrap it up here. But to summarize everything we talked about, we talked about the power of orientation, really just gazing around your environment and doing nothing. We talked about how we are I-SOMA beings, meaning that we’re experiencing the world through our channels of image, sensation, orientation, meaning, and affect.
And through these channels, we can use our strategic use of perception to orient ourselves towards what they call signals from home, resourceful signals, beautiful, beneficial things in your environment that you’re probably overlooking and not paying attention to, like how soft and beautiful the sweater is that you’re folding, how the water that’s running across your hands as you do the dishes is the perfect temperature. We talked about the organic intelligence mantra of easy does it, and how you can say this to yourself all the time when you’re making decisions, and I’ve been finding it really helpful. You can also remember that the job is enjoyment.
The more you can orient towards pleasure, figure out what lights you up, and we have an entire section of the guidebook on this in Yoga for Self-Mastery because most of us have completely forgotten what is enjoyable. So there’s a lot of resources to help you remember, but the job is enjoyment is a practice and way of life that is extremely helpful to your biology. And lastly, the plan is improvisation.
The more present and embodied in the moment of here and now that you are, the more agile you are, the more curious you are, the more you’re going to enjoy all those beautiful little things that are trying to peek through your isoma channels that you’re giving no attention to right now because you’re totally focused on the what’s wrong attention. And lastly, just remember this week, anytime you’re having an unpleasant experience or you’re suffering, you feel like you’re suffering, think of the percentages that we talked about. It’s likely because your internal experience has become too intense, and the way that you can course correct that is by coming back to the present moment and gazing around and using the senses to notice what you notice and feel what you feel and ideally land on something that looks, smells, or feels nourishing.
And lastly, what I love about this, because I’ve coached so many of you on this exact issue, and I used to have this issue too, is that I find so many of us, especially who are high achievers or type A personalities, we are afraid to rest because we worry that if we do rest, we’ll never work again. We maybe have judgments about it being lazy or slothful or whatever, but we also have this concern that, well, how is anything ever going to get done? Who’s going to do it if I don’t do it? Or if I just binge Netflix all day, how will I ever get my business off the ground? But when we can trust in the principles of organic intelligence, that if we rest enough, our body will naturally crave arousal, we’ll want to do something again. I think that’s what’s really beautiful here.
It’s asking you to trust in those natural cycles. And I invite you to think about a time in your life when maybe you felt some inkling of this. For me, I can remember back to being nine or 10 years old and doing some of my homework.
And then my dad lived on this huge property, kind of woodsy with a lot of land. And then I’d just go out and play in the woods for a couple hours. And it would be the decompression, the downswing.
And then when I’d come back, I’d be excited to build something on the computer or film a little video or arouse myself again with what would be considered work. So if you can really trust in yourself and trust that these rhythms are going to emerge, if you flow with them, it can be incredibly magical. I would love to see you in the Yoga for Self-Mastery course, if it’s one of the programs you haven’t done yet.
It ships with a beautiful journal that walks you through all the videos. You get to journal about everything as you go. We offer live calls with it every time it launches.
So you get that personal mentorship, accountability, and support as you start integrating the core three skills with the whole group. Thank you so much for being here all the way to the very end. And until we connect again, take care of you.
Loving what you’re learning on the podcast? Apply the ancient science of yoga to your daily life surrounded by incredible peers in my uplifted 200-hour online yoga teacher training. Or grow into your role as a leader of others in my 300-hour professional program for yoga teachers, which is also a high-level business mastermind. At any time, I would love to welcome you into my Yoga for Self-Mastery course to help you uncover your personal blueprint to serenity.
Or join my uplifted yoga membership for an all-access pass to my most popular yoga courses, thematic class plans, and practice calendars. Don’t forget to prioritize your well-being and get on your mat today. From my heart to yours, namaste.
