A Seasonal Journey of Embodied Living
A guided descent into embodiment across a season
How to Use This Summer Practice Space
Summer is not a movement or phase to complete. It is a space to return to. You may be drawn to one practice and stay with it for several weeks. You may move between practices as your needs change. There is no correct order and no expectation that everything needs to be explored.
I will suggest that you begin with the body through Yin Yoga, let the body orientate you to the breath and energy through pranayama and over time, the breathing will orientate you towards your mind and meditation that feels supportive.
The invitation is not to do more. It is to notice what helps you remain connected to yourself while life moves.
Return often. Move slowly.
Allow the practices to meet you where you are.
Summer. Heart’s Fire. The radiance
The energetic uprising of Spring softens into a slower unfolding as the Summer landscape opens. As we look around, an entirely new landscape reveals itself.
There is a fullness to all things, a sense of stretching into the widest expression of life, as though arms are flung open to the sky above. This is Fire’s visible offering: growth, abundance, and openness.
The time of childhood and the early movement of Wood has passed. With Summer, we turn our face toward what surrounds us, finding ourselves drawn into the wider world and our place within it.
Meditation & Pranayama Practices for the
Fire Season
We begin with the body, move into breath and energy, and refine into awareness. Each layer becomes more subtle, and yet requires greater attentional clarity.
THE BODY IS THE TEACHER
I am here in form
Morning Yin Yoga into Moon Salutations
A practice for blending the physical with more subtle levels of awareness, the main point here is for you to explore how these technique can work for you and to bring these into an intelligent tool kit for tapping into the very basic energy in your being, to move from the appearance of disconnection, dis-ease, to the emergence of wholeness.
A Short Evening Yin Yoga Practice
A practice for calming the nervous system when energy feels as though it is rising into the chest or head, or when sleep is unsettled, you could use this short sequence to calm the body before exploring one of the Meditations on the Heart - Cultivating the Heart Channel or Quiet Heart.
A Short Yang Sun Salutation Practice
A practice for remembering how movement and posture sequenced in a particular way can change how we experience ourselves. To activate the energy of practice, will and effort have to be balanced and you don’t need a fancy technique. The more yang techniques can be more effective at engaging the mind, yet stop at the simplest thing that works. If it is distracting or difficult, let it go. Whatever gets you there is the one to do.
Yin Yoga Practice
Jing, Destiny seeking Shen, Curriculum
A practice exploring the primary relationship between Fire, the Heart and Water, the Kidneys as our deepest potential and true nature. Without that spark of Shen, all that potential within would remain hidden and we would not have the desire to express who we are in the world. This practice looks to lift energy from the root up towards the Heart. From there, you might explore a Meditation or Pranayama with a focus on the Heart.
BREATH & ENERGY PRACTICES (PRANAYAMA) / THE BREATH REVEALS MOVEMENT WITHIN THE BODY / We begin with the body which orientates us towards the breath and the energy of the body.
I am moving energy inside form
Pump Breath Pranayama
A pranayama practice for working with the breath through three stages, using the idea of “pushing” the breath around the lungs to create space for fuller respiration. It works by emptying and filling the lungs as completely as possible. This is a stimulating and energising practice and is not suitable for everyone - especially if you have low blood pressure, heart conditions or are pregnant.
Breathing Salutes Pranayama
During this Sun Salutation, breath retentions are used within the postures. It is based on the same principle underpinning the “Pump Breath”: directing breath into areas of the body that may not be fully oxygenated.
Guidance:
This practice may not be appropriate if you have high or low blood pressure, are recovering from surgery, or are living with heart conditions or glaucoma. It is also best avoided during pregnancy.
Yin and Yang Meditation and Pranayama at
the Heart
This meditation and Yin Yang pranayama focuses on the level of the Heart. Here, pranayama is approached from a slightly different perspective, as a method of focusing attention in a particular place and in a particular way. In this way, we explore awakening the energy and consciousness of a specific area and the subtle effects this has on the state of awareness that arises.
MEDITATION & INNER AWARENESS / Awareness arises through the meeting of experience / The breath and the energy of the body orientates us to our own mind
I am aware within experience
Quiet Heart Meditation
This is a meditation focusing on the Heart, with a very subtle Yin pranayamaM where the breath flows naturally without manipulation, and attention remains with the Heart. As we relax and release focus on the Heart and breath, we sit quietly for a few moments before gently moving attention to the third eye.
Cultivating the Heart channel
The purpose of this meditation is to give you time to immerse yourself in the Heart’s primary channel in a way where you know roughly where it is, and the rest is feeling. The channels are pathways of consciousness, each representing a different quality of awareness and the practice is an exploration of what moves within them. Over the three months of Summer, you are invited to cultivate this channel for yourself.
What is this? A 10 minute Meditation
I would like to introduce something quite different here - a meditation I have practiced for many years and have found deeply useful. At one level, this is a very simple practice. You sit, lie down, or walk with presence and ask a single question: What is this? A 10 minute introduction to the practice, followed by a 10 minute sit.
The Light of the Spirit. A 20 minute Meditation
Who did you meet today? Did you meet partners, children, friends, parents or people you passed in your travels - someone in a shop, a café or on the street? Is this who you met? Or did you meet the light, in all its many ways of being expressed? We are all the same in this way and yet so different in the forms that surround the heart. If you could meet each being as carrying a quality of spirit and truth and meet them through that lens, how might your experience of the world begin to change?
Metta Meditation - 15 minutes
This Meditation written by Ayya Khema, was shared with me by one of my first Yoga teachers and I would like to share this with you here. It is a simple practice of sharing peace, love and compassion freely from the heart as a gift, freely given.
“Tranquility is advised at this time of year, but since everything has the quality of rising yang, the advice was to take walks in high places. This contemplation of vast landscapes from high vantage points was so we may tune ourselves to the season. We maintain growth within ourselves just as the Sovereign assists everything in the kingdom that surged up in spring and now needs care in development.”
LIVING PRACTICE (INTEGRATION)
I remain with myself while life moves
This section holds the return into everyday life, where practice is no longer separate from living, but continues as relationship, movement and awareness inside the world.
Each Step a Prayer, Each Step a Meeting
(15 minutes)
A walking meditation that brings awareness into movement, where each step becomes a meeting with the Earth and presence is carried through the simple act of walking, returning you to relationship with yourself while in motion.
As Yin-Side evolves into A Seasonal School of Embodied Living, I wanted to begin by sharing a practice that reflects the heart of this.
Summer & the Practice of Relationship
A short reflection on how Summer heightens connection and relationship, and how Fire reveals our patterns of attachment, projection and openness, offering a way to stay in contact with ourselves while relating to others.
SEASONAL REFLECTIONS,
Returning to Your Own Ground
These reflections are offered as a guided practice, held within the lens of embodied awareness and Traditional Chinese Medicine.
They are not questions to be answered intellectually, but a way of noticing how experience is already moving through the body, the breath, and the mind.
There is no need to arrive anywhere with them.
Simply read slowly. Pause where you feel drawn. And allow the questions to meet you where you are.
Seasonal Wisdom: Cooling the Heart Fire
In the cycle of the year, midsummer is the height of outward expression. Light is at its fullest. Days are long. Life moves quickly into connection, activity, and expansion.
In Traditional Chinese Medicine, Summer is associated with the Fire element and the Heart. The Heart, which houses the Shen — the aspect of consciousness through which we experience and are aware of life — governs our capacity to relate and remain open to life.
When we look at nature in this season, everything is in bloom. But even in abundance, there is a quiet intelligence at work: growth without rest begins to burn out. And the same is true within us.
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Sometimes in this season, life can feel full in a way that becomes slightly overwhelming. More social contact. More stimulation. More emotional movement. More expectation. And instead of feeling spacious, we may notice something else arising: a sense of being stretched thin, reactive, or ungrounded.
Not because anything is wrong - but because there is simply a lot of outward movement happening at once.
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The practice of Summer is not to reduce your capacity for life. It is to learn how to stay connected to yourself within it. To notice: where you are moving with life…
and where you may have moved slightly away from yourself.
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Just like a garden in midsummer needs both light and shade, we also need moments of inner cooling — places of pause, stillness, and return. Not as escape, but as balance. A way of letting the nervous system settle. A way of remembering the body. A way of returning to inner quiet while life continues around us.
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And so the question of this season is not: “How do I do more?” But perhaps something simpler: Where do I come back to myself in the middle of life?
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Midsummer Reflections: Returning to Your Own Ground
Take a few quiet moments with these questions. Not to answer quickly, but to feel into them.
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The Pace of Life
Where in my life right now does everything feel full, fast, or outward-moving?
Where could I introduce even a small pocket of stillness, simplicity, or space?
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Relationship & Reaction
When I feel activated or emotionally reactive with someone, what tends to happen inside me first?
Do I move toward them, away from them, or away from myself?
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Returning Inward
If I place one hand on my chest and one on my belly, what is the quality of my inner state right now?
What helps me return to a quieter, more steady place inside myself — even briefly?
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May you flow out into life and may life flow back to you.
Em x