Daily Delights: A practice to deepen mindfulness & embodiment (and to simply feel good)
I'm spending the week in easy, breezy summery mode at the beach, so it felt fitting to invite you into a sweet, light (yet profound) practice — a fun way to both deepen your mindfulness practice and support your feeling your way into your being through your body.
I’ve been feeling incredibly nourished and enlivened by a sweet and simple “Daily Delights” practice I’ve been doing with a friend recently, largely inspired by poet and essayist Ross Gay’s lovely recent episode on the We Can Do Hard Things podcast.
And this has become a practice I find myself suggesting to many of my wonderful 1:1 coaching clients these days as well.
Because, while, yes, tuning into micro-delights in the moments of our everyday life is…well…delightful — there’s so much expansion and sense of deeper connection that comes from turning our attention consciously toward uplifting emotions like awe, joy, wonder, gratitude, and delight.
Gratitude has long received well-deserved credit for its profound positive effects on wellbeing as a practice of intentional turning-toward. But these other qualities are richly potent too; and in my opinion, can actually connect us even more deeply into the subtle layers of our interior world.
So beyond it just feeling nice, why is it valuable for us to pay closer attention to qualities like delight?
Because these qualities — when intentionally noticed as they’re felt in the moment and in the body — connect us to the rhythm and magical quality of the universe at large, beyond our limited and limiting small ‘s’ sense of self.
And they drop us out of our intellectual mind and ego filter into a direct experience of being alive as felt through the senses and through tracking the movement of energy in our bodies.
The “Ahhh!!” that arises within us as we pause to take in the magic of a hummingbird hovering to suck nectar from a vibrant fuchsia flower - delight!
Meandering through a farmers market tasting the most luscious, vibrant heirloom tomatoes and juice-dribbling-down-your-chin ripe nectarines - delight!
The upward rise and radiant spread of warm, light energy throughout my chest with a sense of an inner smile as I watch my four-year-old skitter excitedly from the puppet show to the carousel to the train to the dragon slide at Fairyland – delight!
The “Ooohhh!!” of catching a waft of jasmine as you walk down the street - delight!
Stumbling on your morning beach walk upon a slew of perfect sand dollars you get to take home to your toddler who cherishes them as precious “treasures” - delight!
Being tickled by the silliness of a favorite podcast or show - delight!
Breaking into a spontaneous kitchen dance party - delight!
Catching your first ever wave surfing - delight!
Watching the light on the hillside shift colors from bright greens to subtle oranges and then soft pinks as the sunset sun drops into the ocean - delight!
Getting rolling with an inside joke with an old friend until you’re both in tears with bellies hurting from laughing so hard - delight!
You’ll notice that none of these examples occur in the mind. The experiences of delight, wonder, and awe can only be experienced through a felt sense of aliveness in your body and can only be experienced in this present moment.
So tuning into delight is:
A wonderful presence practice.
A natural gratitude-expander.
A frequency-elevater. Tuning into qualities like delight, awe, wonder, and gratitude plugs us into universal flow and opens up channels toward more synchronicity and sense of abundance in our daily lives.
A practice of noticing what's good and abundant within and around us.
A gateway to greater spaciousness. The more fully we allow ourselves to feel expansive qualities like delight, the more we start to trust our capacity to hold space for all kinds of things in our lives.
A nice way to lighten up our mindfulness practice, which, when approached (as it often is) from a will-driven, perfectionistic-ish place, can actually lead to less embodied sense of connection to the flow of life rather than more.
Not least to mention that tuning into delight wherever it sparks within us just feels good. Which is reason enough to pursue the practice, but which also leads to us tending to find ourselves able to get the things “we need to get done” in our lives done with greater ease and efficiency and less analysis paralysis and procrastination.
Summer is a lovely time to start your own Daily Delights practice.
If a friend who you feel it would be fun to share this practice with pops to mind, send them a note and ask if they’d be up for sharing sweet little snippets of delight - pictures, texts - whenever they pop up over the next few weeks.
Consciously pause to really soak in the warm, uplifting, light, expansive, radiant flavor of delight in your body as you experience it.
The more we intentionally turn toward and amplify these life-enriching qualities, the more they become our attention’s default and our natural embodied state of being.
Let this not be something you feel like you should add to your to-do list. Let the practice be super light-touch; sweet and simple.
(Don’t forget — the simplest practices done consistently and intentionally often have the most profoundly transformational effects on how we move as beings through the world.)
Wishing you lots of sweet delight through your treasure hunt.
With Love,