It’s early April in Yellowknife and spring is making promises it isn’t ready to keep yet. The days are longer now, the sun higher and brasher in the sky. You can feel the cold still. It hasn’t gone anywhere. But something has shifted. After months of hunkering down, there’s a sense that the world is starting to remember itself.
I’ve been thinking about returning a lot this month, about what it means to come back to something after a long absence. Maybe it’s just April. It doesn’t feel like a brand new beginning to me. It feels like remembering.
That idea of returning, of coming back to something as if for the first time, is at the heart of a concept I love in Zen Buddhism. It’s called Shoshin: beginner’s mind. The idea is deceptively straightforward: in the mind of the expert, there are few possibilities. In the mind of the beginner, there are many. The invitation is to hold your expertise lightly. To approach what you already know as if you’re meeting it for the first time.
I think about this a lot on my mat.
I’ve been practicing yoga, at different levels of commitment, for a long time. And I still find poses that surprise me: the unexpected opening in a hip, the way a familiar stretch lands in a place I wasn’t expecting, the small discoveries that remind me that my body is always changing. Cues that land differently today than they did last week. A practice that changes shape depending on whether I’m rested or tired, open or braced.
What I love about beginner’s mind isn’t naivety. It’s the quality of attention it requires. When you genuinely don’t know how something will go, you have to be present. Actually present. And that, I think, is what returning really means: not just coming back to something, but actually arriving in it.
That’s the practice. Choosing to arrive. Again and again, in the same poses, the same life, and finding that it’s never quite the same at all.
Every season has something worth returning to. I hope this one brings you back to yours.
Three things I’m carrying this week
- The pose I keep coming back to: Tadasana. Mountain Pose. I have a post planned for instagram this week that explains why just standing there is so much more than just standing there.
- What I’m reading: The Summer Day by Mary Oliver. A short poem. Read it slowly.
- A thought to take with you: The last line of that poem. You’ll know it when you get there.
With warmth from Yellowknife,
Amy
P.S. If you’re local and want to practice together in person — I’m teaching Thursdays at 7pm in the + Collective Soul Space. I’d love to see you there.