What do we mean when we say our Daily Practices are adaptable?
The Good Girl to Goddess program suggests a set of daily practices that women can adapt to suit their lifestyle, preferences, and needs. For example, we invite women to develop a meditation practice and teach the “focus on the hands” style of meditation. For even just 10 minutes, one or twice a day, simply close your eyes and focus on the sensation of having hands, and when the focus drifts, take it back to the hands. However, this is just a suggestion – a starting point – and we fully support our collective members to choose a style that works for them.
One of our GGTG Collective members exemplified this perfectly when she discovered that cycling to the forest was her form of meditation. She craved movement, something that a sitting practice could not possibly achieve. Yet one day, as she rode on a path through nature, it clicked for her – this was her meditation practice. It was the activity that allowed her to find and stabilizeher flow, to get out of her mind, into her body, at one with her breath.
We also propose journalling as a daily practice, and this can be done in any number of ways. You can use pre-set prompts (we suggest lots of these in the online platform), you can free-write for 10 minutes first thing in the morning, or you can keep a gratitude journal that you fill in just before bed.
Any of these options fulfils the purpose of the Daily Practice – to connect you with the authentic voice within, and to root out the thoughts that might be limiting you from expressing your inner Goddess.
Coming into the body is another highly adaptable Daily Practice. You can use the hands meditation as a means to achieve the goal of reconnecting with your bodily sensations by shifting your awareness from your hands to your head, then neck, then trunk, then hips, and so on.
Yoga Nidra is a beautiful practice that you can reap the benefits of in as little as ten minutes. It invites deep relaxation and has demonstrated countless health benefits with regular use. Kundalini Yoga is another excellent practice for coming into the body, with many kriyas, or sets, lasting around 15 minutes.
You can even use your gym session as a way of coming into the body – but only if moving your body at the gym is something you do mindfully, and with joy. If you’re constantly self-critical and comparing yourself with other women, you will have missed the purpose of this particular Daily Practice (though you will certainly have discovered some emotions you can mine for their own limiting beliefs, which is an excellent means of applying the GGTG ethos of conscious living!).
Probably the most adaptable practice of all is creativity, imagination and play. Watch children in the playground or around an arts and crafts table, and you’ll get a sense for why this is true…no two children play in exactly the same way! Yes, they may play together and coordinate their activities, but they still bring completely unique elements into the game.
Allowing ourselves free time for creativity, imagination and play is probably the most challenging aspect of the GGTG Daily Practices for most women – it certainly can be for me! At the same time, I find that it is during these unstructured sessions that I receive the most profound a-ha moments, solutions to issues completely unrelated to what I am doing that would have taken me hours, if not days, of dedicated effort to solve.
How’s that for a time saver! And it’s also loads of fun.