🍃 Week 1: Sphinx Pose (Salamba Bhujangasana): Noticing What's Emerging

Spring is in the air for Yoga for Leadership™. 🌱

This is your calm and centered leadership series, where I share one yoga pose each week with a leadership practice you can use in real time. If you've missed our past series, I've shared the link in the comments below.

For our new 8-week series, Opening with Spring, I'm inspired by the arrival of spring. We're getting longer days, more sunshine, and in our area, blossoms are in the air.

While the beginning of the year always signifies some change, some beginning, springtime offers another type of beginning. Something more organic, more natural, more inviting.

So these next 8 weeks will be focused on Openings. Poses and leadership principles that help us open, expand, and perhaps see something we haven't previously seen before. Seeing beyond.

Week 1: Sphinx Pose (Salamba Bhujangasana) 

Leadership Practice: Noticing What's Emerging

We start with a lovely, gentle opener.

You lie on your belly, prop yourself up on your forearms, and lift your chest just slightly off the ground.

It’s a subtle lift - the first awareness that something's ready.

Spring doesn't arrive all at once.

Here in Seattle, we get a beautiful spring day, then suddenly it's pouring rain for a week, then a cold spell, then perhaps another spring day. My daffodils don't know whether to bloom or to hide.

Leadership is the same.

Before the big change, the bold move, the new strategy, there's something emerging. A sense that something wants attention. A quiet pull toward what's ready.

Most leaders miss it. They’re caught up in the work vortex - too busy to slow down, and too tired to notice anything that’s not screaming for attention.  

But real growth starts earlier. In the noticing. In the gentle lift toward what wants to emerge. Even when conditions aren't perfect yet.

Sphinx teaches you to pay attention to the subtle. To notice the first signs of opening before you're asked to act on them.

That's where spring begins. And that's where your next leadership move is already forming.

🌱 Leadership Practice

This week, notice what's emerging in you or your work.

Not what's urgent. Not what's loud. What's quietly wanting your attention?

Give it space. Don't force it into action yet. Just notice.

💫 Ask yourself: 

What's beginning to emerge in me that I haven't fully acknowledged yet?

One breath.

One pose.

One practice at a time.