Yoga & fairy smut

Ever since I learned to read (especially when I started getting into *chapter books*) I loved to constantly rotate though several books at a time, my wavy non-linear brain excited to excel at the task of keeping multiple plots and countless characters straight as I jumped from story to story.

My dad has a giant imagination, and that combined with the amount of time I spent with my mind in fantastical, far away places through what I was reading resulted in a childhood romanticized through my sparkly rose-colored glasses. I went on to study & graduate in English (so I could keep reading) and I’ve continued my obsessive reading habit ever since.

Over the past year or so, I’ve picked up a new genre I like to call fairy smut (or fantasy romance, if we’re being proper) and let me tell you, it has swept me away to a magic la la land with more stardust than I’ve ever seen. I’m currently re-reading one of my top favorites (A Court of Silver Flames, by Sarah J. Maas) and part of it is talking about these super badass female fairy warriors creating a Valkyrie fighting unit — and to train, they do yoga.

The descriptions of the postures, movement, and meditations of these Valkyries is beautiful, but one phrase I just read made heart explode with starlight: the point of it all is to go “from seated calm to active soothing.” To go from sitting in calm awareness in a controlled, safe environment — to active soothing on the battlefield. That struck me as a big giant HELL YES! That’s the point of it all, ya know? To take these mindfulness techniques — the breathing, the awareness, the introspection — and use them to improve the quality of our lives: from seated calm, to active soothing.