Creating a practice space

A practice does not require a space. Plenty of women practise on a bed with the door shut and never think about it further, and that is entirely sufficient.

But something does happen when a practice has a place. Not because the objects hold power, though you may believe they do, but because a designated space removes the question of whether this is happening today. The decision is already made. The corner is already there.

What a space actually needs

Very little. A surface you can see from where you practise, and permission from yourself for it to exist.

A shelf, the top of a chest of drawers, a windowsill, a small tray that can be brought out and put away in a home where nothing stays out. All of these work. Size is irrelevant and expense is irrelevant.

What matters more is that it is visible. The most common fate of a yoni egg is a drawer, and a practice kept out of sight is a practice that becomes theoretical by March.

What might go on it

Your egg, in its pouch, which is reason enough for the whole arrangement to exist.

Beyond that, choose things that mean something rather than things that photograph well. A candle, which is the most common addition and which usefully marks a beginning and an ending. Something living, a small plant or a cut flower. A stone or shell from somewhere you loved. A photograph, though of yourself as a child more often than of anyone else, which is a choice a surprising number of women arrive at independently.

Water, in a small bowl, is traditional in a great many practices and sits naturally with the element associated with the sacral chakra.

And nothing else. An altar assembled from a shopping list belongs to the shop. Three objects that matter will do more than twenty that were bought together.

Setting an intention

The other half, and the part that turns an exercise into a practice.

Hold the cleared egg in both hands at the level of your heart. Be still for a moment. Then name one thing, silently or aloud, that you are practising toward.

Keep it simple and keep it honest. To feel more of myself. To soften. To stop bracing. To come back to my own body. Something closer to a direction than a wish, and closer to a wish than a demand.

Then let it go and begin. That is the technique in full.

What makes an intention work

Three things, and the third is the one women get wrong.

It should be about you rather than about an outcome in the world. To be more present is an intention. For my partner to notice a difference is a hope, and it puts the result somewhere you cannot reach.

It should be small enough to be true today. Grand intentions are easy to name and hard to feel any relationship with twelve minutes later.

And it should be set down after it is named. Do not carry it through the session, checking whether it is working. Naming it once at the start is what makes the next twelve minutes a practice; monitoring it turns the whole thing into an assessment, and assessment is the frame in which nothing much gets felt.

When there is no space to spare

Shared homes, small flats, children, housemates, a partner who would ask questions. Plenty of women have nowhere to put an altar and no wish to explain one.

A tin works. A small box that holds the egg, a candle stub and one object that means something, kept in a drawer and opened at the start of a session. Opening it is the same act as walking to a shelf, and the practice does not know the difference.

Keeping the same one

Most women change their intention far too often, treating it like a weekly theme.

Try keeping one for a month. The same four words at the start of every session. It becomes something quite different by the fourth week, less a statement and more a place you arrive at, and women who do this describe it as the point where the practice stopped being a series of sessions and became continuous.

Clearing the egg beforehand pairs naturally with this, and the breath method takes thirty seconds. Five ways to clear and charge your yoni egg covers all of them, and the exercise guide is where the session itself goes from here.