Hey everyone, I'm Andrea Ferretti and this is Yoga Land.

This week, I wanted to offer you a short meditation to check in with yourself and to find some calm centeredness in the middle of this holiday season.

So one of the things I love about meditation, and I feel like I want to be more clear about

this upfront with people because I wish someone had said this to me long ago.

One of the things I love most about it

is that when I don't try so hard, I drop into a place that feels really natural. And it feels

like what the poet Mary Oliver described as the soft animal body that we have.

It connects me to other beings and other forms of consciousness that are just very natural and

unfettered and unbothered by day-to-day anxieties, day-to-day comparisons, day-to-day stress.

So the other day, I was at the botanical gardens with my daughter, and she was really excited to

show me this pond. The last time she had been there, there were tons of frogs in the pond and

tons of turtles. And so she was running ahead of me and so excited to show me the pond. I was starting

to get really excited and we got there. And on this particular day, there were no frogs and there

were no turtles. So we looked and we looked and we were squinting.

There were lots of lotus flowers in the pond. We were looking through the murky water.

And then all of a sudden we saw one big turtle and he had crawled up out of the pond and was

on the side wall just sunning himself in the sun. And as a turtle does, he was moving really slowly.

And I just sat and watched him for, I don't know, a good seven minutes. And I really enjoyed

watching his tail move slowly, and then maybe one foot at a time, take a little step, and then his head would

arch more toward the sun. He was really just sunning himself. And I had the thought, I love that

this turtle is just turtling. He's just being a turtle. He's likely not thinking about

being a turtle or worrying about being a turtle in this very moment at least. He is just in his

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