I'm sitting on the plane on my way home from Boston where I've been teaching at a retreat for school teachers and people who work with children.
I have a book with me.
On these long flights I really like to bring a book that is large enough to read while we are flying over the Atlantic. It is a special feeling to have the opportunity and space to sit immersed in the book – and occasionally raise your eyes and let your thoughts float into the sky. With the great ocean roaring beneath you.

I don't really like flying – but sometimes my job requires me to overcome my reluctance. On long flights, I always choose a window seat if I can get one. It gives me the opportunity to gaze at the eternity outside the plane window when I meditate – and every now and then try to feel this timeless expanse inside too.

On this trip I brought a book that was published two or three years ago, and which I have been looking forward to reading: The Awakened Body by Willa Blythe Baker.
The subtitle is 'Somatic mindfulness as a path to freedom', body-based conscious presence as a path to freedom.
Which is very comprehensive for the book's content. Because that is exactly what it describes, a down-to-earth, body-based practice of presence that clearly and pedagogically takes the reader by the hand and along on a path the author himself has walked - and therefore knows very well. You can feel that right away. This is not a theoretical desk book. It is a lived practice path, with proven exercises and integrated insights.
As a reader, I get the feeling that Willa Blythe Baker is what she writes.

She has been in retreat for seven years and is an authorized Buddhist lama.
The foreword is written by her teacher, the Tibetan lama Tsoknyi Rinpoche, son of the Dzogchen master Tulku Urgyen.
Baker teaches at the Dharma Center she founded in Boston and at a retreat located an hour's drive west of Springfield. Despite her deep roots in Buddhist scholarship and spirituality, her book The Awakened Body relatively free from religious concepts. You don't have to subscribe to Buddhism to benefit from it.
On the contrary, she speaks very directly to the resources we have in our bodies, especially with regard to how we can implement these when we want to deepen a contemplative practice.

The book is divided into three main parts:

1) The Earth Body · The Earth body.
This chapter takes as its starting point the physical aspects of being alive, the very concrete body of flesh and blood. Here the book focuses on how we can become more deeply physically grounded in the body through contemplative practice and how we can care for it.

2) The Subtle Body · The energy body.
In this part we delve into the energetic aspects of being in the body, with an emphasis on sensuality and the emotional layers of existence and practice.

3) The Truth Body · The body of consciousness or the truth body.
Here she points to the conscious aspects of having a body, our ability to be present and awake, how this experience of simultaneity with the present, i.e. knowledge of the present while we are in the present, can enrich our existence and being in the world.
Baker calls The Truth Body alternately also for The Awareness Body.

Large parts of the book are direct instructions for practice. It is actually structured in such a way that it supports contemplative reading; that is, that you alternately read and activate the mental apparatus of understanding, and then relax into practice and let go of the content. There are regular and frequent breaks in the text in the form of meditative exercises, which means that the book invites the reader into a bodily meditative experience with the material as much as it is an invitation to mental immersion.

As I approach the end of the book, I look out the window again over the Atlantic. The sun is rising over Europe. Below us now lies the North Sea.
In the penultimate chapter, Willa Blythe Baker describes several approaches to discovering how the sky above us can be an invitation to practice presence and contemplation. An opportunity in all of our everyday lives, we just have to remember to look up. Because, as Baker says, when you look up at the sky, out into infinity, and feel inward, the sky can point to consciousness.

I close the book and look down at the winter sea below us – and out into the openness of the sky.