A service led by Rev. Sarah Gibb Millspaugh & Kelley Grimes
What Is Inner Poise?
Some of you know that yoga is one of my spiritual practices. It helps me be more present, grounded, and strong. I did yoga on-and-off for over twenty years, until 2019 when I began to practice in the tradition of BKS Iyengar, a 20th-century teacher from Puna, India. Then I became a regular! Unlike many popular forms of yoga in the US, Iyengar yoga is still deeply tied to Hinduism, and its specific teachings go back 3000+ years.
Those of us who are not Hindu might imagine the goal of yoga, pranayamic breathing, and saying “OM shanti shanti” is a feeling of peace inside. But my instructor, who learned from Gurugi Iyengar himself, says “no. Inner peace is not the goal. The goal is inner poise.”
With inner poise, there can still be struggle, there can still be conflict, there can still be fear. All is not peaceful. But when we are poised, we bring a quality of presence to that struggle, that conflict, that fear. Instead of reacting, we respond. We can be happy or sad in that poise. We can be grieving, we can be hurting. But we have wisdom. We have grace. We have courage.
“Peace is a duality,” my teacher said, “it’s there or it’s not. But poise is a quality we bring to everything.”
During the pandemic, I spent a sabbatical learning more about how we can heal our bodies and minds after trauma. The best part was a course with the Trauma Resource Institute on the Community Resiliency Model of trauma healing. They offer six skills for internally moving from reactivity to responsiveness. All of us get reactive sometimes… and those who have experienced more trauma can find ourselves more easily stuck in reactivity.
Have you noticed anybody stuck in a state of reactivity these days? Just log in to social media and we see reactivity setting off reactivity setting off reactivity. All of this can leave us feeling angry, or exhausted, or exasperated, overwhelmed, or checked out.
After learning about inner poise in Yoga, I realized that most of the trauma healing work I’ve engaged with is also about cultivating our inner poise. So is Buddhist meditation, Christian and Jewish prayer, earth-based chants, and so much ritual, music, movement, and dance. It brings us closer to our source, to our center. It steadies our spiritual and psychological feet on the ground. The ancients knew something about how to live in this world. It keeps being reaffirmed in biology, psychology, and medicine, in traditions sacred and secular. When we nurture our capacity for inner poise, we are stronger, more resilient, and more wise.
Kelley and I would like to invite you to cultivate some inner poise with us, here in the service today. But we won’t ask you to make a yoga pose. Instead, you can stay right in your seat and we’ll engage in some of the foundational practices of the Trauma Resource Institute. Think of it as an experiment in equanimity, in curiosity, in wisdom. Everything we offer today is an invitation. If any given guided reflection doesn’t speak to you, we invite you to just sit quietly and get in touch with equanimity, with curiosity, with your inner wisdom in your own way. Like yoga, these are practices that build inner poise the more you do them. It’s the practice that makes the poise more and more accessible in the moments you need it the most.
Poise Practices
In this experiential service, we led several guided practices developed by Elaine Miller-Karas of the Trauma Resource Institute. These are not reprinted here, but are available online at the iChill website and in the non-profit, free app iChill (Apple or Google Play).
Finding Inner Poise
It was almost three years ago, on October 22, 2023, that I first preached here, under this gazebo, to this congregation. I was here as your regional staff person from the Unitarian Universalist Association because the previous week, the board and the interim minister Rev. Stephen had decided to part ways, and suddenly, Palomar UU Fellowship no longer had a minister.
Throughout that October we were already feeling out of balance. The violent attacks of October 7th had happened just two weeks before, and the prime minister and cabinet of Israel had unleashed unprecedented violence and blockades on the people of Gaza.
This congregation, a place and a people of grounding, ritual, and care, was hurting and confused, having said an abrupt goodbye to a minister you’d barely said hello to.
As I thought about how to be of use to the people of Palomar UU that Sunday, I knew I needed to speak to the pain and the traumas—old and new—that were getting evoked. I told a story about a bee sting on my toe that caused so many different injuries all over my body: I leaped reflexively after the sting, then I walked funny on my foot for a mile, both of which injured my foot in a place that injured a nerve, which spread to my knee, to my hips, and so on. The pain in my body persisted long after the bee sting was healed. I talked about how the somatic practitioner Resmaa Menakem teaches that we need to attend to and digest our pain, so we don’t keep inflicting it on ourselves and others. We need to have poise after a bee sting, and endure the temporary pain of the sting, instead of reactively jumping around and creating worse injuries.
It feels like now, three years later, our country, our world, has amped up the pace of pain. Throwing it around even more. The president and his co-conspirators target people with cruelty to gain political points. People who are in legitimate pain because they feel irrelevant to today’s economy latch on to the politics of supremacy and go around denigrating those who they think of as “less than.” Even normally compassionate, friendly people can go off on one another and spiral into full-scale online rage. The pain keeps moving around our collective body because most of us don’t want to look deep down inside at what’s really going on in our souls. To do that, to clean up our pain, takes courage.
Brene Brown reminds us that “In one of its earliest forms, the word courage meant ‘To speak one’s mind by telling all one’s heart.’ ”
Prentis Hemphill expands on this in their book What it Takes to Heal: “Courage is feeling what matters to us the most.” Hemphill, a contemporary writer, embodiment facilitator, political organizer, and therapist. Like BKS Iyengar with yoga, Hemphill works in those places where our minds/bodies, and spirits connect.
They write:
The team I work closely with has been looking at courage in the last few years as we’ve watched our nation’s collective fear level skyrocket and escalate every conversation. At a recent retreat, we did a deep dive into courage, asking what our bodies know about it, this force we can generate inside of us that knows fear but doesn’t succumb to it. How might we cultivate this virtue in each of us to affirm us in the hard moments, at times when we need it most?
In our somatic trainings, we practice embodied courage, a courage that is feeling and aware… When someone is afraid to try a new move or gesture outside their comfort zone, we don’t ask them to not feel the fear—because they already do. We don’t ask them to wrestle their fear or make it disappear. Instead, embodied courage for us invites fear, in all its trembling, making room for it to include whatever might be there, the terror, the grief, the connection, and anything that makes it worth it to act in the first place.
Fear is an alarm, one that we should listen to. One that tells us that something we care about is under threat and fills our bodies with the energy we need to do something about it. … The protective impulse of fear can be our wisest message, but at times we want what is beyond our fear’s dominion. We long for what only courage can help us reach. (from What It Takes to Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World, pp. 179-180.)
And it is inner poise, I contend, that gives us access to sustained courage.
Earlier this week I was invited to drop into a meeting of the Vista Human Rights Committee, known as Comité. This group has been on the front lines as ICE has taken people in Vista, San Marcos, and Escondido, especially in recent weeks during this “Operation Safe California.” Comité has been fielding texts and calls from their tipline, and doing their best to document apprehensions and offer mutual aid to those left behind. Doing this work involves risk—ICE agents do not like people filming them, and they let that be known.
Entering into Comité’s space and seeing how they interacted with one another, there was joy, even amidst the sorrows and stresses, and a feeling of abundance. Abundance of food, abundance of love, abundance of compassion, and community care.
They seemed to be acting from a place of inner poise. In Light on Yoga, BKS Iyengar wrote:
The yogi uses all their resources—physical, economic, mental or moral—to alleviate the pain and suffering of others. They share their strength with the weak until the weak become strong. They share their courage with those who are timid until the timid become brave by their example. They deny the maxim ‘survival of the fittest,’ but make the weak strong enough to survive. They become a shelter to one and all. (language updated to be gender-neutral)
That’s what the inner poise is all about. The inner courage to respond in a way that expresses our deepest truths, even in the face of our fear.
Poise Practice: Gesturing
by Kelley Grimes
I want to invite you to place your right hand on your heart center and take a few breaths. Now take a moment to reflect on the ways you express your courage, your strengths, your resilience, your inner poise, your love, your compassion.
Breathe into those resources you have cultivated within yourself.
Now I invite you to place your left hand on your heart center and take a few breaths. Take a moment to think about what brings up fear for you, those things out of your control, that feel unsettling and anxiety inducing.
Breathe into those fears with love and compassion, knowing that in this moment you are safe.
Now I invite you to place your right hand over your left hand on your heart center. Holding your fear with love and compassion and reminding yourself of all the resources you have nurtured within to support yourself.
Breathe into that place of love and courage as you hold your fears gently, with kindness and care.
Now if you are comfortable, reach your left hand out and hold the person’s hand on your left and while you reach out your right to hold the hand of your neighbor.
Feel the support in your body knowing that you are indeed supported by this nurturing community and when you feel fear you are not alone. As we connect we are reminded that we are so much more than we would ever be alone and that we can hold our fear with love.
© 2026 Sarah Gibb Millspaugh. All rights reserved.
