-Guest Post by Alex Howson
There’s a phrase we use so casually we’ve almost stopped hearing it. Spring in your step. A lightness, a readiness, a little extra lift in the way you move through the world.
March is when that phrase stops being metaphor and starts being instruction.
The spring equinox arrived this year on March 20th. This is the moment when day and night hold equal measure before the year tips decisively toward light. It’s a threshold, and like all thresholds, it asks something of us. Not to rush across it, but to meet it with our whole bodies. From the breath down to the soles of our feet.
I came back recently from a trip to Thailand, with a short layover in Singapore. At Gardens by the Bay, I walked through the Flower Dome, an extraordinarily engineered world of hothouse blooms, including a section dreamed straight out of Alice in Wonderland: fantastical, color-saturated, entirely removed from ordinary weather. It was gorgeous. It was also deeply strange; all this abundance sealed under glass while an equatorial heat pressed at the walls outside.
Coming home to the Snoqualmie Valley the following day, the contrast with our firs and pines was stark. The way spring arrives here isn’t theatrical (no hothouse blooms!). It’s incremental, almost shy: a flush of green at the edge of the trail, the smell of warming earth after rain, the rivers running louder with snowmelt from the mountains. After the lush spectacle of the tropics, I found myself paying closer attention to what is particular and restrained about spring in the valley. That traveler’s fresh eye is its own kind of gift.
And I noticed this particularity first in my feet. The ground here is much softer now than before I left on my trip in late February. Muddier. More alive underfoot.
From the ground up
Before you can have spring in your step, your feet need to remember how to meet the earth.
Most of us spend our days with our feet compressed into shoes, their small intrinsic muscles essentially switched off. But these muscles along the arch and sole are where proprioception lives. Proprioception is your body’s sense of where it is in space. It maintains a quiet, continuous conversation with the ground beneath you. Without proprioception, balance becomes effortful. With it, you move with more steadiness and ease.
This simple exercise wakes up that conversation.
Try this: Foot Doming
Rest your hands lightly on a countertop or the back of a sturdy chair for support. Press your feet flat on the floor. Then slowly lift and spread your toes as wide as you can — really let them fan out. Now, keeping your toes lifted, gently dome the arch of your foot, drawing the ball of your foot and your heel toward each other without gripping the floor. Hold for a breath or two, then release.
That’s it. From the outside, it looks like almost nothing. But underneath, you are waking up small muscles you’ve likely been ignoring and beginning the work of supporting your balance and your body’s orientation in space.
Do this daily, even just a few repetitions. It’s a quiet act of tending to your foundation.
Try this: From the sky down
Spring also arrives through the breath, if you let it.
One of my favorite practices for this time of year is a Japanese breathing exercise best done outdoors, among trees. Choose a cherry blossom, If you can find one. If you can do this on a trail in the Valley — along the Snoqualmie River, or in the foothills where the firs are still dripping from the last rain — so much the better.
Stand quietly, feet on the earth. As you inhale slowly through your nose, draw your hands gently toward your body with palms facing in, arms gathering the breath toward your center. As you exhale, release your arms slowly back out. Repeat three to five times, as though you are drawing the air of spring directly into your body and soul.
The gesture is one of receiving. Rather than rushing toward the season, you’re drawing it in. Letting it arrive.
Let the smell of the trees and the sound of water be part of what you gather.
Permission to receive the season
Spring doesn’t need you to chase it. It’s already here, arriving incrementally, working its way up through the soil and the still-cool air. Your job is simply to meet it: feet awake on the earth, breath moving in and out.
The earth is waking up. You can too — from the ground up.
If you’re a woman in your 40s, 50s, or beyond, you might find that balance — literal and otherwise — feels like it deserves more deliberate attention right now. The BodyWise Spring Series at Mount Si Physical Therapy Wellness Collective offers exactly that: ten classes designed for women 40+ to build strength, steadiness, and community through this season of transition. Registration is now open. Spaces are limited, so grab your spot.
-Snoqualmie-based medical writer and yoga teacher Alex Howson, PhD, draws on decades of experience in health education, medical writing, and yoga. Alex explores practical, evidence-based ways to support physical, emotional, and mental well-being through the many seasons of life. Each column blends accessible science, grounded storytelling, and simple tools for building steadiness, resilience, and long-term health in a changing world. You can find Alex on Facebook, Instagram, Linked In and on her website https://www.alexhowson.com/.
[Featured Image by Canva]
