Hey There.
First I just want to say how thankful I am for this community. These last few months have been so strange in so many ways. I, like many of you often find myself wondering how is this happening, is this even real? You know what the yogi in me silently whispers back? "it's not real", this is the practice. Knowing your true center, the space within you that never changes, that sweet soul spot - that is what is real.
So here we are, realness contained in different forms of humaness, experiencing a pandemic, coupled with lack of leadership and a racial equality movement. ALL AT ONCE. As a yogi, tree hugger and egalitarian I find myself swaying between feeling like the all accepting yogi who believes that everything which is real will be revealed and that of an infuriated citizen, confused and curious how I can help. I am going to tell you now that there is no right way to feel this. But I am going to ask that you do feel this. We come to this peaceful practice of yoga and learn it levels everything. There is no one of more value than the next. There is no right, there is no wrong, it all simply "is", all of us are connected through our energy. I call this energy my soul or the divine that resides within me.
We are all made up of the same stuff (matter and energy) and we all come into this world with a purpose. This purpose gets clouded by our samskaras. These are mental impressions or memories that our soul knows even though sometimes our minds cannot remember. Samskaras are interesting because they can layer this life with our generational understanding and our souls life.
Just like you share a family history and DNA with your genetic family you also carry the scars of that history in your cells for multiple generations, which means you hold their traumas in your cells. Crazy, right? In yoga many of us are open to the idea of past lives, this makes sense to me since energy cannot be created or destroyed. So you also carry the scars of your previous lives. These are the traumas and karmic ripples in your energy. Considering samskaras in this way you now are having to untangle the knowing of your soul and the knowing on a cellular level without the help of your thinking mind. This is why I want you in your body and I want you to feel. I want you to feel and reckon with your human heritage. I want you to dive down into the depths of your soul and reckon with your karma.
Begin in this moment and trace your mind through every time you were privileged, silenced or challenged, every interaction, every feeling, none is too small or invalid. How does your body react? What do you feel? Listen to that. Feel that. That is the deep awareness held in your DNA, it is a part of your genetic story. Now turn towards your soul energy. The best place to hear in this space is through meditation. Give yourself permission to go to all the improbable places, all genders, all races, all roles as you understand them. Just feel and listen, then notice. When we tune into these deeper levels of our experience we open up to things about ourselves we would have never know. It is uncomfortable at first but the more you sink in the more you learn about yourself the easier it becomes.
Take time to spend these next few weeks or months uncovering, feel out those samskaras and the messages that are held within. Move closer to what you know is true and right and allow that to guide you. Give yourself the gift of waking up. This world will thank you for it.
“WAITING
You keep waiting for something to happen,
the thing that lifts you out of yourself,
catapults you into doing all the things you’ve put off
the great things you’re meant to do in your life,
but somehow never quite get to.
You keep waiting for the planets to shift
the new moon to bring news,
the universe to align, something to give.
Meanwhile, the piles of papers, the laundry, the dishes, the job —
it all stacks up while you keep hoping
for some miracle to blast down upon you,
scattering the piles to the winds.
Sometimes you lie in bed, terrified of your life.
Sometimes you laugh at the privilege of waking.
But all the while, life goes on in its messy way.
And then you turn forty. Or fifty. Or sixty. . .
and some part of you realizes you are not alone
and you find signs of this in the animal kingdom —
when a snake sheds its skin its eyes glaze over,
it slinks under a rock, not wanting to be touched,
and when caterpillar turns to butterfly
if the pupa is brushed, it will die —
and when the bird taps its beak hungrily against the egg
it’s because the thing is too small, too small,
and it needs to break out.
And midlife walks you into that wisdom
that this is what transformation looks like —
the mess of it, the tapping at the walls of your life,
the yearning and writhing and pushing, until one day, one day
you emerge from the wreck
embracing both the immense dawn
and the dusk of the body,
glistening, beautiful
just as you are”