It's been quite some time since I have written something publicly. I have been growing at warp speed this year, I have taken in so many lessons and am still being rattled around. My life shifted and I have been adapting. Looking back for years, I can plainly see that this is what I always do and what we always must do. Life shifts. Adapt. The more we fight the things we cannot control, the more we suffer.
Last fall, I got an amazing opportunity and began an incredible job teaching yoga full-time for Boston Public Schools. I walked away from the teaching schedule that I painstakingly curated for years in order to try something totally new and completely different. I am still figuring out how to be effective with middle schoolers, and how to function in a new working culture. It's exciting and it's hard. And every day I feel like I am actually doing work that is changing the world.
In my life, my practice has given me the ability to be open to what comes. At the end of February, it will be ten years since I first set foot on Konalani Yoga Ashram, where this current lifetime began to make sense. It was here that I completed my first Yoga Teacher Training. But more importantly, it was here where I consciously began my sadhana, found my teacher, found my sangha... and found my Self.
Taking in the view post meditation at Konalani, 2008
In these ten years, I feel as though I have shed lifetimes of tension and have watched myself transform. Things that once upset me are much easier to understand and process now. The complexities and intricacies of behavior and connection need not be analyzed, but felt without attachment. The reasoning and the digging for meaning has nearly ceased, because I am instead trying to open up and experience rather than figure out WHY. There is so much I will never understand and never know, why strive in futility to get a handle on it? Why pretend that I can figure it out with my small mind? I would rather experience it with my huge heart. I am trying to be resilient, be open, be joyful, be present. I have tried to say yes more to things, even though this has opened me up to potential for failure and potential for pain.
As I come up on the ten year anniversary of my sadhana, I don't feel as though I have all the answers at all. Yes, I meditate every day. Yes, I would say I am overall a happy person. Yes, I have chosen to live a conscious life in accordance with the teachings of yogic philosophy. Yes, I am more adaptable and more aware than many of my peers. Yes, I still get really lost, really anxious, and really sad. What I do know is that my practice is my constant companion. My practice is the indicator that I am actually trying, I am always growing. My practice reminds me that this path I am on is not new, it's not strange, it's where I am supposed to be. My practice feeds me, and will feed me until my last breath.
I feel like I have so much more work to do.
Ten years, and I am just getting started.
