Gentle Rise

Amrit Yoga Institute, Salt Springs, FL: I have wandered back into the forest. Back to my spiritual home. Why I am here irrelevant, it never matters.

In this place you can wake to the rising sun gently, easing into the day. In this same place you can know that’s an option and still choose to be miserable. You can fight. You can struggle. But you still know you can ease. It’s always an option.

Such is the nature of a Yoga Institute. You are shown yourself, your reactions, your perceived flaws and perceived greatness. Ultimately, if you’re open, receptive and listening you begin to perceive all. You are no longer your ideas about the world. Your opinions swim in an ocean of irrelevant drivel. Anything you say about anything seems utterly ridiculous. Especially to yourself.

Welcome to awakening. Becoming aware can be painful or easy or anything in between. The awareness that you are part of something much larger. An all-encompassing knowing that EVERYTHING is connected. Everything. If I am angry at you, I am hurting me. If I love you, I must first love me.

You cannot look at another without compassion. Without knowing what they are going through. Without weeping. The kiss of the wind on your face allows ecstasy to well up within you. The sound of the lake gently lapping the shore brings you to your knees. Maybe. The compulsion may be there but the ego may be packing it’s bags saying, “This is ridiculous!” Yet you stay.

You have come to be scrubbed clean. You don’t know what that means yet. Or perhaps you have come to learn yoga. You think it’s about the postures, the flexibility. Oh, it’s about flexibility, but it has nothing to do with touching your toes.

You begin to let go. Breathing without being instructed to do so. You no longer power your way through each posture, each task, each day. You doubt and back slide. But back slide from what? You are just beginning to learn who you truly are. Not the personality you, the infinite being, you.

You’re sarcastic, you get mad, sometimes jealous. You whine a little and maybe wine a little. You feel guilty, you let it go. Maybe nothing has changed. But something has. You are now aware and awareness of this awareness is growing. You can still act and behave the same way you always have, but most of the time you don’t want to. It’s not about what someone else wants for you. It’s not even what you want for you. It’s grace. It’s your way of being in the world.

Today, as the sun rises, you ease into the day.