Why We Return to Our Practice
I walked in the door of my house after facilitating our first yoga and writing retreat, Mind, Body, Word, with my writing sherpa and partner, Julie Tallard Johnson. My black lab puppy, Shadow, jumped on me like crazy as if she thought she would never see me again. I dropped my heavy bags and greeted her playfully. I looked around. Something was different. The house and everything was just as I left it, a blanket thrown over the back of the couch, an empty water glass in the sink, but how strange the air and space lingered, like a foreign place.
Integration. When you come off a weekend of soul work, there's bound to be a period of re-entry. Like leaving a yoga class, I wonder how long I can keep the warm, pulsing feeling inside me, until a bill in the mailbox or screaming kids agitates it into a knotted-up clump in my chest.
I took off my coat, tossed it on the desk chair, and finally exhaled after the weekend. A tenderness swelled inside my chest, like someone had recently performed surgery there. I had to stop and think, what is this?
A swelling of gratitude. A weekend of surrender. An opening of trust. A glimpse of pure love.
This is why we return, again and again, to our practice. We return to remember who we are. We return because each time we taste the sweetness of acceptance, and a feeling that everything really will be ok, like a yummy dessert, we want to taste it again and again. We return because it is human nature to forget. We return because glimpsing the soul, as it's called in the 7th Limb of yoga, Dhyana (Meditation), is just that - a glimpse. For a moment during meditation, we might glimpse that we are actually worthy of forgiveness. We might allow our bodies to feel and to cry. We might journey somewhere inside ourselves we were too afraid to enter. We might uncover pain, but along with it, an eerie sense that the love available and created by us is abundant, overflowing, and pure.
All of this might happen during meditation. It also might happen during a walk, or while writing in a journal, or while attending a retreat with a group of yogis and writers. Moments of glimpsing the soul, of tasting truth, are available all around us. Because they already exist inside us, as part of who we are.
As quickly as the thoughts come - I am lovable. I am a writer. I am strong enough.
They go...
Often after an experience like a weekend retreat, our ego will trick us into thinking none of it actually happened. We float on our spiritual high for a while until insecurity and unsureness settle in to convince us our experience wasn't what we thought.
Because of our conditioning and our culture, moments of clarity from a soul practice may seem like moments of insanity.
As I integrate myself and my experience back into my world of parenting and puppy-care, of chaufering and bill-paying... I will remind myself of the gift of my practices. When I focus on my soul, through writing, through yoga, through meditation, through laughter, and through nature, I am led to truth. I walk away from a yoga practice feeling illuminated, because I am. I entered my house today with an ache in my chest because I had honored, loved, and acknowledged that part of me I too often brush off as crazy. My center probably fluttered in applause, and the tender pang was simply my heart saying, "Thank you for remembering me."
