Kiyowara

Love is what remains

"Love. Love is what you are.  Love is what you came from, and Love is what you return to.  Love is all there is, and all that is."

One of the hardest practices for me in my daily practice is to hold myself in love.  To sit with myself compassionately can present huge challenges.  Resistance rises up and only through the hard won efforts of daily practice am I able to sit through the feelings that I want to run away as fast as possible rather than face loving compassion.  The ego plays all kinds of tricks to keep me in a place of distraction.  Sometimes I end up repeating exercises like fourfold breathing over and over again to still my anxious mind...and the greatest anxiety producing activity is to set the intention of resting in the arms of Love.

The quote above came from one of my Guides.  Though they never coddle me, neither do they scold or scorn me.  I am expected to stand as an equal in the relationship, and active partner in my own destiny. They always approach with love and compassion for me and I find that accepting that love is far more challenging than if they were to approach with disdain or reproach.  I have worked hard to hold myself in love, and I hate having to admit that there are still seeds of self-loathing that I have yet to uncover.

I had an interesting conversation over the weekend related to this internal damage.  When someone else points out a mistake I have made, and I genuinely know it was a mistake, it's reasonably easy for me to just own it and say, "Yep, I made a mistake," and get on with taking whatever action is appropriate.  However, when I am calling myself on a mistake, I feel terrible.  I treat myself horribly, holding myself to an impossible standard.  When I discovered over the weekend that another friend has the same response to similar situations, I found a little comfort in my humanity.  Oh, look, I'm not alone in this reaction!  What a relief, truly!  And then it was a little easier to open a bigger space for myself, to hold myself a little more compassionately.

Unconditional Love is something that requires practice.  In this lifetime I did not come from an experience of unconditional Love, so it is a truly a learned experience for me.  If I cannot find space to love myself unconditionally, I can't hold others in that space.  Learning to first expand myself and let my experience flow over and out to others only after the energy has filled me is the only way I can truly support the work I do, to walk my talk.  And yet, it still feels like a selfish act.  I still have the internal dialogue that says I should do for others first, even though I have the first hand experience that by first filling me, taking the time for self-care, I bring so much more of myself to the table, I have so much more to offer other relationships, that I can be so much more fully present.  Being present is, after all, the real point here.  

And so I say to all of us, "Love. Love is what you are.  Love is what you came from, and Love is what you return to.  Love is all there is, and all that is."

25 days of yoga

I was challenged by my Guides to do 25 five consecutive days of yoga.  I have been practicing yoga for several years now, much more seriously in the last 2-3 years.  My routine had settled into 2-4 classes per week at Willow Glen Yoga, a wonderful studio with fantastic teachers.  I try to bike 2-3 days per week as well.

However, the challenge to practice yoga 25 consecutive days came in response to my desire to deepen my spiritual work through strengthening the vessel of my body.  I know that I need to further embody into the physical form I have in order to support the level of energetic work that I feel called to work.  A series of changes in my attitudes and patterns over the last 3 months has given me a glimpse of the possibility of the level of work I could be doing, but I wasn't sure how to get there.  

To be fair, I wasn't really issued a challenge so much as given a very loving suggestion.  The suggestion was sweet, while suggesting that the commitment to this 25 day practice might support more growth for me. 

Given that the 25 day period in question rolled right over big events in my life like Thanksgiving and Black Friday at my shop, I could see that I would have some interesting scheduling challenges ahead of me!  Still, I did manage to get in a yoga practice everyday for 25 days.  Sometimes it meant accepting that my practice for the day would be restorative rather than active.  I came out of those sessions with a much greater appreciation for restorative practice, and I plan to incorporate at least one restorative practice per week going forward.  Sometimes I practiced late at night, or sacrificed sleep in order to practice early in the morning, knowing that a later in the day practice simply would not occur.  (Black Friday my lovely Wife joined me in getting up at 3:30 in order to have both our meditation and yoga practices before work!)

Did I experience changes during this cycle?  Yes, I did, some of them visceral and others much more subtle than I was expecting.  I gained a lot of endurance and physical strength.  I also was able to see a tiny crack in the wall I have around compassion for myself.  It's only a tiny crack, but that glimpse is enough to inspire me to work harder at taking down those walls!  My meditation practice and magical work also benefitted greatly from both the physical and energetic strengthening that I experienced.  I saw how I have held back from making big commitments in my life in really subtle ways.  I found that my capacity is much larger than I had allowed myself to believe.

Then I took off days 26 and 27...and the I hit a wall.  Turns out that my body and my psyche really want/need/desire/crave this piece of my practice.  Everything -and I do mean everything - works so much more smoothly when I practice yoga everyday.  My magical practice is so much more centered, and the work I do is so much more comprehensive when supported by the yoga.  My relationships work much more smoothly, too! My first response to this was to make another 25 day commitment; then it dawned on me that the real answer for me was to step up and make a much larger commitment.  That felt frightening, but the work of these last few weeks gave me a better center from which to address this fear.  My primary contact pointed out that I do know the answers, I just need to do the work.

I commit now to practicing yoga every day, not just for 25 days but for the rest of my life.  I understand that it doesn't have be a vigorous vinyasa practice every day.  A teacher I worked with recently gave me this piece of wisdom that she received from one of her teachers: A yogi or yogini is not such because they practice physical yoga every day, but because they are fully integrated, present, and embodied.  That is what I desire, to embody into this moment, fully integrated, present and accounted for!  This way I can step up "in all my parts"!