Out of your head and into your heart

This was supposed to be a Wednesday update but – here we are! Making a promise to myself to update, starting… NOW!

I’m sitting here sweating after riding to and from amazing yoga at my beloved The Yoga Room. Eddie Teboul’s incredible Vinyasa class couldn’t have been any more apt (THANK YOU) – Independence Day. Independence from fear, anger, jealousy, sadness. Suffering is inevitable, we all know this. It’s how we deal with it..

There’s an awesome Summer Sixty challenge going on at TYR right now and although I’m not officially participating, I’m doing a challenge of my own. The nature of MY beast is sometimes inconsistency – yet I’ve come to the point where I realized.. Hey – I’m one of those people. I need this. I need yoga. I need the sound of OM resonating. I need chanting. I need sweat. I need communion with myself and others.

I put my head to the mat and think: I am bowing to the power in myself and in the universe that is greater than my sadness and fear.

And after – I feel the palpable difference. What more evidence do I need?

We are all so cerebral. Sometimes you can analyze yourself to death and still get nowhere.

There is a source we all come from that is greater than THIS – whatever external or internal affliction we are dealing with, imagined or actual, mental or physical. We all need a way out, but a way out and INTO awareness – into the VAST, infinite space we are actually occupying.

It’s like curling up in a cave in the corner of a HUGE, beautiful forest we are refusing to acknowledge. It’s there. It’s endless. And it’s beautiful.

I hiked in Cold Spring on the Breakneck Ridge trail and it was exhilarating in ways I can’t explain. Not only to feel the somewhat imminent danger but to stand up there and know we had traversed it – hand over hand, one foot in front of the other. Our sweat, our exertion – brings us this.

Overwhelming.

But everything is like that.

I am reminding myself to be patient. Every single day counts. Every single effort counts.

And there are ways beyond trying to conceptualize it in our minds. I have felt stuck beyond BELIEF. But today riding out of that yoga class – I feel the knots loosening. I want to flow freely. Heart broke loose on the wind..

Here’s hoping you acknowledge and celebrate your own independence today.

UPCOMING EVENTS:

Reading for Malini Singh McDonald at REZ Reading Series in Kew Gardens – 7/11/13 [Facebook invite]

Reading for Boundless Tales at the 3rd Annual NYC Poetry Festival on Governor’s Island – 7/27/13 [Facebook invite]

INSPIRATION:

When water gets caught in habitual whirlpools,/ dig a way out through the bottom/ to the ocean. There is a secret medicine/ given only to those who hurt so hard they can’t hope./ The hopers would feel slighted if they knew. – RUMI