This little dove to my right changed my life-- forever.
It's a Saturday night at 7:30 pm when half of the humans who live in Ocean Beach are at the local bars finding their own idea of truth when we opt to rent out a yoga studio for a Chakra Water Tasting, all taking shots of alkaline water mixed with different essential oils, crystals, and organic herbs blended for specific ailments like heartbreak and voice blockages. We're going around in a circle, discussing what hurts or heals us most, pulling angel cards when this little dove throws her arms up to tell us all that she has a cyst the size of a small baseball on one of her ovaries.
Her response upon the discovery?
She welcomed it with arms this wide open.
"I saw the test results and I thought: why hello, little cyst! Thank you for being here! I have nothing but love for you. I know that I am not my name, that my spirit chose this body and it already has everything on my map planned out for me. I learned of my spine being out of alignment, so it led me to yoga-- and now I teach. It all happens perfectly! So I say, welcome to the cyst. I ask it: what are you here for? Stay as long as you will to teach me whatever it is you have to teach."
We are not our sadness.
We are not our despair.
We are not our anger or our cries, no.
They are just experiences that we are experiencing-- that we are learning how to experience. We are not even our happiest moments. We are just souls experiencing whatever experience there is provided for us to experience.
May we learn to not only sit in comfort with the discomfort, to not only really BE with it, but may we learn to EMBRACE it.
To hold hands with what could potentially take this experience away, or shift it at all.
May we learn to act with engrained wisdom rather than re-act to our given situations.
We cannot control what happens around us, or even "to" us, but we can control our response and learn that every scenario happens FOR us.
THIS-- this philosophy-- this is our yoga.
Always Chose Love
It's a Saturday night at 7:30 pm when half of the humans who live in Ocean Beach are at the local bars finding their own idea of truth when we opt to rent out a yoga studio for a Chakra Water Tasting, all taking shots of alkaline water mixed with different essential oils, crystals, and organic herbs blended for specific ailments like heartbreak and voice blockages. We're going around in a circle, discussing what hurts or heals us most, pulling angel cards when this little dove throws her arms up to tell us all that she has a cyst the size of a small baseball on one of her ovaries.
Her response upon the discovery?
She welcomed it with arms this wide open.
"I saw the test results and I thought: why hello, little cyst! Thank you for being here! I have nothing but love for you. I know that I am not my name, that my spirit chose this body and it already has everything on my map planned out for me. I learned of my spine being out of alignment, so it led me to yoga-- and now I teach. It all happens perfectly! So I say, welcome to the cyst. I ask it: what are you here for? Stay as long as you will to teach me whatever it is you have to teach."
We are not our sadness.
We are not our despair.
We are not our anger or our cries, no.
They are just experiences that we are experiencing-- that we are learning how to experience. We are not even our happiest moments. We are just souls experiencing whatever experience there is provided for us to experience.
May we learn to not only sit in comfort with the discomfort, to not only really BE with it, but may we learn to EMBRACE it.
To hold hands with what could potentially take this experience away, or shift it at all.
May we learn to act with engrained wisdom rather than re-act to our given situations.
We cannot control what happens around us, or even "to" us, but we can control our response and learn that every scenario happens FOR us.
THIS-- this philosophy-- this is our yoga.
Always Chose Love