“The greatest journey she ever took was to heal herself. You can go around the world a thousand times. Until you go inside your soul and make peace and LOVE, you have not actually gone anywhere. How kind can you be to yourself in the next moment? That is the journey.”
—Jaiya John
These words are my new mantra. Again reminded this past week that vulnerability is the only gateway to the heart. I crashed off my patio while looking at the full moon and landed on my right side. My wrist and knee are now recuperating, and I am humbled just to be still. This active whirling dancer is sitting on the inner journey of listening and releasing the habits and patterns of my “doing” identity. I’m grateful nothing is broken; just the ego is bruised.
This month we begin our fall season of classes and workshops. Our teacher training is coming to its completion in October, and I’m debating on how to move forward. So much of our teachings at YAF are sharing the tools needed to move into our healing and connecting to our true inner selves of the heart. I want to begin teaching the philosophies and the methodologies of deeper, refined meditations for releasing the old patterns of traumas—the anger, the hurts, and the old beliefs that no longer serve in learning to love.
Yoga therapy is not just a physical practice but offers teaching with a heart-to-heart individual relationship between teacher and student. Holding a safe place to shift the mind’s struggle of gripping onto the patterns of thought, speech, and action that only add to the suffering. The mind is in the body, the breath, the thoughts, the behaviors of identity, and our moods. Each tool of yoga can influence these layers, and ultimately through practice and nourishing of new patterns, open the gateway to our deeper intelligence.
Learning self-love versus self-loathing is a journey of the soul. This is my life commitment to keep growing, and so I surrender my need to be perfect and accept my humanity. I am forever grateful for my injuries to remind me to come back to my practice in a new gentle way. As I prepare for my retreat in Portugal, my injury becomes a gift to move deeper in mindful meditation and to accept my limits by nourishing my grateful heart.
Everyday healing is not for the weak of the spirit. My hero at this moment is Michael Taylor, my dear friend, and colleague who is truly living the moment-to-moment acceptance of cultivating patience as he sits each day in uncertainty. His entire system is healing from a transplant last April.
And for anyone undergoing any type of treatment, whether a cancer diagnosis, an autoimmune disease, or just a much-needed mental rest from the exhaustion of living, know that we at YAF are holding the space of love and support for one another. May we all be nourished and feel connected as a community. This is what it means to be human.
Let’s meet each other where we are. Learn the gift of shifting anger into passion, fear into love, and appreciation for the brilliance of all the teachers that walked this path before us. Let’s move each thought, speech, and action from harming to healing. When you can observe your thoughts of anger or worry or fear and witness the thoughts as a pattern of learned habit, in that moment of awareness, pause, reflect and choose a better, right thought—the one that arises from a new pattern of practicing detachment from the self-preservation of identity. The ability to choose a better action from a kinder, compassionate perspective allows for a new experience to unfold, living a life with the possibility of less suffering, a pathway inwards with the desire to experience self-love.
The light in me honors the light in you,
Laura Jane