Where to begin with this one?
As information enters into our system from the world 'out there', it goes through different screens of perception. This is the natural 'checks and balances' order. Every life form to ever exist had to do two basic things - get food, procreate. This is fundamental to biology. The first single celled organism did this, of which grew the great tree of life that we see in all its rich diversity and complexity. This is hardwired into our DNA which contains the entire history of said tree of life within its code. Our biological ancestry and all the karmic history of these previous lives are a written story, intertwined in the endless strands of genetic information found when unraveling a single DNA structure from one cell.
And we are made up of 50 trillion of these cells.
Think about it - the human being is just a colony of cells, functioning together harmoniously with some incredibly energetic forces holding them in sync. And these cells are communicating constantly, eavesdropping on our thoughts and feelings, receiving messages from our consciousness about what to do and when to do it. All their quantum functions are important to the whole ship to run smoothly. The 200,000 chemical reactions that take place in one cell every second are all doing a specific job to keep things in order.
As life emerged from this single celled ancestor and gradually grew into multi-cellular organisms, these lifeforms had to slowly develop ever more complex ways of responding to the environment. Initially it was not much more basic than perhaps just being more aggressive in their quest for food energy. But over time it developed into increasingly elaborate situations that the lifeform could adjust to and evolve from. These responses to the environment are called e-motions, or energy in motion, and the two basic ones are love and fear. The first cell had to love, or be expansive in order to take in energy (search or obtain food/mate)... Or it had to fear, or be contractive and remove itself from possible danger and conserve energy. Expanding and contracting, just like a breath, just like the whole rhythm of the cosmos....
As these emotions developed under these two base movements life could take (love and fear), we could have different responses, which could alter outcomes, which could further evolve our genes, etc etc. Now as human beings, we have an incredibly diverse array of e-motions to be experienced, because the fortune we have to be such complex beings. These e-motions are designed to give us information about the environment and how to respond, they are filters to that help us to apply our own rules to govern our living. After all, every lifeform is and always has been responsible firstly for itself.
If something in the environment triggers fear, the e-motion of fear kicks my system into response mode to get energy moving in the direction of safety. I contract away from the stressor. If I am exposed to love, on the cellular level my body feels expansive and the cells in my body are able to take in nourishment easier, more readily as they are receiving the signal that everything is okay and they can repair, rebuild and evolve as Nature intends.
The information coming in must pass through the initial stages of emotional filtering to screen for immediate threat. If the environment is safe, then we can move on to more advanced filtering. This is actually seen in psychology when studying the developmental stages in a child. I cannot recall the exact research at the moment but we see as children develop into adults they require critical and foundational stabilizing platforms for additional growth to occur. If basic needs are not met, a child will never learn how to read or write. Their nervous system functions in these orders of processing, and no energy will be expended towards 'higher learning' if the first test of the nervous system is not passed. The nervous system, as part of our amazing biology, its job is to scan and pick out all the necessary information from the external environment to make a decision and it is doing this constantly. On micro levels with incredible speed, but also on a macro level in terms of developing our personalities.
We will call any experience that a person could have 'a happening'; within the realm of our current possibility, of course. With the 'trickle up' effect taking place, as received by through our senses by the energetic aspect of us (known as the nervous system), we end up having various feelings about 'the happening' that took place. If we re-act to these emotions, they end up molding and shifting 'the happening' into an event that is similar to recent ones or memorable ones in our lives. The emotions are just there to feel, but we have a very strong tendency to store memories about experiences with strong emotional attachment to them. This storage of memory served a purpose evolutionarily because it teaches us what to seek to survive and what to avoid to survive. Only if we don't pay attention it will hijack our present moment experience and shape it around past events.
This is how a personality is formed. We have experiences, we have feelings and thoughts about them, we store them, and then we develop proclivities to re-live events, characteristics, or patterns because we are attached to some and avoid others. It is just information filtering up through our orders of consciousness.
How is this all relevant? In a further post I will discuss these orders of consciousness in more detail but for now, we just pay attention to our own thoughts and feelings about things. Can we not cast judgment, so as to leave less of an imprint on our nervous system, giving it a bit more space to operate? Can we take note of our emotions but not re-act to them, giving us a chance to live a new life entirely since we did not re-act an old one out?
Friday, July 14, 2017
The Energy of Perception and Attention
It isn't exactly evident to our own senses, but they are energetic in nature. They (the senses) transmit electric signals via the nervous system to gather information from and respond to the environment. Our organs of sense perception (the eyes, ears, nose, mouth, skin corresponding to seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and feeling) are incredibly complex 'decoders' of 'reality'. These amazing things effortlessly filter the raw data in the observable Universe into something our consciousness can recognize. Supposedly the brain receives this data, categorizes and organizes it. Since it is the command center of our nervous system, hopefully equipped with good reconnaissance, it can 'create' a response that is beneficial for the survival and ultimate evolution of our species. Hopefully.
What if our recon taking abilities get compromised? What if what we 'see out there' is actually not what we are making it out to be, and the information coming in gets filtered through our own belief system?
Back up. You are saying that I filter reality through a personal lens? What does that mean? I am saying that depending on what we choose to believe, the world appears as such. It all boils down to perception, like in the study that demonstrated this wonderfully. They took a group of volunteers and had them fill out a survey rating their levels of satisfaction with different areas of their life. On a scale of 1-10 how satisfied are you with career, relationships, domestic life, etc. The experimenters then divided the group into sub-groups A) largely satisfied with life, and B) largely unsatisfied with life. They went on to show them images on a screen while hooked up to retinal tracking technology, so that the scientists would have a 'heat map' of where they focused their eyes when looking at the screen with the image on it. Basically, they could see exactly what the person was looking at - which is super cool, because most of the time as we look out at things, we are scanning little points in an extremely rapid fashion and making a 'connect the dot' picture in our head. Fascinating.
Anyways, so group A looked a picture of a mall and a battle scene. Group B looked at the exact same image. After studying them for a short time, the group was asked to report on what was seen. Group A saw the people holding hands, the mom hugging her infant in the mall image. Group B said they saw the caution wet floor sign. In the battle scene, similar results. The largely satisfied with life participants saw a medic tending to a wounded, a man covering for his friend. The unhappy people saw a man getting shot.
What is the significance of this? The biggest takeaway here is that the experiences we place our attention on, become real to us. Once we have a thought and interpretation of them, the information has crystallized upstream into a thought as a neuropeptide, being filtered through all of the possible emotional lenses that influence our decision to act, or not act. Run or numb. The activities of our sympathetic nervous system.
Now obviously the emotions we have play a significant biological benefit when they work to our advantage. It's a no brainer that stress kills, and stress is an emotional re-action to an experience. That's all. If we notice something positive and allow ourselves to actually feel good about it, such as experiencing joy when seeing a beautiful sunset, we are celebrating on a physiological level right down to the cells that make up our body. This has a system wide affect on our whole being. Of course it does.
So going back to what we 'see' and how it is filtered down so we can respond appropriately. The human being and the human nervous system is so awesomely complex at decoding information in this quantum soup of unmanifest probability that we are all in (more on this to come), that even the best supercomputer today cannot do the level of calculation that a human brain can. We are collecting so much data while simultaneously comparing it to every other experience we've had with blinding speed. The system gets backlogged when this information gets caught in the firewall. This metaphorical firewall is the bridge between our inner system, and the outer system. It is the nervous system, with the brain as its central processing unit.
This nervous system has evolved over millions of years. Many countless iterations of Mother Nature's great attempts at really nailing it have gone into the making of this thing that animates your body. So it is really good at doing it's job. But it is influenced by something.
What is that thing? As if Mother Nature Herself is the spirit behind the material representation of Her as a human being... She is the One watching the information come into the senses. She is watching as the brain compiles it and spits out a response. She is able to make a very subtle, usually too subtle, influence over the decision before it is made, but often She is overheard, and the material body carries out its script. The script written by the nervous system - the cataloguer of experiences.
Ever been driving and got to a familiar destination and wondered how you ended up there? Or picked up a phone to call a friend (back when we punched in the numbers on a landline) and remembered the phone number automatically? These are examples of the nervous system gathering data enough times it can write a script that is like a 'plug and play'. If the situation looks similar to one previously, we already have a code for it and can place our attention elsewhere. Where does the attention go? Into thought. Dream land. The subtle world where things can be imagined without ever having 'existed' in material form. It can also go to worry world, where it is creating plans for future experiences as a result of having a previous experience that was not liked. Essentially it is the same as dream land - because we worry about things that have not happened and fabricate a reality in our mind to project into existence if the event takes place. We are trying to solve problems in the future that we create before they actually 'exist'.
If we don't pay attention to how these scripts are written, we end up writing them all over the place. Our nervous system is good at it - that's its job and its done a damn fine one for many, many years. They are written for us at a young age because we can't possibly know any better - we are a blank slate nervous system making a bajillion connections a minute as an infant and struggling to comprehend the creational onslaught of reality. Yet as we age, the patterns become fixed and layered on us. This is known as our personality. It can also be seen physically, in one's posture. How we hold ourselves in space influences everything about our physiology, ranging from neuronal output to hormonal secretions. Which certainly, most definitely play a role in our moods and emotional proclivities, even down to our likes and dislikes. Sounds like personality, no? So personality is just the range of a person's potential expressions, the probability of which can be seen in their posture.
Our posture is influenced over years of specific behavior patterns. Think about a person who has experienced many years of depression. Their mood will inevitably cause them to contract into a slouched, rounded shoulder posture. A naturally protective posture, due to the signals coming from the environment that the world is a depressing place. But who is home to pick up the message from the environment before responding to it? If no one is home, the voicemail is spit out, and everything looks and remains the same. Because it is - according to the consciousness of the observer. Their attention is simply misplaced.
Remember, what we place our attention on grows stronger for us. Our physiology shifts when having a thought and a feeling. If we place our attention on things that are not serving us, we send the signal to our cells and our tissues to respond accordingly. In this case if it is harmful, we produce cellular responses that are geared towards survival. Maybe some adrenaline is secreted. Who knows. What I do know is this - our body responds to perceived threat as if it is real threat. We have to and have had to for eons, in order to survive as a species.
Yet our species has reached a level of self-awareness that we can notice and direct our attention. We can consciously change our posture, or our breathing pattern. We can connect to deeper and deeper levels of ourselves through these layers that consciousness works through. It is in us, as us. We just have to pay attention to it. What do we pay attention to? Who is looking. Who is receiving the feed from the 'outer world' and playing it back to the 'inner world'? Are they getting in the way at all?
What if our recon taking abilities get compromised? What if what we 'see out there' is actually not what we are making it out to be, and the information coming in gets filtered through our own belief system?
Back up. You are saying that I filter reality through a personal lens? What does that mean? I am saying that depending on what we choose to believe, the world appears as such. It all boils down to perception, like in the study that demonstrated this wonderfully. They took a group of volunteers and had them fill out a survey rating their levels of satisfaction with different areas of their life. On a scale of 1-10 how satisfied are you with career, relationships, domestic life, etc. The experimenters then divided the group into sub-groups A) largely satisfied with life, and B) largely unsatisfied with life. They went on to show them images on a screen while hooked up to retinal tracking technology, so that the scientists would have a 'heat map' of where they focused their eyes when looking at the screen with the image on it. Basically, they could see exactly what the person was looking at - which is super cool, because most of the time as we look out at things, we are scanning little points in an extremely rapid fashion and making a 'connect the dot' picture in our head. Fascinating.
Anyways, so group A looked a picture of a mall and a battle scene. Group B looked at the exact same image. After studying them for a short time, the group was asked to report on what was seen. Group A saw the people holding hands, the mom hugging her infant in the mall image. Group B said they saw the caution wet floor sign. In the battle scene, similar results. The largely satisfied with life participants saw a medic tending to a wounded, a man covering for his friend. The unhappy people saw a man getting shot.
What is the significance of this? The biggest takeaway here is that the experiences we place our attention on, become real to us. Once we have a thought and interpretation of them, the information has crystallized upstream into a thought as a neuropeptide, being filtered through all of the possible emotional lenses that influence our decision to act, or not act. Run or numb. The activities of our sympathetic nervous system.
Now obviously the emotions we have play a significant biological benefit when they work to our advantage. It's a no brainer that stress kills, and stress is an emotional re-action to an experience. That's all. If we notice something positive and allow ourselves to actually feel good about it, such as experiencing joy when seeing a beautiful sunset, we are celebrating on a physiological level right down to the cells that make up our body. This has a system wide affect on our whole being. Of course it does.
So going back to what we 'see' and how it is filtered down so we can respond appropriately. The human being and the human nervous system is so awesomely complex at decoding information in this quantum soup of unmanifest probability that we are all in (more on this to come), that even the best supercomputer today cannot do the level of calculation that a human brain can. We are collecting so much data while simultaneously comparing it to every other experience we've had with blinding speed. The system gets backlogged when this information gets caught in the firewall. This metaphorical firewall is the bridge between our inner system, and the outer system. It is the nervous system, with the brain as its central processing unit.
This nervous system has evolved over millions of years. Many countless iterations of Mother Nature's great attempts at really nailing it have gone into the making of this thing that animates your body. So it is really good at doing it's job. But it is influenced by something.
What is that thing? As if Mother Nature Herself is the spirit behind the material representation of Her as a human being... She is the One watching the information come into the senses. She is watching as the brain compiles it and spits out a response. She is able to make a very subtle, usually too subtle, influence over the decision before it is made, but often She is overheard, and the material body carries out its script. The script written by the nervous system - the cataloguer of experiences.
Ever been driving and got to a familiar destination and wondered how you ended up there? Or picked up a phone to call a friend (back when we punched in the numbers on a landline) and remembered the phone number automatically? These are examples of the nervous system gathering data enough times it can write a script that is like a 'plug and play'. If the situation looks similar to one previously, we already have a code for it and can place our attention elsewhere. Where does the attention go? Into thought. Dream land. The subtle world where things can be imagined without ever having 'existed' in material form. It can also go to worry world, where it is creating plans for future experiences as a result of having a previous experience that was not liked. Essentially it is the same as dream land - because we worry about things that have not happened and fabricate a reality in our mind to project into existence if the event takes place. We are trying to solve problems in the future that we create before they actually 'exist'.
If we don't pay attention to how these scripts are written, we end up writing them all over the place. Our nervous system is good at it - that's its job and its done a damn fine one for many, many years. They are written for us at a young age because we can't possibly know any better - we are a blank slate nervous system making a bajillion connections a minute as an infant and struggling to comprehend the creational onslaught of reality. Yet as we age, the patterns become fixed and layered on us. This is known as our personality. It can also be seen physically, in one's posture. How we hold ourselves in space influences everything about our physiology, ranging from neuronal output to hormonal secretions. Which certainly, most definitely play a role in our moods and emotional proclivities, even down to our likes and dislikes. Sounds like personality, no? So personality is just the range of a person's potential expressions, the probability of which can be seen in their posture.
Our posture is influenced over years of specific behavior patterns. Think about a person who has experienced many years of depression. Their mood will inevitably cause them to contract into a slouched, rounded shoulder posture. A naturally protective posture, due to the signals coming from the environment that the world is a depressing place. But who is home to pick up the message from the environment before responding to it? If no one is home, the voicemail is spit out, and everything looks and remains the same. Because it is - according to the consciousness of the observer. Their attention is simply misplaced.
Remember, what we place our attention on grows stronger for us. Our physiology shifts when having a thought and a feeling. If we place our attention on things that are not serving us, we send the signal to our cells and our tissues to respond accordingly. In this case if it is harmful, we produce cellular responses that are geared towards survival. Maybe some adrenaline is secreted. Who knows. What I do know is this - our body responds to perceived threat as if it is real threat. We have to and have had to for eons, in order to survive as a species.
Yet our species has reached a level of self-awareness that we can notice and direct our attention. We can consciously change our posture, or our breathing pattern. We can connect to deeper and deeper levels of ourselves through these layers that consciousness works through. It is in us, as us. We just have to pay attention to it. What do we pay attention to? Who is looking. Who is receiving the feed from the 'outer world' and playing it back to the 'inner world'? Are they getting in the way at all?
Wednesday, July 12, 2017
What is Yoga?
What is Yoga?
I've been asking myself this question directly and indirectly since I began practicing the ancient arts of yoga, three years ago. Consciously and unconsciously, the layers of my awareness work the variables in the equation and tinker with the balancing system in my life to expand me into new levels of understanding. As comprehension dawns, its like I have arrived to a new place I've never been before, yet the familiarity of the territory provides a sense of recognition and re-membering. Re-membering what? That I've been here before? That this is something that has always been? That will always be? The more I practice, the more I realize that there was never anything missing, and that all these revelations come as a result of me letting go of something else that I once thought was real... Letting go of false illusions of self, identities and beliefs around which I have created my entire life. In a way it has been a self-destructive process - like I've packed up all my old belongings on a gasoline soaked wooden sailboat and flung a lit match onboard to watch as the whole thing became a glorious fireball. It has been scary, it has been challenging, but it has provided purpose. It has somehow felt right, amidst a large scattering of un-right feelings and thoughts. In fact even today, there is still an endless stream of these off-track thoughts and feelings - I think they are always arising in each of us. Off-track in a sense that if we pay close attention to them, they are really not things we want to think about or necessarily feel. Who wants to experience the pain of judging or criticizing another? This is not something we put effort towards understanding - our own tendencies to create suffering for ourselves in our own mind. Yoga allows for the effort to fall away and the realization to simply arise, so that there is no more resistance. Yoga and the related practices allow an individual to come to terms with the contents of their own mind, and understand how it is this strange but obvious immaterial 'thing' called mind that affects every aspect of our lives.
So, what is yoga? Yoga means union. Which means what? Union with what? Classically, it is union with everything, for everything is interconnected - everything is absolute awareness in different stages of consciousness development. In quantum physics we explain this as energy, arising in different material forms. All that exists in the physical, manifest Universe is in a wave like, probabilistic state, expressed into material form at the state of observation. All matter is both in a wave and particle state of existence simultaneously until a picture is taken. The underlying nature of this reality is the energy that is purely a wave. Energy = awareness, and as the energy transforms to become a solid, observable object in order to interact with other solid objects, it develops something akin to consciousness. This consciousness is the intelligent force that drives the matter to behave in certain ways. A hydrogen atom has the consciousness of a hydrogen atom, meaning that it contains within it an organizing force, an intelligence, to direct its wave-like nature into its definite particle reality once it is needed by the Universe to take part in Creation. All things are related in this manner, for all things that manifest are required by the rest of manifestation to continue their development towards total refinement of consciousness; to the point that consciousness becomes absolutely reflective of awareness itself.
Let's circle back. Yoga just means union. Union with what? Union with whatever the observer choose to unite with. Inevitably, as the understanding of this relationship grows - that we can unite with whatever we choose to unite with - the yogi wants to unite with the highest possible thing. Which is what?! Well - whatever we think is the highest! See, what I love here is that there is no limit, no boundary, and no definition. There cannot be. For what if a practitioner feels that they have a better idea about what to unite with, or what is the 'highest'? Well, go for it. Krishnamurti said "the truth is a pathless land". Yoga allow us to determine our own truth, tread our own path, and create our own reality. And creating our own reality in a very, very real sense, for it depends on the state of the observer and what we choose to observe, for the observation to take place. Patanjali said "same object, different consciousness, separate path". What he means is that life is always going to be life - its is the same external object. Depending on the person alive's consciousness, a separate path will unfold. What path do you choose to walk? Could you change it if you didn't like something about it? Of course you can - you are the Creator. It's spiritual. It's natural. It's science. It's religion. And while being all of these things, it is none of these things. It is yoga. Union with the best possible thing you can imagine.
I've been asking myself this question directly and indirectly since I began practicing the ancient arts of yoga, three years ago. Consciously and unconsciously, the layers of my awareness work the variables in the equation and tinker with the balancing system in my life to expand me into new levels of understanding. As comprehension dawns, its like I have arrived to a new place I've never been before, yet the familiarity of the territory provides a sense of recognition and re-membering. Re-membering what? That I've been here before? That this is something that has always been? That will always be? The more I practice, the more I realize that there was never anything missing, and that all these revelations come as a result of me letting go of something else that I once thought was real... Letting go of false illusions of self, identities and beliefs around which I have created my entire life. In a way it has been a self-destructive process - like I've packed up all my old belongings on a gasoline soaked wooden sailboat and flung a lit match onboard to watch as the whole thing became a glorious fireball. It has been scary, it has been challenging, but it has provided purpose. It has somehow felt right, amidst a large scattering of un-right feelings and thoughts. In fact even today, there is still an endless stream of these off-track thoughts and feelings - I think they are always arising in each of us. Off-track in a sense that if we pay close attention to them, they are really not things we want to think about or necessarily feel. Who wants to experience the pain of judging or criticizing another? This is not something we put effort towards understanding - our own tendencies to create suffering for ourselves in our own mind. Yoga allows for the effort to fall away and the realization to simply arise, so that there is no more resistance. Yoga and the related practices allow an individual to come to terms with the contents of their own mind, and understand how it is this strange but obvious immaterial 'thing' called mind that affects every aspect of our lives.
So, what is yoga? Yoga means union. Which means what? Union with what? Classically, it is union with everything, for everything is interconnected - everything is absolute awareness in different stages of consciousness development. In quantum physics we explain this as energy, arising in different material forms. All that exists in the physical, manifest Universe is in a wave like, probabilistic state, expressed into material form at the state of observation. All matter is both in a wave and particle state of existence simultaneously until a picture is taken. The underlying nature of this reality is the energy that is purely a wave. Energy = awareness, and as the energy transforms to become a solid, observable object in order to interact with other solid objects, it develops something akin to consciousness. This consciousness is the intelligent force that drives the matter to behave in certain ways. A hydrogen atom has the consciousness of a hydrogen atom, meaning that it contains within it an organizing force, an intelligence, to direct its wave-like nature into its definite particle reality once it is needed by the Universe to take part in Creation. All things are related in this manner, for all things that manifest are required by the rest of manifestation to continue their development towards total refinement of consciousness; to the point that consciousness becomes absolutely reflective of awareness itself.
Let's circle back. Yoga just means union. Union with what? Union with whatever the observer choose to unite with. Inevitably, as the understanding of this relationship grows - that we can unite with whatever we choose to unite with - the yogi wants to unite with the highest possible thing. Which is what?! Well - whatever we think is the highest! See, what I love here is that there is no limit, no boundary, and no definition. There cannot be. For what if a practitioner feels that they have a better idea about what to unite with, or what is the 'highest'? Well, go for it. Krishnamurti said "the truth is a pathless land". Yoga allow us to determine our own truth, tread our own path, and create our own reality. And creating our own reality in a very, very real sense, for it depends on the state of the observer and what we choose to observe, for the observation to take place. Patanjali said "same object, different consciousness, separate path". What he means is that life is always going to be life - its is the same external object. Depending on the person alive's consciousness, a separate path will unfold. What path do you choose to walk? Could you change it if you didn't like something about it? Of course you can - you are the Creator. It's spiritual. It's natural. It's science. It's religion. And while being all of these things, it is none of these things. It is yoga. Union with the best possible thing you can imagine.
Saturday, July 1, 2017
The SHORT Stories of a Yogi (Parts 1-40)
I wrote all of these as a series for my IG account. What you see here is forty, short, short stories, capturing the journey into this land of yoga that I've found myself. Through this work, the reader will encounter the essence of what has driven me along and get a chance to see how my path has unfolded. Stay tuned for the book!
And without further ado...
Part ONE
What led you to shift from working for an insurance agency to what you're doing now. And describe what you're doing now in your own words?"
I was working in insurance directly out of college because after graduating in May 2012 I was still lost in my heart around what to do, and i just knew I had to start supporting myself so when I heard about a State Farm job fair, and mustered the courage to go. Put on a suit with a massive hole in the crotch that my dad bought offhand at an auction which certainly wasn't meant for someone who was squatting 6x a week and ended up getting an interview then job offer on the spot. Therein began my stint in the corporate world, pursuing my preconceived idea of success. Between then and the time that I finally left State Farm was almost three years and two promotions, moving into a leadership position and then into their bank to do mortgage consulting. During that time a few massive shifts occurred. One - I knew for sure that I didn't want to be in that environment for long, even though I had a great team, surrounded by great people and was pretty much grooming myself for higher leadership in terms of self-development and personal aspirations, I just felt something missing. I was so interested and fascinated by the so-called 'human condition' - how our bodies and minds work, how we came to be, what our purpose is, etc . These interests began with the grosser and more obvious dimensions of our existence such as general fitness (I was obsessed with how to get physically strong) then went deeper into subjects such as how nutrition affects our biology and the chemistry of the brain, neurobiology, and consciousness. I went so far as to purchase a medical physiology textbook and seriously considered leaving my career for medical school - which I sorta did, but life carried my in a different direction. About a year before my final departure from my career job, I somehow ended up in a yoga class, purchasing a month-long membership to a studio down the street from my house, not missing a single day ...
PART TWO
....... Carried on from my previous post : After practicing yoga for almost a year, I was overcoming some self-imposed health issues I'd acquired from overly excessive heavy weightlifting. I was still lifting weights at this time; I had the idea that yoga would help me not only gain flexibility (so I could become a better weightlifter) but that I would be able to recover a bit. After I entered the studio 9 months previously, I started practicing everyday, often twice a day, and literally never missed a practice since day one. I began living a double life - I fell totally in love with something that I could find on the mat that was missing from my weightlifting routine, but I still continued to train hard in the gym. The yoga allowed me to balance my nervous system so that I could continue to push myself physically. The double life was such that I had this love affair with yoga growing in its honeymoon phase, whilst trying to salvage the marriage I had with weightlifting that was falling apart. Interestingly, it was as if the weightlifting and corporate identities were intermixed - versions of myself that I had created and supported due to what I thought was my path to fulfillment. I was perplexed because I was discovering I was not those things - through yoga. After one very memorable practice, at the end in meditation, I was practically given precise instructions on what my next step in life was. Call it whatever you want, I just know that I stepped out of the studio that night and gradually initiated a course of action that would completely change my life. I had no idea where it would take me but I knew it was the right direction. To make a long story short - I ended up quitting soon after (May '15), traveling to Costa Rica on a solo backpacking adventure that would land me at an off grid retreat center in the jungle where i practiced and studied yoga all day for a month and returned to the States with a 200hr certification to teach...
Part THREE
It was August of 2015 when I returned home from my jungle adventure, complete with a license to teach yoga (what does a certification mean anyways? It's just a piece of paper - we can only 'teach' from our level of experience), I had no idea what I was going to do to support myself . Luckily I had saved up enough cash from working to cover my living expenses at least for a little while, as I began the process of re-creating myself. Who was I? What did I want to do? I was determined (at the time) to pursue the medical school route, as I had my eye on naturopathic medicine and felt that this was the highest form of service to others I could achieve. So I was taking the pre-requisites for med school at a community college because apparently an undergrad in Business Administration wasn't going to cut it for my admission (weird). It was okay because I was excited to be there - learning has always been fun, despite the fact that I'm sure at least a few of my teenage classmates thought of I was some loser who didn't make it in 'real life'. My life became mostly yoga with a bit of school mixed in, and shortly after coming back I was asked to teach two yoga classes a week at a boxing/ MMA fitness gym. It seemed too good to be true and I leapt at the offer, even though we were in an small, old wrestling room sandwiched in between the group boxing classes going on behind a thin door next to us and music blasting through the opposite wall. It didn't matter to me that I only had one student and sometimes none at all, I just kept showing up, and life kept opening doors to me....
I had nearly completed the pre-reqs necessary for my admission to the Southwest College of Naturopathic Medicine and was teaching/ practicing yoga full time by December 2015. My job at the boxing gym ended around the same time that I was presented with the opportunity to teach at two new studio spaces in a Chandler close to home. Just writing this and reflecting, I am so grateful for all of these chances for my development in the yoga community, as it is so clear that I owe everything to these people for their support and faith in me. I've had such great teachers (yes - you), and I want to just say... Thank you! Anyways... As I grew into this new role, I was procrastinating the next semester of my enrollment for classes. Apparently, organic chemistry appeared less sexy than teaching yoga to me at the time. Looking back, I had left one or several attachments behind, only to create and strengthen a new one. I was becoming a hardcore yogi, as hardcore as I was as a weightlifter. In essence, I swapped one drug for another, but the spiritual ego I was developing had put the blinders on, so I wasn't able to see what I was doing. In hindsight, I think it was just a massive pendulum swing in the opposite direction, and it was totally necessary for the next leg of my journey...
Part FOUR
After procrastinating my enrollment for the next semester of pre-reqs before naturopath school, I finally made the decision that I knew in my heart was true . I wasn't going to go to school just yet - I had to pursue this thing called yoga. I was discovering more and more that the only way to heal anyone was to heal myself. The ability to channel love inwardly is paradoxically the only way an outer expression of true love, divine love, can occur. I decided to commit myself full time to yoga as an occupation, as a lifestyle. Before this it was an intense passion, an incredible love affair. By January 2016 it had become a way of life. To me, it felt like the choice had already been made to forgo school and throw myself into my practice and teaching, so when it happened it was another massive let go. I had become attached just to the idea of becoming a doctor and healing others so deciding to veer off on my own once again and quit everything to follow my heart was another one of those massive 'let gos' where suddenly everything just seems so right. I just had to trust that the tiny whispering voice in my heart wouldn't lead me astray. It hasn't so far, but back then I was still learning to trust it after armoring myself away from my feelings for so long. Taking the six inch drop from the head to the heart is f-ing scary - we are so used to living in our heads and using our imaginations to portray the story of our lives, how we think they should go. But it's only when the heart comes out to play that we begin the process of falling in love with the mysteries of life, and not the defined, prefabricated paths influenced by our human condition....
Part FIVE
Shortly after my decision to opt out of school, again moving away from something that I (at one point) 'knew' was right for me, life opened its doors for me. I was contacted by one of my original teachers, @lizlindh at @thesanctuaryattworivers , and presented with the opportunity to return to the Costa Rican jungle. I was asked to be a guest teacher for her yoga teacher training retreat program, tasked with creating and presenting on the anatomy curriculum for 200 hour student YTT'ers. Had I been in school, two weeks of travel for this in April and May might have been impossible..... Anatomy and understanding the human bodymind complex was and always has been an intense passion of mine, having spent years in my own study and being fascinated by it all. I was ecstatic for the opportunity; humbled and so grateful to share my experiences with the yoga world whilst early on in my journey. With my background in weightlifting and fitness coaching, it seemed too good to be true... For me to be combining fields of interest with my intense love for yoga, it felt like I had been preparing my whole life for this...
Part SIX
Between January 2016 and April 2016 I became more intensely devoted than ever to my own personal practice, making time to practice 5+ hours a day. I knew that if I was to deliver something of value not only to my current students, but soon to people who were going to go on and become teachers of yoga in the world, I had to do the work myself. I was simply committed to bringing the best version of myself and it fueled and motivated me in the same way I'd found in previous lives. As I've mentioned, it became one drug replaced with another - I'd swapped steel chains for golden ones, yet I was still bound by some desire to 'prove' something. It appeared that I was committed to find something that was apparently lost. This feeling of absence certainly contributed to my discipline in seeking, and my willingness to search. I was filled with an intense longing to discover - replacing my incessant childlike curiosity and wonder towards the world with a now 'matured' but imbalanced quest for purpose in life. Teaching was going great, and my journey back to Costa Rica was approaching; it seemed like everything was going right, yet I was still having moments of feeling more lost than ever....
Part SEVEN
By the end of April 2016, I made it through my first round of teaching teachers. I still had only been in the position as a yoga teacher for less than a year, and despite my preparations and practice, I felt inadequate. The silly thing is I knew I had given it my best, but I couldn't shake the feeling of unease. Why was I feeling this way? Was I being inauthentic? Was yoga really my 'thing'? I was being torn in half because it seemed like I had left everything behind on more than one occasion to pursue what I felt was true for me, and was still experiencing this dissonance. I appeared happy externally, but underneath the surface a lot was going on. My practice did so much to allow me the introspection to really look under the hood and question my motives and behaviors but it was hardly helpful at answering the deepest questions. My search for God as if He was missing from my ordinary life was perhaps the key factor in all this strife. Due to this, I was creating separation from myself and others while paradoxically knowing my fundamental purpose was to give, love, and serve. I hadn't fully realized it at the time, but looking back, my condition was obvious. I just had to let go of the idea I needed to find something that was absent....
Part EIGHT
In May 2016 I made my third trip to Costa Rica; it was my second round of sharing on the topic of anatomy to yoga teachers in training at @thesanctuaryattworivers . I felt major inner alchemy and changes happening within myself from each trip out to the jungle and back to the States, as if the purity and seclusion of being in the perfection of a natural environment did something to wash away any misperceptions I'd fabricated inside. I decided I was going to take advantage of this internal scrub down, and have my own mini retreat. I planned to spend an extra two weeks away from any teaching responsibilities and arranged to be gone for three weeks this time. The first week I'd spend at the Sanctuary to teach, but then two additional weeks I would find some quiet beach on the Caribbean coast, practice lots of yoga, and focus on stepping outside of my mind for a bit to truly see myself as I was. The week of teaching went well, very well - much better than last time - which I attribute to removing the pretense that I was there to prove anything and allowing a more ordinary relationship to develop between myself and the students. I felt a big shift had occurred and was occurring. Afterwards, I set out to backpack the coast and although I felt really good about everything that was happening, there was an underlying sense of unease I couldn't shake. I think I started to finally have an objective lens about this thing called yoga and my role in it as student and teacher. I saw that the same dichotomy and polarity that was created in social institutions was being played out by myself. Although I sought to avoid and liberate myself from the separation caused by our social conditioning, I was contributing to the mess. I felt that I was just as responsible for creating separation in the spiritual realm with yoga, as religion had been for ages in our cultures. Again, the search for God or 'liberation' or 'enlightenment' as if it was missing from mine or others lives was contributing to a power struggle wherein I was a perpetrator. The ideas that I had to achieve some sort of 'mastery' in yoga or that others needed to follow in my footsteps to find something that was apparently was lost, was bullshit. It seemed that something that was once so true for me was rapidly disappearing into an illusion that left me scared and confused. I was on the road in Central America with just a backpack on my back and more lost than ever when decided I wasn't returning home...
Part NINE
I had made it to Panama and was scheduled to be on a shuttle back to Costa Rica so I could fly home by June 2016 when I canceled my return flight and ditched the shuttle. I was laying on a beach in a speedo when the decision was made for me. Call it divine ordinance, a cosmic download, or just some
cry heard from the depths of my being; I heard in my heart a voice say "I'm not going home." Right then and there I knew it was true, but as soon as the thinking mind began his favorite job of interpreting and distorting the truth to suit his selfish motives, I started to question myself. But - I had teaching jobs back home! But - my students! But - my friends and family! But - my house payment, car insurance, bills... Blah blah, the mind went on to list all the reasons why I couldn't do what the heart had already chosen. With help from an angel, I managed to squash all this psychological noise and free myself of the drama I was creating. It was incredibly liberating, and the expansiveness I felt began dissolving the unease I was feeling. Of course at this point, making the decision to remove myself from any social responsibilities that I had accrued in my life brought with it a terrible fear that I was quitting on life AGAIN (it seemed to be a recurring pattern), but I knew I was on the right track. With no idea where I was going and what appeared to be a long journey ahead of me, I set sail on a seemingly endless voyage into an ocean of mystery with one overwhelming desire, filling my sails with its eternal wind...
Part TEN
I sent messages to everyone back home letting them know I'd be gone. For how long? I didn't know, so I left out details... Just a simple message to my loved ones and studio owners back home that I'd be away for awhile. Of course I started with the mental mapping of what I was actually going to do; the mind is amazing at creating a detailed story about our future. Usually we end up acting out this story, whether or not it's what we truly want to do. The tough thing is realizing that it's not often that this part of our mind is taking into account the greater good of everything, as it is driven by motives of self preservation. How else have we survived over millions of years? Sometimes we tap into the gaps between our thoughts, where true inspiration lies. The kind of inspiration that motivates us to create a more beautiful world for ourselves, and others. Not the conditioning of our psyche, which would have us repeating the same behaviors for the sake of familiarity, but something undefined and outside the ordinary box we create for ourselves. I feel incredibly fortunate for the God given opportunity to have cast myself outside of this box in a far away environment where there was no choice but to see things differently . Even though I was starting to develop a sliver of clarity about what I was doing, it would have been easy to return to my old ways and come back into the space of dissonance I was experiencing before leaving for Costa Rica. I didn't want that. Not for myself, not for others. I had become incredibly selfish in my pursuit of one thing and paradoxically had to take that selfishness to the extreme to find out what I was actually after, after all....
PART ELEVEN
.... By June 2016 I had found myself staying at a hostel on a small tropical island off the coast of Panama. I was living out of a backpack that was only packed for several weeks in a single location and didn't know what my next destination was. I remained devoted to my own practice and meditation, asking for the guidance and courage to continue to wherever it was I would be asked to go. It seems that when life is happening we forget to be devoted to ourselves so whilst alone and abroad it was easy for me to realize the importance my practice played in my life. It was also liberating because before this, it seemed at least partially that my practice was somehow about achieving something, getting somewhere, or doing it for others as a result of my egoic desire to prove something. At this point, practice was just something that I did. I just had to show up for myself. What else was I going to do? It took on a whole new meaning, and consequently when I had the opportunity to teach donation yoga classes at my hostel I was ecstatic. The classes grew in size and had their own pulse and rhythm to them, just like the breath that breathes us. They were a celebration between myself and myself - seeing the students merely as reflections of myself and my own role as a teacher was simply to be myself. I was having fun again and the feeling like I was being inauthentic began to decay. I collected enough in tips to support my cheap lifestyle; most days it paid for my dorm stay and lunch. It helped that I could forage mangos and coconuts 
so with my newfound freedom yet the absence of a plan, I was determined to explore the world according to the flow of energy that fueled me. As long as it felt right, I could just 'go with the flow', as they say. Where would I end up...?
Part TWELVE
.... This surrender into the flow led me to couchsurf with a very generous and kind local Panamanian I had met until it carried me onward... and inward, towards the mountains. I think I had spent about 4 weeks on the Caribbean coast and the cool air of Boquete, Panama called to me. I arrived sometime around late June, found another beautiful a cheap hostel to stay at after wandering around the town for a bit. It was gorgeous! I had a nice open expanse of grass by a flowing creek I could practice on and a diverse group of open backpackers to connect with. I spoke with the owner and donation yoga classes sprung up once again. Life continued to support me in the form of different people and places. I still couldn't figure out what exactly I was doing or where this would all take me, but I started to realize that I don't think we are supposed to know so I just gave up trying. As long as I kept showing up, life appeared to give me everything I could ask for, because ironically all that we really want is to stop wanting. By just being present, the desires and aspirations disappeared and the gift of simply being alive was readily available. Abundantly and infinitely available, in fact. At first, everything was alright, but even abroad and beyond any influential events or major triggers, the story of how I needed to 'do something' kept reemerging. What was I to prove with only two pairs of pants, several tank tops and no underwear, or socks? I continued to surrender to the divine mystery that appeared to look a lot like 'life living me' instead of 'me living life', only looking back I believe they are the same thing. It just takes the willingness of giving up our limited idea of what we want life to look like so that we can relax into the beauty and perfection that it already is...
Part THIRTEEN
.... I was getting frustrated at myself for feeling lost again. I was in this perfect environment, beautiful mountain village in Panama, practicing and teaching yoga daily, and the initial expansiveness and liberation that I'd felt upon first deciding to travel were drying up. I asked and prayed for guidance in my morning meditations. A repeating mantra I kept with me became strong - "I am divinely guided and protected. I have all that I need. All that I need to know is revealed to me." I began creating a plan to move on, even though I hadn't received any direct communication or felt the flow pull me onward. My plan was to head south, eventually making my way into Colombia where I'd practice more Spanish and then travel on through South America. It's amazing what we can dream up. Through my impatience I merely missed the sign for my true next destination....
Part FOURTEEN
... An adorable Indian girl came up to me after one of my yoga classes one morning. She was a volunteer at the hostel I was staying at. Her name was Nidhi, and she bubbled about how great the class and my teaching was. It's hard not to let those sort of things bring a sense of swell; I was simply having so much fun teaching and sharing my practice at that point. I thanked her. We probably hugged. Little did I know, her next words were one of the biggest challenges I would face. "You must go to India." I laughed. I've realized that I often smile and/or laugh as a distraction to myself, preventing me from taking things too seriously. She repeated "no - you NEED to go to India!" I knew in my heart her words were true - it was like they formed themselves into the fist of God and hammered at the gates of my soul. I resisted it at first as the storm of truth swept through and tore down the house of dreams I had dreamt of my adventures through South America. Resistance to the flow had become painful as trusting the energy was rapidly transforming me. When she returned that night with her laptop and told me that her volunteer work exchange stay was ending in two weeks and she had to return home TO INDIA so she had to purchase plane tickets, it was like the Universe had practically rolled out a red carpet to me. She even said she would speak to her parents about me staying with them and could pick me up from the airport. As she handed me her laptop to purchase my ticket, I was asked once again to give up my plan in favor of Life's plan; to surrender myself to God's will, the Universal will that was responsible for all of Creation....
Part FIFTEEN
... I bought a one way ticket to India from Panama in July 2016. I had only been gone from home for two months but it felt like long time. The next leg of life's journey was looking even longer, but I was determined. Determined for what? To discover what this yoga thing really meant to me; to find out what exactly it was that was sweeping me along on an apparently infinite current. There seemed to be a willingness driving me forward and moments of resistance were painful. Funny - because then I realized after purchasing my ticket that I needed a visa to enter the country, so I breathed a (false) sigh of relief as I quickly canceled my flight for a full refund before the 24 hour window. I let Nidhi know, my Indian friend who was to pick me up from the airport, and she sympathized with me. For some reason I didn't feel any better about it. So I went down into the small mountain town of Boquete's post office and did some searching online. I tried figuring out a way to get my passport mailed to the visa office in the States and get a 6 month tourist visa approved. Wouldn't work - had to be in my native country to do that. Again, it seemed like the greater plan was falling apart, but I just knew there was a way. By chance I found a link to a recent form called the ETV on the India government website. An E-tourist visa. I could apply online and pay a fee and they would grant me 30 of conditional access if approved. Thirty days! I was going to fly half way across the world to a country where I felt like a search of indeterminable length was pulling me and I could only spend a few weeks there. Then I realized if thirty days was all I was going to get, that that was all I needed, so I submitted my online application and waited...
Part SIXTEEN....
... It was the middle of July 2016, I was still loving it in Panama, and my e-tourist visa was approved for a thirty day visit to India. I purchased another one way ticket, only this time I decided I would fly to the Northern part of the country. When I first made the decision to go, before all the stumbling blocks, I arranged to fly in to the South so that I could accept the aid of my friend Nidhi. With only
thirty days I instead planned to beeline my way to Rishikesh in the north, an ancient city at the base of the Himalayan foothills known for its roots in classical yoga. I think I actually read somewhere on the internet that it was known as the yoga capital of the world so of course I had to go. Wasn't I after authentic yoga? Surely it had to be there. I pictured some stereotypical Indian guru in a Himalayan cave with a beard and a robe and me sitting on a cushion before him. I am being somewhat serious. So I ended up taking a bus from the mountains to Panama City where I would fly out and make the two day journey through three airports to make it to the sacred land known as Mother India. A land of magic and Mystics, spirituality and worship, the occult and orient, and many many stinky cows....
Part SEVENTEEN.
.... Before my trip to India, I was bombarded with messages of warning and caution from friends and family. I was told to be careful . I felt loved and supported but also had this strange suspicion that no one really knew what they were talking about. Maybe I just appear to lack intelligence or common sense... It certainly might have looked that way if anyone was following my journey up until that point! Panama to India, what a wise decision... Then when my good friend sent me the six message of caution I actually responded to him, asking what I needed to worry about. He basically said it would be easy to get lost and find myself taken advantage of. Okay, pretty basic. Then when he found out I was flying into New Delhi in the north, he asked me to get in touch with a personal friend of his who happened to live there. Okay, cool. The Universe continued to support me its mysterious ways. I connected with his friend who graciously offered to host me for a few days as I got over jet lag and integrated myself into the Indian experience. Let me tell you, New Delhi is chaos. Cows walking in traffic, bicyclists pedaling towards you on the wrong side of the freeway towing a wide cartload of mangos, and people freely urinating on the sidewalk chaos. The sights the smells the land itself... Wow! This was something. It was a literally an assault to my senses after my quiet mountain village in Panama. Within two days I had already achieved the easy feat of acquiring diarrhea aka 'Dehi belly'. Since I flew in on Friday afternoon, I decided to stay the weekend with my host so I could contact the local embassy on Monday to see about extended my visa. It worked out as I was incredibly jet lagged and on the toilet every twenty minutes. Monday rolled around and I finally connect over landline with the embassy. After some difficulty I get someone on the line to help, explaining my 30 day e-tourist visa and hoping to apply or extend for a longer visit. Access not granted. With only 27 days left on my calendar I figure I make it as quickly as possible to Rishikesh as my final destination and use all of my time there on the quest for real yoga. Whatever that means....
Part EIGHTEEN
... I got the next bus out, northbound from New Delhi . I'd been in India for only three days and already had butt-pissed diarrhea probably thirty times. The embassy wouldn't let me stay in the country longer than my visa would allow (27 more days at that point), and I risked detainment and arrest if I overstayed my welcome. I didn't really care much about that because I was already in - but I didn't want to find myself permanently banned from the country, which was a possibility. Apparently, tourism wasn't their industry, as I also discovered at the bus station in my attempt to find the right bus. I started developing all sorts of schemes in my head about how I was going to stay in the country, or hop over to Nepal to renew my visa somehow and return, because I wanted to take my time exploring this smelly, chaotic but mystical and beautiful land. Even six months didn't seem long enough. How long would be I away from home for? Who knew at that point - I was on the other side of the globe with just a whispering wish in my heart burning a hole in my chest. As the bus bumped along towards the Himalayas, my stomach gurgled, my
head complained, but my heart sang. I was in the land of the real yogis practicing real yoga, having physically extricated myself from what I saw as a lost-in-translation version of truth. Using the telephone game, our Western world had turned what was once a way of life into exercise in a heated room, and I no longer wanted to contribute to this dilution. What was the true Spirit of Yoga? I had faith that my bus was headed to the heart of the matter - Rishikesh, the so-called yoga capital of the world....
Part NINETEEN
... I arrived to Rishikesh under the light of the full moon. It was an auspicious day for this pilgrimage that I appeared to be on, as it was also the Guru Purinma. Indians celebrate this special holiday by honoring all teachers - past, present, and future, but more importantly by recognizing the inner light that is our true Guru. Our North Star. Every human being has within them this amazing discerning faculty to ultimately determine what is right and what is wrong. All we must do is pay attention to the feeling in our heart, and trust that we 'know'. The difficult part is having the courage to act, as the thinking mind will easily sway us from what is right and true in favor of what is easy or fun. Its job is to ensure that life remains comfortable, but if everyone always did what was comfortable and familiar, the beauty of our creative abilities would lie under cover of our survival instinct. Being creative is being brave and having courage. We use the gift of our spiritual inheritance, which is this light that guides us, to step out and into something new. We do this often enough and we inspire ourselves. Through our own inspiration, the world appears as it is - beautiful, perfect. And all we want to do is contribute to its beauty in our own creative manner. We have feet to dance, a mouth to sing, and hands to illustrate. Our bodies are representations of creation and creative ability flows through us. It's only when we open our hearts to sing our song and not somebody else's that we begin to experience this ultimate joy. It is our birthright. We are born perfect and we forget our own perfection. Enlightenment isn't something we attain. It's something to remember. So I stepped off the bus into unfamiliar territory, my body shivering from the stomach cramps, and realized my phone listing all the places I planned to stay, had died....
Part TWENTY
.... It was late at night when I stepped off the bus into this unfamiliar place of Rishikesh, and I was feeling lost. I was comforted immensely by the glow of the full moon as I looked up and she smiled down upon me. My phone was dead, so that meant at least a temporary death to my plans. The addresses of the destinations I had planned ahead of time was locked inside a device that needed a wall socket to power up. See, when I first arrived jet lagged to India, I would wake up at 2 in the morning and ponder my journey ahead. I knew that making it to Rishikesh was a priority, for the ancient city contained many of the established ashrams of notable yogic lineage in all of India. An ashram was essentially a place of residence for spiritual aspirants, and are built around the truths and principles discovered by incredible scholars of the ageless science and technology of yoga. Amidst the darkness of night, awaiting the sun to climb his way into the morning, I would be searching the Internet on my phone for what (I thought) would be the best ashrams to visit. I paid attention to the lineage itself - who was the yogi who founded the ashram? Had he 'achieved' anything of 'worth'? Where would I find my so-called guru? The One who would bring light into darkness? (Gu means light, Ru means dark). I had faith that answers to these questions could be found once I arrived to the sacred city, and compiled a list on my phone's notepad of the most qualified locations to spend time at. My plan emerged as if created by a kid on a shopping spree in a toy store - excitedly throwing into the shopping cart everything of interest. Only this plan become obsolete when I stepped off the bus late that night, and I just needed to find a place to stay. ....
Part 21
... There was one last thing that I asked my incredibly hospitable and beautiful host before leaving to catch my bus from Delhi northbound towards the Himalayas. I don't know what prompted it, but her answer to my question happened to change the entire course of events in my life. As usual. Despite having a overbooked itinerary and only 27 numbered days to discover Rishikesh, I asked her what ashram I ought to visit in the city. She wrote the name and address on a slip of paper, which I looked at briefly before slipping into my pocket. Truthfully, I wasn't super interested, because like I said, I had already compiled my list of ashrams to stay. She did say they had daily yoga classes, which was a plus, and that it was cheap, also a plus, but I wanted... I don't know, something more? I've always trusted the locals in all my places of travel, and usually I just follow their confidence and allow myself to be guided in this way. I think some of our best lessons being abroad are found through this willingness to surrender to the greater organism of Life, and trust that if we open our heart to the world, the world will reveal herself to us in the form of a hidden path, a newly befriended stranger, or a destination that would have previously went undiscovered. The places that exist in our imagination, behind the familiar territory of rationality, appear before us as a fairytale come to life; reality is a dream come true only once we allow our ideas about the world to dissolve, so we can then see that the ideas we come up with in our heads are merely failed attempts to capture something that is infinite and beyond all thought...
Part 22
... I knew I must have looked lost but I was determined to put one foot in front of the other and trust that I would be guided in the right direction. I knew I'd have to ask for help at some point, which is another thing I love about being alone and abroad. Life is just not possible to live by ourselves, and experiencing the mutuality of existence is one of the many pleasures available to us when we give up our egoic desires to "go at it alone!" So when the Tuk-Tuk driver approached me from the shadows of the bus station to
ask if I needed a ride, I put my faith in this good human before me. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the scribbled note from my friend in Delhi and handed it to the man. He looked down at it, murmured something indiscernible, and paused. Maybe it was just for dramatic effect. Then he demanded a price as if it was already a done deal. Apparently this was the way they did business in India. I was too tired and still sick with diarrhea to argue, so I hopped in the back of what appeared to be the equivalent of a motorized lawnmower, and we set off. Rushing through crammed and dirty streets, I looked out at the passing flashes of people wearing orange and the various tea shops on the side of the road. Was it always this busy? I wondered. It must have been late as it had gotten dark hours ago and I was very exhausted. I had no desire to find a place to Charge my Phone so that I could actually end up at one of the more well known ashrams that were on 'my' plan. I just hoped that he would take me somewhere I could sleep for the night and practice in the morning. ...
Part 23
... The Tuk-tuk driver dropped me off in front of the dingy looking building somewhere in the middle of Rishikesh, right next to the great holy river known as the Mother Ganga. The chipping paint and the moss growing from all the rain made the sign out front seem less than new, but it matched the handwritten note so I figured it was where I was supposed to end up. I just hoped they had a bed to sleep in and a toilet to receive my watery bowels - I was still jet lagged after two+ days of travel, flying from Panama to India, and already had diarrhea. I was too exhausted to care that the place lacked the majesty I'd expected from a locally recommended ashrams. I paid my driver the nominal fee of 150 rupees (about 2 bucks) went in and found the inside as poorly maintained as the external. I think I was just experiencing my over-the-top Western standards about how public buildings should be kept. I'm glad I was unimpressed because the external appearance of things has a way of directly influencing our opinions about them and thus, changes the object itself and our interactions with it. If something fails to meet our preconceived expectations, we might be lucky enough to drop our guard and suddenly something really cool happens. Without the armoring of our conditioned perception, things appear as they are, which is real and perfect. My perception of the place I had stepped into was that it sucked and I was determined to leave as soon as possible, but as tired as I was, I paid for the night and collapsed onto the mat-on-a-board of a bed in my small room....
Part 24
... I awoke early and went downstairs to check the yoga schedule. The man at the front desk told me they had no classes as it was the low season. I was feeling pretty discouraged at this point by my experience so far in Rishikesh, so what could I do? Practice. Since it was still so early I couldn't get anywhere to check in somewhere else, so I just set out with my yoga mat and went searching for a clean, open expanse of grass or just some open space to practice in. The city was already waking up and people dressed in orange were marching through the streets. I had just stepped out the front door, and was already assaulted by stares from passerbys that I would quickly grow accustomed to, and walked like I knew where I was going. I didn't have an idea so I just turned left and began walking. For some reason there were (what seemed like) hundreds of people walking in the opposite direction, so I was going against the flow. This didn't help me get any less stares. I found out later it was a special holiday month that people from all over India would travel to Rishikesh for a month-long worship of their deity Shiva, called the Shiva Ratri. It was over a week before someone told me that the city wasn't usually filled with two million pilgrims wearing orange, and that this wasn't its standard chaos. I was relieved. Anyways, i was swimming up river that morning but apparently felt like I was headed in the right direction. I hadn't walked more than twenty feet and I saw a path leading out of the downstream current and up a hill, away from all the hustle and bustle. A sign hanging over the path hung like a holy broadcast. It just said "YOGA". I stepped off the street under the sign and started walking up hill....
Part 25
... The path was caged over the top and looked like some strange tunnel on the side of a hill. There were monkeys overhead, so I guess the cage must have been a good idea, but didn't stop their shit from being smeared all over the walkway. The noise and stares from the street down below fell away, so I didn't care, plus the sign out front promised "YOGA". I stepped over the crap and carried onward. It became a small climb and actually fatigued me a bit in my semi-dysenteric state, but eventually opened up to a beautiful vista with an open expanse of grass with a flower bed and a small security outpost. What! I couldn't believe my luck. The flow of the river Ganga was seen from the lawn and the smells and sounds from below were drowned by nature; birds, monkeys and the breeze in the trees was music to my ears. I approached the security guard and asked him where I'd found myself and he just pointed to a piece of paper taped to the wall. At the top it said 'Yoga Niketan Ashram' with a schedule posted underneath , starting with meditation at 5 am, which I missed, but a yoga class was starting in thirty minutes at 630 am. It wasn't one of the places I'd planned to attend and didn't appear in any of my research for quality ashrams in Rishikesh, but the unexpected beauty of my discovery of it left me enamored. When I asked if I could attend the yoga class, the security told me only residents were allowed, so I promised I would be back when the front desk opened at 8 am and promptly laid my mat down on the grass out front to practice. Afterwards I came back with my bags and checked in for the night. Even though I found what appeared to be a nicer place to land myself, I still had plans of my own and a list of places to go. Little did I know, I would end up at Yoga Niketan for longer expected....
Part 26
... I found myself seated across a sparse table in a cheap plastic chair with a light shining me directly in the face. Not a literal light, but a British guy with a shaved head who emanated such a radiance I nearly had to squint to look him in the eye. It was in our first eye to eye contact that I 'remembered' that this was why I had arrived to India. I say 'remembered' because meeting Steve felt like something that had already occurred. Or maybe I just allowed myself to experience the truth of the moment with such profundity that it shook me awake from a sleepwalk I was caught in. Either way, I knew Steve as if I'd known him my whole life and immediately felt that connection when we shared a cup of tea - my first chai of India. I commented on how sweet it was. He laughed, saying how the Indians definitely liked lots of sugar in their drinks. I told him that least there no caffeine. Yogis aren't supposed to consume that poison! He laughed again, "oh I'm sure there's plenty of that, too" punctuating his comment with a sugary, caffeinated sip. We both chuckled together at the irony of it. Or maybe we were laughing at different things. I guess it didn't matter. Being around Steve we were often smiling and laughing, as if life was one great comical play. Maybe it's just a cosmic drama in which find ourselves stuck and eventually realize that taking it too seriously was a way of discounting a miracle. Either way, I recognized in Steve that day a relationship I was already committed to. His utterly relaxed way of enjoying and participating in life, exactly as it was, was obvious. I had to find out more about this man yet already knew enough; my heart was telling me to go with him but my head had its plan of renewing my visa in Nepal and returning for another six months in India. I ended up staying a few days more than expected in the ashram to be closer to him, using the two daily sixty minute long meditation sessions to question the authenticity of this heartfelt sense of connection. I felt like I was reaching, or had reached, the end of this particular road I had found myself on...
Part 27
... I asked Steve to tell me the secrets. His characteristic smile and penetrating gaze reassured me I already knew them, but he told me to meet him in the meditation hall with a notebook. At that point I was at the ashram for several days longer than expected and just felt too much internal resistance to get up and travel onward to any of my other pre-planned destinations. There was nothing extraordinary about our first official student-teacher yoga practice together and I think that was exactly what made it so real to me. It is obvious now that it's totally obsolete, but back then I must have still been holding on to some bullshit idea that there needed to be a more classical or formal meeting for the transmission of true wisdom to occur. Whatever that means.....
Part 27.5
We sat down, he shared his practice in a matter of fact way, and that was it. No chanting. No obeisances. Nothing other than a human to human interaction speaking in our native language without emotion, judgment, belief, or any other variable to influence the flow. Part of this was facilitated by my own receptiveness but this was only possible through the reflection of Steve's casual and disarming nature. I listened while he spoke, and although the incredibly powerful techniques and practices that he shared and that I still do to this day, it was the way the information was transferred that the true revelations unfolded for me. I think in these early moments of my relationship to my teacher that I started seeing what I was looking for all along. After all, it's not that we want to rely upon someone else for the knowledge we hope to obtain in our lives. We might look for it there but the inevitable thing is that we must end up accepting it as ours and making it our own anyways. Whether or not it appears externally, it is always germinated and cultivated internally, with the eternal flow of love and the fertile soil of faith. This is what it means to find your true teacher; your true Guru...
Part 28
Recognition of the inner light that illuminates our own truth and wisdom to us in every moment without the need of someone or something else to validate the truth of our own inner Guru . Let's not pretend that I abide in this light as if I've got it all figured out, but let's also not pretend that this light doesn't exist everywhere, in everyone. It is a process of remembering; of coming back again and again to the knowledge that we already know, that we've already found what we are seeking, and that to pretend otherwise is to transfer our own power somewhere outside of ourselves, only to end up looking for what was never lost. Over the next several weeks, I resisted these profound realizations, but with the alchemical effects of the yoga practices and yogic lifestyle I was living, they inevitably started to sink in more and more. Ironically, it didn't make it any easier, and I wasn't any happier about it, but for some reason I experienced the paradox of feeling more okay than ever. I didn't know what was next other than that I would end up at some point in England with Steve, so I just spent the remaining weeks at the ashram in Rishikesh without leaving or going anywhere else. Things just got more and more interesting...
Part 29
I'd been at Yoga Niketan ashram for two weeks and only had two left before I risked overstaying my visa, but it this was perfect. Steve had left for England after spending a month in his own yogic retreat there at the ashram where we met, and was taking his family on holiday for several weeks, before he was to resume the business of a yoga school running out of his home in Southampton, UK. Before he left I told him flat out I wanted to be his student, and was committed to lend my energy as an exchange in any way necessary. By the gift of grace he agreed and welcomed me to come teach and assist out of his yoga school named 'The Sanctuary', so we planned to meet at the beginning of September when he would be back from holiday. After my stay in India, I was to travel to London on my way to the southern coast of England, so I could continue my study and practice of yoga there with Steve. The juiciness of life was dripping from my chin and it felt like I was gorging myself in an orchid of God's fruits of grace and fortune. My path seemed to be becoming more defined, or at least I felt like I had finally found a track to run on, instead of my aimless wandering....
Part 30
... Even though it seemed like I'd found the whole reason I came to India or had been traveling, there didn't seem to be an end to my desire to practice. I still sought higher wisdom and universal truths in the realm of yoga. Even though I feel that the mystery of it all is not a problem to be solved, it is one of those complex puzzles that are enjoyable to piece together. It would be boring if there was finished product - because, then what? So I stayed the rest of my time at Yoga Niketan and did my practices, incorporating what I'd learned from Steve as it had confirmed a lot of my own recent discoveries and also the vague understanding I was beginning to develop in the so-called 'higher' levels of yoga. I was slowly cultivating not just an intellectual grasp on pranayama, meditation and the energetic aspects of our being, but I was beginning to experience it. Truly, direct experience is the only way this stuff can ever make sense, since it is quite literally beyond the mind. This is why in my teaching it's not so important what is said but that the practice is done on an individual level, meaning each of us discover our own truth of the matter through our own practical experience. I cannot emphasize enough on the significance of a daily practice for any one (and a practice of any type, not necessarily 'yoga' as we label it). It is critical at revealing the aspects of our own reality. Go for a walk every day for a year and this alone will start unraveling a few of the mysteries our mind has , and how it keeps us caught up in it's tricky mannerisms. Due to the nature of the mind, that it only 'perceives' what we look for, and is influenced by previous experiences, it can easily make our lives function on autopilot. If we don't set aside time to turn our gaze away from the external manifestations of the mind , then we will find ourselves looking out into a world, seeing it through layers of social and cultural conditioning and then labeling it as truth. What is Truth if it can erodes from the sands of time? Once our physical body has disintegrated back into the Earth, what meaning did our temporary beliefs have? How can we discover an eternal standard of living? Is there a legacy to be left once we are dead and gone, or does it only
matter what we do while we are here, right now? Maybe the legacy is left automatically through our dedication to upholding our own highest standard of living in each moment. Maybe Truth just is, standing still as something eternal and timeless, and that connecting to it means bringing Heaven to Earth where it has existed all along...
Part 31
... After a long, diarrhea ridden month in India, By August 2016 I had made my way to England en route to meet Steve in Southampton in September. His yoga school was to recommence after their summer holiday break on September 5th, so arriving to London in early August meant I had several weeks to re-acclimate to the first world on my own. I'd spent three months abroad at this point and hadn't flushed toilet paper down a powerful enough toilet since I left home in May. It had also been one month since I'd had a regular bowel movement and I felt pretty depleted, so coming back to a place with a familiarity that I had removed myself from for so long was actually a bit strange at first. Call it reverse culture shock. Since there was time before I had anywhere to be, I decided to explore what it was like to be a human again. What did this mean? For starters, I was starving after a month of rice and lentils and often one meal a day, so the European pastries were among my first enjoyments. I spent the days wandering the streets of London and tasting all the delicious food, it was awesome. I would get up very early, hop the fence into the local park that didn't open its gates until 7 am, practice under a tree, then find some cafe with an amazing array of baked goods and sit down with a coffee and pastry to write, read, and reflect. To be honest, coffee actually tasted like shit at first so I spent about a week looking for the best hot chocolate in the city and spent well over a hundred dollars doing so. It was fun, I was on a whole new adventure that was vastly different from the one I had been on up until that point. I think the beauty of this reflection is in the experiences that are available to us are endless. There is nothing inherently wrong with any activity, and maybe this is just me justifying spending more money on food in a week in London than my whole month of travel in India (it was cheap), but whatever. Maybe you are wondering, like me, if all this was necessary. I can tell you, it brought me into stark recognition of my truth, because none of these things brought any more or less contentment to life than I'd already found. As we begin to identify with the One who is witnessing it all, we understand that experiences are just temporary moments for us to see ourselves. If we don't do this, then we think that it is the experience itself that brings the joy and we become attached to our pleasurable moments and avoid the painful ones. This binds us to living half a life. I was determined to live a full one...
Part 32
Welcoming all the experiences of the modern world felt like I was rediscovering things for the first time. I was so thankful to have gained the perspective of a month in India and could certainly have spent more time as a barefoot spiritual seeker throughout Her mystical lands, but honestly it felt good to finally have clean bathrooms and ready access to WiFi. I was buzzing like I was high after my first coffee stop in one of London's quaint cafes. Gelato was too sweet. Bread was dry. Food from the famous markets looked fake and unreal; the cost of food had me alarmed. And, no supermarket-purchased mango tasted as sweet as the ones those carts on the sides of the streets in Rishikesh. It was fun readjusting and relearning all these things, because it felt like I had gone on a deep inner journey and was now reemerging into the daylight of the external world. London was awesome for this. Yoga didn't take a break, in fact I explored a lineage of the practice known as Shadow Yoga at school located right there in the city. A unique blend of martial arts, classical Indian dance, and hatha yoga - Shadow Yoga of Chandor Remete was beautiful new exploration for me to incorporate a lot of the energetic discoveries I was making from my own practices. For the next three weeks I'd be there, I would attend every lesson I could. It was just like that; for my time spent in London I reintroduced myself in a new way to things I previously liked, rediscovered other things that I didn't like but thought I did, and learned most of all one very precious thing. It was all this that showed me in an initially jarring but eventually joyous manner that nothing is an absolute enjoyment other than the presence behind it all...
Part 33
... I said my goodbyes to the beautiful and diverse city of London with a final embrace to a beloved friend who showed up as another angel on my path onward. It was through traveling that it was really made clear to me that no matter where you are, showing up with an open heart will provide opportunities to meet the most beautiful humans of all kinds. These interactions inspire you to continue to share and become the love that they reflect; they show you that ultimately we are all the same. We are beings made of love, created out of this Universal truth that allows all things to manifest through the Union of opposites. My train sped onward as fast as you could turn the page in a novel, symbolic of this closure to one chapter as we opened to a new one. My journal was full of entries, as full as my heart was of experiences. As I approached Southampton to embark on the next leg of my journey, my head wondered what was next but I felt the freedom of not needing to know....
Part 34
... Steve welcomed me at the train station as i arrived. He was wearing jeans, sneakers and a t shirt with a hole in it. Just an apparently normal guy but with a radiant smile and a light that was nearly visible in the ordinariness of daytime. We embraced and then I was introduced to his family which was all waiting in the minivan. It felt amazing to have an entourage of beautiful smiling faces waiting for me in a foreign land, and I will never forget the feelings of gratitude I have for such an experience, and all like it. After we shared a meal together and caught up, I was handed the keys to a flat that would be mine for the next couple months. Can you believe such fortune? One of the advanced yoga students, another angel, had just moved out of her place and was going to sell it so had offered me the whole place to myself while it was being prepared for sale. My word.... The truth is, we don't need much , and least of all do we need or want an expectation; when things happen the way they should, we are rewarded tremendously. In some cases the reward appears greater than others, but perhaps this is only because we were patient and tenacious while life took its time exhausting us for a rest in the gorgeous open meadow just ahead of the rocky road. We are never given more than we can handle, and we are always given what we deserve. This goes for 'good' or 'bad' experiences. Diarrhea for thirty days straight in India? Maybe there was a lesson there for me. I'm sure there was. Being grateful for just being alive allows us to see the silver lining behind every experience and certainly gives us something to celebrate when it appears like we get 'lucky'. This form of simple, practical gratitude shakes us out of the automatic, taking-things-for-granted way of life that we fall into. We might even find ourselves making demands from life if we forget to give our thanks daily. I can tell you, having a private bedroom, a kitchen to cook my own meals, and even my own designated yoga room after months of cots, dorms, and bunk beds... My heart was bursting with thanks for the love and support I continued to receive....
Part 35
It was September 2016, and four months previously I had left home without the foresight to where I would end up. Arriving in Southampton on the overcast coast of the UK was something I would have thought crazy, especially when my plan was to travel the sunny and tropical coasts of Central and South America. Funny how life has its plot twists. The Saturday night I got into town, Steve (my yoga teacher) called a meeting to kick off the Sanctuary's next semester of yoga classes, beginning Monday. It was my first introduction to the crowd of authentic yogis and the community he had fostered around one man's sincere wish to spread the teachings of yoga into the world. I was awestruck but the love present in these individuals. I was even more overwhelmed when he introduced me by asking me to rise in the yoga hall filled with about a hundred of the Sanctuary's students. After he had welcomed every one back for our upcoming semester, he launched into a comical story about how he met one devoted yogi while on his own yoga retreat in India over the summer and apparently this practitioner wanted to come back to the UK and practice with the crowd listening. I felt heat rise into my face when I understood he was referring to me. Then as I stood in the room and looked around at the smiling faces, welcoming me, offering me their absolute attention... I knew I'd finally arrived. This was a group of yogis I'd been traveling to find. Every one of them shined with radiance and devotion. I felt so blessed in that moment to be received as I was. It was incredible. Even though I left it months ago, I finally felt home....
Part 36
Settling in Southampton was so easy, it felt effortless. I was in an English speaking country which obviously always makes things easier and I could flush toilet paper down the toilet. My flat was equipped with a kitchen for me to prepare my own meals and I could walk to the market which had familiar foodstuff and other items I could purchase with a credit card. My yoga school, where i would be practicing 6+ times a week and also teaching two or more of those days was also within walking distance. It was nearing the end of summer and the weather was beautiful. I spent a lot of time outdoors in the dry air, appreciating the well kept gardens of the traditional British culture after having my morning coffee in one of Her many cozy cafes. I read and wrote; I reflected. I wondered how on Earth I got so lucky and I continued with devotion to pray in sincere gratitude for the abundance that was offered so freely. But most of all, I practiced yoga. After all, that's what I was there for. That's what I'd been on the road for. That's what all of this was about... Wasn't it..?
Part 37
The only obligation I had was teaching yoga a few times a week. This left me free in my own space to really dedicate myself to exploring my practice. Using the tools and technology transmitted to me by Steve, I vowed to deliver to myself as sincere of a devotion to the mat as I could. What's more and the best thing about this all, was that through takes with my teacher and my own reflections and meditations, I steadily woke up more and more to the realization that the yoga practice was really integrated into every part of life. Practice was somewhat irrelevant or even redundant on the mat. This was living yoga. It became apparent to me that we dedicated ourselves to showing up on the mat so we could be absolutely present to our reality in every moment beyond the mat. I think I knew this before, in fact I know I did... But I continued to avoid it. Before, I was using practice as a means of escape. Now I was using it as means of celebration. I was quickly developing a romance with all of life, not just the moments of breakthrough during a defined 'yoga practice'. As this romance emerged, steadily my actual practice revealed itself to me. It was becoming an offering of myself. I was no longer demanding anything. I simply would arrive and that was it. These shifts started bringing such clarity towards... Everything! And slowly, gradually, the ever present Source of my existence began to peak Its head as if some cosmic game of hide and seek was dancing with me to some distant tune that I could only catch in fleetingly delightful moments...
Part 38
The day's carried onward. I knew not how long I'd stay in Southampton and had no plans to move forward. For once, my mind took a rest on its constant pursuit of solving 'the' problem. As this happened, meditations deepened and an ever present awareness of the breath developed. Sleep naturally shortened and my intake of food lessened until I was sleeping from 10 pm to 4 am and eating one meal a day, with an additional hot milk in the morning and perhaps tea at night. I was doing 4+ hours of asana or physical yoga practices a day, with a longer amount of time specified towards breathing exercises. Meditation happened spontaneously and would arise frequently, but especially got interesting at the end of one of three dedicated mat practices I would take part in daily. I knew not what I was after only that what was happening felt right and allowed myself to be swept into the momentum of it. While it appears like discipline, I think it's safe to say that discipline does not exist when what you do and what you love are the same thing. It is something that is a joy to partake in, because it extends so much further beyond the short term gratification that another option might entail. I continued to surrender myself over and over to this mystery as my mind struggled to figure out if being so apparently hardcore was necessary. I had no choice....
Part 39
It was Monday, and a full moon. How auspicious - monday, moon-day. I'm not superstitious but stuff really starts to appear interconnected when we just start noticing it all. Anyways - I made my nightly travel to the Sanctuary to practice an asana flow then sit for an hour of spinal breathing followed by meditation. Steve taught one class per week specific to this kriya, known as spinal breathing, which stems from the lineage of Babaji and Yogananda Paramahansa. Some of you may have read 'the Autobiography of a Yogi'. It's those guys. The OGs of bringing real yoga to the West. Spinal breathing is the means that we bringing our attention to the current of life energy flowing up and down the spine, by focusing our breath there. This is the intersection of spirit and matter. The spirit being our breath: to inspire, from our Latin root 'spirare' which means 'to take on life'. Matter being physical life aka biology, centralized as the axis of our spine. Connect these two and what do we get? Let's do it and find out...
Part 40
I sat comfortably upon my meditation cushion and gradually my outer body softened. I could feel my spine rise like a spring up and out of my pelvis, and the ebb and flow of breath making small expansions and contractions throughout my physical body. It felt like I was breathing through my skin and that my whole body was pulsing with this movement. As much awareness that I had of my physical vessel, I was able to steadily relax it more, and more, and more... I picked up the thread of my inhale and exhale and began to follow it closely. The inhale would meet the exhale, and return itself with an inhale. All of my attention was on this movement of breath. As the mind grew into a single pointed focus, I began to notice small spaces between the two breaths. It seemed like the movement of breath itself shortened and the gaps lengthened, yet there was this cyclical, circular nature to it all. The circle appeared or rather felt like it was shrinking. I started losing track of where the breath 'began' or when it 'ended'. The spaces between were more familiar, more comfortable. I felt like I could relax there. Over time I lost complete track of my body and was only aware of this tiny cycle of breath... A very, very faint and slow tiny sip of air in, a long pause.... And a very, glacially slow release of air out, another eternal pause.... At some point during all of this the breath just stopped. Complete cessation of breath, involuntarily. For how long, i have no idea. But during that time; there was none. I think I had catapulted my consciousness outside of linear time and space, but just reflecting on this and trying to comprehend it intellectually confuses even myself, the experiencer. I'll do my best to explain. The light grew stronger and if I had to define it by physical location, it appeared to emanate and radiate outward from my third eye or pineal gland. As it expanded, the awareness that was behind it all broadened its view. No specific image or visualization took form other than pure light, but as this light grew and took on the 'shape' of something beyond 360 degree form, I 'knew' that everything existed or exists because of and through this shape. It was as if I was seeing every manifest thing in its Unmanifest form. I had a glimpse into a formless void, which is impossible to see with our eyes of perfection or even to comprehend with our minds. In that eternal moment, everything made sense because there was nothing other than what I was witness of, or to. Or maybe I just became acutely aware of pure witnessing. I don't know. I still struggle with this one because it's impossible to really put into words. However, i do know that for however long this occurred, I was filled with absolute love. Not any human defined love, but pure, divine love. The love of all existence. I was bathed in it, I was merging into it. I had become it. And whilst in that space, I suddenly felt a tug for below. Like a faint whisper in my ear awakening me from a dream, my body, and identity as a human named Grant, began to call. Only it wasn't a dream, it was the realest of all things that I had ever been blessed with experiencing. Yet just like that, after the infinite moment of this love affair with something beyond name and form, I was pulled back into the physical with a painful inhale. It was like the first breath ever received. It tore my lungs asunder. And even though it was still faint, I gradually noticed the circle of breath broadening again. Increasing its diameter. With such, the sensations of my body became more clear. My seat was uncomfortable. My leg was asleep. How long was I there?? What .. The..!fuck was that?! Despite all this confusion in my thoughts, an underlying sense of calm, peace and fulfillment remained with me. Although the womb of love that i merged into and then arose from remained as only a memory, the tether of light connecting me there through my breath was apparent as if a tangible reality and not the illusion of some dream or memory. And with all this, I knew. My 'work' was done. It was time to go home....
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