I texted some friends last night as I suddenly stood amidst a slew of balloons and Light the Night t-shirted people that "I never know what I'll be doing from one moment to the next."

Previously, I was on a quest for a birthday gift for my mom and was having no luck. Turning onto Broadway in Walnut Creek, I passed a bunch of EZ-Up Tents and people with signs about Light the Night, which I had no idea what it was. Of course, I had to check it out. Ninety percent of the time that I see anything resembling a street fair I have to check it out (Seriously, I've calculated that percentage; it's actually, 89.53%, but I round up. Sheesh, gimme a break). And after failing at another store for the item I was looking for, I ended up at Light the Night, registered, made a donation, and got four balloons of varying colors. Apparently each color had a meaning, so I unwittingly identified myself as a lymphoma survivor--I guess I should do a little more research next time. =)

Positive Vibes
Everyone was really very happy, and there was a great energy about the event. Most everyone were on teams supporting different people who'd passed on or were still struggling to survive the disease. My favorite T-shirt read, "Get Busy Living." How beautiful is that?

I chatted with all kinds of people from teachers to bakers to non-profit workers, and then of course, we went on the 2 mile walk with the lights in our balloons lit up. I typically migrate to whoever has similar energy to mine. I've been learning to not question it so much and enjoy whoever that happens to be. Several weeks ago, that meant I was sitting on a park bench in Concord talking to an elderly Greek couple, who were both just absolute gems. I think their names were Mariqua and Dirita (sp?). Absolutely fabulous people. Dirita raised two teenaged sons on his own after coming to America. Now that's a hero in my book.

Tonight, I ended up spending most of my time with four sisters and one of their daugthers from Marin county. Totally fabulous ladies. I think they were walking for an aunt of theirs who had passed, but they were super funny and spent a good portion of the time bopping each other over the heads with their balloons. They struck me kinda how Dave (my brother) and I will be in our forties. It was beautiful to see such a wonderful sense of sorority (in the true sense of the word, not in the lets get drunk and screw way that that term has come to mean).

Who Am I?
Last night (Saturday) is yet another neat moment in my life of re-discovering who I am. When you've gone through so much internal change, a lot of the old stuff that you used to do or find fun just doesn't work anymore. My patience for bar scenes was always limited before, and now it's a rarity for me to go there. It's a practice of patience that always makes me feel a little sad and like moments for real connection get lost as the lights dim and go out in the eyes of the guys and gals that you talk to in that space. So to stumble upon a Saturday event like Light the Night with such positive energy and to connect with people in that space is an absolute joy.

Going Deeper
It's also a practice of learning how to be seen. Most people don't see me. Most people don't see anyone. They're caught in a myriad of their own projections of who they think other people are. You always know that you've gotten caught in a projection when someone does something and you're like, "I never thought s/he would do that." Surprise! Your projection just broke. Good, bad, or indifferent, you just saw that your little box for someone didn't fit the truth of that person.

But when I get to places like Light the Night, I really come out in the fullness of my being. I think there's a certain sense of safety that allows it and because I feel like I'm doing exactly what I'm supposed to be doing. I don't care about dumping money on cars or clothes (although I've had a lot of fun buying clothes lately). I care about people and relationships and helping the world transition into this new awareness that seems to be changing everyone's lives. So to drop some money into a wonderful charity and support people who are facing real difficulties (as opposed to my boss doesn't like me difficulties, which primarily are mental games that don't't exist as opposed to a physical disorder that you have to face every second of your life), this feels true to me. It feels like me.

And people see that.

I could see that one of the volunteers, Nina saw me. Recognized me. It was the way her blue eyes absolutely shone bright as she looked in amazement that I just walked off the street and joined up. I realized that I was having my own beauty reflected back. It was almost too much for me.

Learning to Accept Your Own Beauty
The last header says it all. It's also a practice to learn how to accept that beauty in myself. My friend, Kara, once said, "You have no idea how much light comes out of you." It's a hell of a compliment, and it's absolutely true. I have no idea. I just sit in the middle of this pin-wheel and spin round and round. Hopefully, some of the spinning has subsided. And while some of this may sound egoistical and I have to keep a close eye on my ego, I think that I'm just starting to understand how much beauty I really shine. And that I really am starting to light up the night.

I've been mulling over the last line of my most recent blog because I think any self-statement often bears the burdens of ego. For most people saying that he or she lights up the night would be some kind of statement of holier-than-thou or spiritual ego claim to fame. That's not what I'm intending to do. It's more of a statement of what all our souls are made to do and an affirmation of sorts on my own part that I can see that I'm actually doing that.

Living Large, Shining Bright
I believe it's Marianne Williamson's quote about not playing small that everyone likes, and I think I'm starting to step into that space in a more fundamental way.

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

 

And if you do the work on this spiritual path, you will start to shine your light and give people around the opportunity to grow and to change. Some times that will lead to intense moments of easy beauty, and other times that light will greatly challenge people around you in ways that won't be comfortable. There's very little that is comfortable about this path, as I've experienced it. Usually, growth comes through breaking the self-created chains that you've looped around your own neck. All these ideas about who and what you are: I'm smart, I'm ugly, I'm hopeless, I'm unlovable, I'm a success, I'm a failure. I'm sure one of them resonated with you, and possibly the ones that we consider "positive" are the worst and most enticing. They loop you in so that you always have to be successful or smart or beautiful because if you're not, then what are you?

All of these things are nonsense. The opportunity of life is to be whoever you want to be. That doesn't mean to go killing or stealing because you can; if you do the work of the spiritual path, coming to those types of conclusions or actions is just insane. You wouldn't think like that. But instead to explore life with childlike curiousity and to be at play with the connections and people that you come across is the great gift that we all yearn for. There's nothing to hold onto, nothing to be lost. Just hold on a little during this path, and you'll find nothing but insurmountable pain.

Your Inner Light, Your Inner Truth
What wakes you up? What makes you get out of bed in the morning? Where are you trying to get to? For all these things, return to the source. Return to yourself. You have all the answers. When you have an "ah-ha" moment with something or someone else, that's a piece of you returning to you. It's lots of fun to find these with other people; it builds amazing points of connection. But it's not necessary to look anywhere special to find them. The Buddha had his biggest moment just sitting under a tree after exhausting himself in all kinds of spiritual pursuits. Usually when we let go, the answers we've always sought are right there for us.

Illuminating, Illumination
We are all lights looking for a spark, looking for a reason to grow and expand our light and wipe away the darkness in our lives. Return to your heart. Return again and again as TV, screaming kids, annoying co-workers, bad traffic, poor grades, and all the usual stuff calls your attention away. Bring your attention back to yourself because when you remember yourself and focus on your own inner truth, your light grows. The problems of the world fade. And as your light grows, the world around you can shift, and you can bring about the change that you wish to see in the world (to paraphrase Gandhi).

We live in extraordinary times, and you can make all the difference. But you don't have to start a non-profit, save the world, or run for public office. All you need to do is to be true to you and you'll be bringing peace and love and light to a world greatly in need of it. And ultimately, if we all start down this path, we'll all find what we've always wanted.

 

 

A chainsaw buzzes and grinds through deadwood in the distance. The long hot summer has claimed a few more trees, and while fire season is most likely officially over, it is never quite fully over in the high desert, even amidst the alpine trees crowded around the Lake Tahoe Basin.

I am clearing my lungs. Bay area city smog still creeps out and mingles with dust and pollen in the area around Pleasant Hill. Even when I'm up on the peaks in Briones Regional Park, I can see the brown smear on the sky and know that I am not quite out of the thick of it yet. I think I may have stopped breathing at one point, my chest paralyzed by the rush of everything life was throwing at me. Things felt just too fast for some years, but that is behind me. And this trail gives me a few more steps to build that distance.

At 6500 feet and more than that at times, I know that dust will be about all that I am breathing, and it feels good to work my legs and to fill my chest with this cool wind.

The ground crunches beneath my hiking shoes, and the ever changing weather of the altitude alternates between chilly and warm as my friend Judi and I wind over knolls and down into valleys, pausing to let mountain bikers churn by from time to time.

Around us in the shady wet areas that harbor several recent patches of snow, baby pines have sprung to life. Small groves of these tree nurseries hug different portions of the trail. I let my hands brush against their young needles to say, "hello" and "I am a friend." They are the next generation to replace their forebears; I wonder how deep their roots may go.

My body enjoys this movement and the peace of the quiet only interrupted by the huffing of the mountains, whistling wind between craggy teeth. It's been awhile since my body has truly enjoyed much; too much change to integrate. Even now, I'm integrating the change of too much strength in some muscles and not enough in others in my right leg, which is causing the knee to grind. Physical therapy helps a lot; everything it seems has moved into moments of self-care.

Ground squirrels and chipmunks chatter and chirp at each other. It's the high-season for winter preparations. It's likely that snow will soon fill up the landscape to truly end fire season. They must be ready to survive the winter.

Lake Tahoe peeks at us more and more as we wind higher, but I didn't come to see the lake as much as to breathe. The Lake is as the Lake always is; cold, blue, often busy with boats or the afternoon zephyrs curling its surface. It's not my favorite lake, but I appreciate it's beauty. It'll never quite match the brilliance of Crater Lake in Oregon.

At some point, we stop before turning back for the car. The wind hushes, and I feel the first nibbles of fatigue in my legs. Trees are spaced out with splashes of blue lake and blue sky interspersed. I am sure that I am smiling. Why wouldn't I be?

I am breathing again.

Before I get going too far, yoga also has spiritual teachings, and my teacher happens to use some of those teachings. However, I'm using the term "yoga" in the more general sense that people think of it, i.e. bending, flexibility, turning yourself into a human pretzel, and so forth.

Of course, the physical work in a yoga practice is also a spiritual practice. This sometimes seems to be forgotten for many yoga teachers and studios. Many people have turned yoga into the new work-out fad. To me, the Bikram or Hot Yoga is possibly the most silly. It ratchets up the intensity by creating a hot environment to give muscles more flexibility. And while I'm sure many people have benefited from this, I feel like it moves away from the deeper practice of yoga which is to learn to be with yourself in any position, not just to get a great work-out.

How to Find a Good Yoga Teacher
Good luck. You're gonna need it. They're out there, and of course there are as many types of teachers as there are types of students. And since so many students are just looking for a good work out and not any kind of revelation, I'm sure that you'll be able to find one (especially if you live in the SF Bay area--seriously, you can't turn around without running into one). But really, I think to find a good yoga teacher takes a little bit of good karma and luck.

What I mean when I say a "good" yoga teacher is someone who understands the deeper practice of yoga and who can help his/her students move into deeper energetic spaces during the practice. Anyone can tell someone to move into a downward dog position; a good teacher can take you there and let you explore the feelings, emotions, and sensations. A good teacher can leave you when you need to be left there and also know when to take you a step further into the fires of whatever issues you need to face and free from your body.

Eureka! I've Found One
Such people are rare, and you'll know when you've found one. You have to know that I don't gush about people very often in much of anything. I see most people as usually just doing the status quo. Nothing wrong with it, but it doesn't light me up. However, the yoga teacher that I met at a 24-hour fitness (talk about luck, right?) in San Francisco in March of 2008 has to be one of the most in tune teachers I've ever come across. She's one of a handful of people that really helped create and hold a space so that I could stabilize during an intense spiritual transition and downward spiral in my life if only for an hour on Thursday night. It was an incredible gift for me, and she's someone who I hold in the deepest sense of gratitude of probably anyone in my life.

Today, I had a chance to re-connect with her and go through one of her yoga sessions. It was very different because I felt so much more stable and at-play in the energy of the space. I'm not in yoga-shape right now, so some of the poses definitely made me work harder than usual. But as usual nothing truly hurt, and I did find some new spaces that my body could now move into (A wheel pose actually felt more like stretching and less like "AHHHH, Get me the heck out of this! My wrists are going to snap!").

I feel like I've integrated so much spiritual energy in my being that I didn't have any dramatic shifts this time around. But I did feel different movements in myself as some things adjusted. It's nice to have subtler movements at play in my body and in my energy. Before, it felt like the grinding of techtonic plates. Good God, I don't know how I kept my sanity last year.

And of course, her flow with everything was beautiful, kind, and encouraging when things were challenging. It's a very special thing that she offers to her students (and which I am happy to remind her of). As I said, most teachers aren't in this space. They're trying to give you a work out or having you push into uncomfortable poses. And it's not that my teacher has me always in completely comfortable positions, but it's the energy of the situation that allows things to shift and free up. Last year, I could really feel issues as they'd arise in different poses. I could the have them release when I released out of the pose.

I probably should explain what I mean by issues. I'm talking about guilt about a relationship gone wrong, anger about a bad job situation, childhood issues, scarcity issues, fear, hate, and anything else that has gotten stuck in you during your life's journey. Yoga can free you from some if not all of these. While I've done a lot of spiritual work in my life, there's something about working with your body that allows you to take things one step further. And though it never happened to me, there have been other students who'd break down and cry as these things moved up and out of them. It was always an honor to be there during a night when that happened and to see someone let go of an old burden.

So it goes without saying that my times last year with her gave me an incredible set of experiences, and as I said, I'm deeply grateful to my yoga teacher.

You Can't Win At Yoga
And I really don't try to. Every now and again, some of the poses feel like I think they should, but most of them (even the down dog) are works in progress. Anything involving hip flexibility is a lesson in humility. They usually come after a nice vinyasa when I'm feeling good about how strong I am in the Plank pose. Nonetheless, none of the poses are about perfecting them in any sense. I don't intend to have a daily yoga practice to even achieve it. I use my yoga as a spiritual practice, a grounding tool, and a general health and flexibility maintenance tool. The beauty of yoga is that it can be all these things. Just remember that you can't win. Or be perfect. And what's great, is that with yoga, those things don't matter.

The Teacher-Student Relationship
My yoga teacher was the first person whom I ever really accepted as a teacher in this kind of intense space. It's not like a professor at college (and I had a couple great ones). That's so intellectual and entirely a whole other beast. A yoga teacher is much more integral working with your whole being, and I'd never really let anyone as deep as I let her in. I'd also never felt like someone could really support and nurture me outside my family, so finding her was truly a gift.

I'm sure that you can hear the love in my voice, and of course if you've been reading this blog, Iove is a deep part of my process. I have a deep love and regard of what she's doing and how she has helped me. Because in helping me open up to a teacher, she helped create the space in my heart to accept my current spiritual teacher, Siddhartha. I'm not sure if I'd have had the same space to bring him into my life without her.

Love, Yoga, and Spirituality
So as much of my path has been about love, so is it with my yoga practice. A practice of loving myself in easy and difficult moments. A practice of watching things arise and pass, tighten and release. If you are so fortunate to find a yoga teacher who can create these spaces, cherish him or her. Honor that teacher and regularly attend as much as you can and as much as you need to. They're rare, but they're out there.

If you're ready, you'll find your teacher. And if you're truly ready, the secrets of the deeper part of yoga may yet start to unfold for you.