When you open up your heart ❤ to life, it can be like bright, new rays of morning sunlight are shining into your world -- illuminating all the dark spots in your soul and showing you a more honest and loving side of existence. In that dawn of a new beginning, you allow yourself to hope. Your passions are fully aligned with your purpose and know you are firmly on your path despite not knowing exactly where the journey will end. You are alight with direction and vision, bursting with unseen possibilities. You are alive!
I just finished Brett Larkin's Solar Plexus themed yoga class and it has me raring to get going, but not in a frantic or pushy way. I'm feeling strong enough to move from the space that I am in right at this moment to accomplish my goals and to-do lists rather than force anything to happen. I all feel really right somehow. I feel as if I am in the flow of yesterday's mood, while grounded in the previous day's intention and also moving forward into the now. It's a really great space to be in, especially when you have as many things to do as I do. Right now it's all about staying grounded on that board, riding on that wave, cresting to my fullest potential! I'm really liking how that sounds! Things are beginning to fall into place naturally.
Today felt like one of the busiest days of the year thus far. I was bustled from destination to destination by subway 🚝 and Uber driver 🚗. I was challenged to repeated practice drills in swim 🏊 class, I studied math problems, sang with and helped to over-see the jazz club I am a member of, went to a photography exhibit that was required as part of an essay for my Photojournalism class, took part in an on-the-spot news story, went to see and photography a dark synth band I like called Mystic Priestess. And through it all, I noticed that I was more grounded, present and felt in the flow. It's amazing what that feels like! This day was incredible!
So wow! I forgot to blog yesterday! I'm still on point with my yoga and meditation practice and my journaling. Yesterday I did a Bret Larkin yoga series featuring long sat nams. I had some trouble focusing and had a sort of jittery energy which followed me through an on-again-off-again rainy ☔ and sunny 🌞 day. My mood brightened up rather like the clouds ☁ 🌞 and stayed that way for the rest of the day. It became even brighter when Jay picked me up and we went to see R&B singer Tinashe at Club Origins in San Francisco's Filmore district!
Today is following along the lines of a similarly happy theme. I practiced the root chakra yoga flow from Larkin's yoga video library on YouTube. Today is going to be a blast again! Going to an afternoon of board games, food, great conversation and friendship called Battlestar with Jay! It's sunny outside. I'm feeling amazing on my cleanse ( I'll prb engage in a little guilt-free cheating at Battlestar). LOL. But it's all good, and so I am!
Boy have the energies and emotions been on a rollercoaster today! I really needed my practice and my meditation as nothing turned out as planned. I rushed to San Francisco for an appt. that wasn't until two weeks from now, I was bored, despondent, irritable, and my beliefs were challenged. All in a days work. It feels as if things like this are getting more manageable each day I dive into both my yoga and meditation practice. I will survive all this. It will pass and I'll emerge stronger thad ever!
Today is all about building up a strength that comes from deep inside yourself. On Day 19 of Brett Larkin's Challenge the last kundalini exercise really required me to dig deep down and find that endless source of surety and grounding - to find my inner fire! I refused to allow my arms to stop their motions and keep concentrating on my third eye point and chanting sat nam (truth is my identity) while noticing my breath and the atmosphere around me. Went deeper into the moment and I allowed the sensations to course through me. There was this little voice (my ego) that said 'stop, you can't do it', but I just noticed it was there and kept moving my arms.. I was nearly in tears at the end of it. I learned a lot about strength today -- what true strength is, and how sometimes we have to conquer the greatest foe that is in our minds. It's the courage that comes with a combination of letting go and engaging the moment.
I am reminded of that everything I go into the deep end of the pool during my beginning swim class. For some readers of this blog who may not know, I was raised in a cult religion called Jehovah's Witnesses. My parents isolated me a lot from the rest of society. That experience has shaped my life in so many ways and I am now in the process of re-shaping my entire life story. Long story short, I was not allowed to participate in many normal experiences with other children growing up. I remember that I longed to learn to swim when I was a child, but my mother wouldn't let me take the class for fear that my mind would be influenced by the children there. This resulted in my not learning to swim when I was young, so by the time I was an adult, I had developed a fear of deep bodies of water. I realize that the experiences when I was younger resulted in quite a few phobias, some of which I've broken, like my (intense shyness) fear of talking to others, and some that I haven't like my fear of driving. Some I am in the process of breaking such as my fear of swimming. It's been many steps to get the point where I can now plunge into the water and tread water in the deep end of the pool and even swim in the deep end with the guidance of a lifeguard. But that first plunge, I'll remember it always - the surrender, the over-coming my mind and the moment when I swam to the other side. I felt triumphant! Every bit of fear that I conquer represents a small win and a letting go of a limiting mindset - the kind of shortsightedness that zaps our strength. My mantra today from Briana and Dr. Peter Borten's "Rituals For Transformation is, "I relinquish my fear to the power of love and my Higher Self".
Sometime the more you "try" the more ground you lose. I find it often is better to just allow. This however is a lot harder than it sounds. That old ego and the monkey mind can get in the way and cause all kinds of mischief. In today's kundalini kriya which focused on breath and endurance, I was challenged to sustain my arms in all kinds of constantly moving poses. I didn't think that I could keep going, and at those points I would chant the kundalini mantra which is "I am truth" or "truth is my identity", and I would find myself going deeper, reaching for more understanding, and indeed, finding my own truth. It was in those moments of struggle that I could really see that part of my path was giving up that struggle and just allowing the sensations to take me over. This involves the sort of surrender that the mind resists. It is when we are in our truer moments, our points of struggle that who we really are is revealed. And it is there that we learn not only who we are but who we really want to be.
