In 2019, my heart was torn open and yanked outside of me to look at when I realized that clients I had known for years, as well as several new clients, were immersed in groups that were marinating their mindsets in conspiracy and disinformation as a coping mechanism for the stressors of an impending pandemic.
I felt all the softness, clarity, and growth I had been teaching for decades was all for nothing. As an empath, I may not have heard their exact words, but I could feel their disdain for me, for calling them back to themselves, as the whispering campaigns against me circulated.
My lifelong trigger of “Why is using my soft voice not enough?” had become fully reactivated.
My world, like so many others, had entered a period of intense deconstruction.
I have been working on my small corner of it since then.
I wrote a new 800-page training manual, and I began requiring the Bodhi Yoga Teacher Training enrollment as a prerequisite for working with me, to provide students with a foundation for living grounded while everything within us was catching fire and burning to ashes.
I stopped trying to help people I had loved and admired for so long, who were heavily programmed.
I forgave myself for needing my work to take root with the souls of clients I had worked with for years, who were/are caught up in disinformation mindsets.
I began sitting within my breath. I regained my connection to the gentle yet deepened voice within my own heart, which was in dire need of strength training, and the most amazing people began to show up.
I rebuilt my life and resolve from the ashes of all that heat (yet again).
I dedicated a new temple, this time within my soul.
I began living everything I had been teaching, by recalibrating my mindsets, because those were the only ones I could evolve.
I wrote and launched the Moon Chakras App to help anyone else who would like to maintain energetic clarity while the world tilts on its topsy-turvy axis.
I returned to the beautiful Eknath Easwaran’s book “Original Goodness”, which gives such beautiful guidance here and then I followed it in the most embodied way I knew how:
“In meditation, we slowly gain the capacity to buck the flow of this fierce traffic. Meditation is a kind of mental engineering project, laying down a lane by which we can, if we choose to, travel back against the flow of conditioning into the realms of the unconscious, where our deepest resources lie…
The place of every one of us is at the summit of living. In meditation, we learn to reach the summit of consciousness, grasp our desires, and infuse them with an irresistible force that can lift us like an eagle, as Saint Theresa says.
I’m curious to reach the peak of spiritual awareness. It is not a luxury for our civilization to hold out this goal; it has become a necessity. When human beings reach a state where their physical wants are more than satisfied, if they do not have a lofty, snow-clad peak to gaze upon, to plan for, or to climb, they cannot help but indulge in destructive behavior. Human daring is meant for this purpose, and if we do not engage it, all that power will turn against us.
When we regain our state of unity, we ask nothing more of life. It is not that spiritual searching is dead; spiritual fulfillment is not the end of growth, only a new beginning. But we no longer ask who we are and why we are here. We know. And in place of the world that once baffled and frustrated us, we dwell in a compassionate universe, whose forces are friendly, only once they are understood. Having this, the Bhagavad Gita said, what more is there to ask for? All we need is opportunities to give, to serve, and to love—which is, without exaggeration, to live in Eden, here, on earth.”1
This is where I am this morning, as I head out to teach BodhiYin Yoga Restorative Class to a group of women who recognize and incorporate the wholehearted nature of my work as they attend to their own beautiful wings, torch, and promise.2
This is where you’ll find me.
Monday’s Meme each week is brought to you by the Moon Chakras™ App. This beautiful app brings you into centered, daily alignment, like a gentle, three-minute electrolyte for the soul.