Your path
Birthdays always inspire me to look back on my year, to see where am I and where I am going. My friend Ana calls birthdays "our own personal New Year's." So in these last three days I have been celebrating with friends, writing "thank-you notes,"teaching and meditating. I also have been looking back and seeing the path that my life has taken, with a compassionate and loving eye.
Joseph Campbell has been a great source of inspiration for me as of late. I am simultaneously reading and almost done with "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" and "The Joseph Campbell Companion." I recently read something that has been nurturing me for the last week. Campbell was writing about the Knights who searched for the Holy Grail. Supposedly whenever the Knights came upon a forest and saw that a path had already been created, they -on purpose- chose not to take it, and instead create their own path:
"If a path exists in the forest, don't follow it, for though it took someone else to the Grail it will not take you there because it is not your path."
So as I look over my life and see how I went from Puerto Rico, to Worcester, MA for College. Then to Costa Rica with a Fulbright grant. Then 5 years in NY for Graduate School. Then did my first yoga Teacher Training in 2001. Then moved to Los Angeles, where I have been teaching yoga full time for 10 and a half years. I marvel at the circles and spirals my life has taken.
This year has been magnificent: I am ecstatic and blessed to be certified in Anusara, which happened last year. As a life-long student of yoga, this year I studied intensely with Leslie Kaminoff, Gil Hedley, Sally Kempton, and Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen who all completely changed and charged my teaching. As a life-long teacher of yoga, this year I taught my fourth yoga TT and my third Anusara Immersion. Keric and I are starting our Anusara Teacher Training this January and we already have 13 people signed up! And Hagar and I are in talks to start our Immersion also... Classes are great. Am enjoying immensely teaching my classes and The Practice on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Life continues to expand and open. Sometimes I don't know where I am going or I get scared. But then I remember Sally saying that you know you are in your dharma when spiritual growth is happening and you don't feel stuck. My path is mysterious but it moves with a throbbing and beating heart. Again Campbell,
"Where there is a way or a path, it's someone else's way. Each knight enters the forest at the most mysterious point and follows his own intuition. What each brings forth is what never before was on land or sea; the fulfillment of his unique potentialities, which are different from anybody else's."
May we look back and honor our own path, that we are following without a map, only by our intuition and the source code of our highest.
Enjoy your day.
Enjoy your path.
Comments