
As I type this, I'm listening to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. The last time I played the album beginning to end, I was a young teenager, laying on the couch in the basement of my parent's house that became a work of art for me. It was a daily ritual for me to go down there and spend hours allowing my create juices to flow through a mixture of music, painting, choreography, and always ending with laying motionless on the couch -- lights off, incense burning, black lights on revealing the glow stars I stuck all over the ceilings and walls to make it feel like I was in space...and I'd lay there bathing in the music, contemplating on what "God" is and how big the Universe really is...and however big it is, what's beyond it's walls...and wouldn't that be the Universe then too? I'd feel the walls of my head pulsating as if my brain wanted to burst out beyond my skull.
Why am I sharing this? That picture above was taken a couple weeks ago, twenty years since the last time I laid on that couch. Twenty years, which feel like the space between the first and last note of that epic album. I asked my super-talented boyfriend to get a yoga-flavored shot of me during a recent shoot. I look at myself here and think to when yoga as a way of life began to infuse my every cell...I was so young and naive, clueless of how life would be unfolding, and it's stuck around as an old-friend who has yet to leave my side.
We've walked together over the years and gratitude overflows from my heart as I think of how many times it's taken my finger and pointed it back to myself. I now realize this is how I practice living harmoniously within myself. The practice of continuously taking ownership of how life reveals itself...recognizing the part I'm playing without taking things personally or creating limiting assumptions. It can be the hardest thing to do...to recognize it's not the other who's at fault for the way I'm feeling...it's me. I feel like this is the work of the Self...unwinding truth from falsehood, teaching the self who it really is.
~~~~~~ Om Namah Shivaya ~~~~~~