Hello Everyone!
I'm back in Wisconsin and preparing enthusiastically for the yoga retreat coming up in a couple of weeks. If you don't know about it, check my website www.smilingyogi.com for information. In pulling my notes together for the retreat, I ran across a journal entry from just before I left for Montana. I thought I'd share it with you here.
From my journal: August 12, 2009
I sit here in my yoga space, settling in for my morning practices. It is August and the windows are wide and open and already the day is abuzz with traffic - ground and air, bikes, pedestrians, birds, dogs, all the sounds of a new day. Within those sounds all around them and supporting them is a spaciousness, an expansive, open aliveness. Shifting my awareness to THAT instantly awakens my senses to take in even more, subtler sounds.
The morning air is fresh and alive with the perfume of lilies and sunflowers, galardia and hosta blossoms. The lavender is lush and vibrant outside my window and the hummers frequent my little garden - best buffet in the neighborhood. I've always tried to have fresh flowers in my yoga space - especially in my studios. Flowers are a little piece of heaven. Nature's finest art work. They have a way of catching one's attention and then doing their work on the entire nervous system, soothing and relaxing it with pleasing color and texture, curling, dancing, swaying shapes and a perfume to transport the soul out of exile directly tothe here and now instantaneously.
A typical class at my studio ran 1 1/2 hours so I wanted to do everything I could to set up a space that would bring people quickly to a more present state. I hoped they could walk in the door, or even approach the building, or even remember the space and instantaneously move to a less guarded, more relaxed, open and aware state of Being. An hour and a half is not much time to undo a day's or a week's or a lifetime's accumulation of thinking and stressing about life's circumstances. I often longed to have more time to do more in-depth sessions. Now my studio is gone and my typical class length is a weekend long. Funny thing. I still long for a bigger chunk of time. My classes typically have about 20 participants. There are questions and requests enough to fill a full week - easily.
When I took my first yoga teacher training - the month-long program at Kripalu, time was my biggest challenge. I had a hard time finding out how to be in the spacious, timeless presence I needed to be in to teach, and still keep an eye on the clock so the classes would have a predictable beginning and ending. In the twenty years prior to that training, my practices and studies seemed to remove the element of time - I felt outside of time or somehow beyond it. For many years, my practice fit comfortably into a three hour block I carved for it from 5 - 8 am.
