In 2007, I went on a 2-month trip to India. I was ready for a radical experience and to challenge my habit mind and open heart. It was the first time I had been debt free in years, sober and clear, and what felt like the perfect time to revisit my longing for deeper understanding of this world and my place in it. I bought a 1-year visa and was open to the idea of letting this trip take over and guide me wherever I needed to go. I even had a thought of not returning because something magical would happen and I’d want to move to India! But as my 2-months approached, I realized I found what I needed.
More stories lead up to the telling of this story, as is the case with all of our journeys on this planet. We might forget that the planet also had a story long before we got here! We are made from the stories we share and from all the many relationships to people, places and things that we create. We don’t all need to have the same experiences, but experience may help us become more kind beings to ourselves and one another. For me, diving in for 2-months to India’s world of dichotomy advanced my spiritual quest in many unpredicted ways.
I had it in my mind that I would find my teacher by going to the original source of yoga. It could be in the form of a guru or a school or a region of India. I had been practicing yoga for years and I felt like it was time to dive deeper. I had enjoyed the teachers I’d been taking with in the Bay Area but nothing called to me as the right stop for immersing in a yoga teacher training. I was taking classes at the big studios, but somehow I knew that I didn’t want to build a lasting home there.
I wasn’t even certain I wanted to be a teacher, I just knew it was time to immerse more fully into the practice and teachings of yoga. After a career change away from modern dance, I knew that some new passion must emerge and carry me forward. And since I felt complete with dance, what was next? After India, I had accepted that many places I visited felt close to what I was seeking, but just not quite right. I found myself more and more enamored by the culture and land of India than I had expected. What I wanted was to visit various sacred areas more than find any one style of yoga. I was learning so much from traveling and hiking, taking music lessons and talking with vendors, appreciating the beautiful Ganga river in the north and being surprised by the not so beautiful Ganga river in other areas like Varanasi. Everything from pristine and sacred to filthy and unsafe existed in India and it was all teaching me more than I realized.
It wasn’t until 2009 that I was ready and even anxious to move forward with my practice and by chance found the 200-hour yoga teacher training at Satchidananda Ashram in July. Some part of me knew I had to choose somewhere or else I wasn’t going to get anywhere. The Integral Yoga practices and universal message of Peace by Swami Satchidananda called to me. Swami Divyananda was one of my primary teachers and continues to be an inspiration. The area of the ashram in Virginia, Yogaville was so beautiful and spacious, it was the perfect place to go. It’s been 20 years of practice and curiosity. And nearly 5 years since taking the leap to live yoga as a full-life practice. What would it be like to have hundreds of years, thousands of years, millions of years, billions of lives?… that’s what this earth story is all about.
We have the teachers of the Earth and Sky, the teachers of the stars and of space. But that’s sort of way out there so I’ll just recognize that we have everyday teachers in the lessons of life. We see where the brilliance of humanity has brought so much of the world closer together. And in the same breath, we see how we have also brutalized this most precious relationship with war, torture and slavery. And this is a forever tale of humanity, nothing new to see here. But we remind ourselves of this and work for greater changes when we reflect on the causes of war and other worldly harms. We see how the earth fights with us or more accurately, we fight with her natural tendencies. And may we be reminded that the Earth, our great teacher has been here for billions of years (estimated at 4.54 billion years) while we, as an evolving species are but a very, very new visitor at 5-7 million years ago. We are wreaking havoc in so many ways for being new visitors but certainly not capable of destroying her as much as we are capable of destroying ourselves.
We can search the surface of the world for life lessons or we can penetrate the surface of our ego and learn our unique lessons of life. Travel may help to trigger some of the inner work, so I figure we all do what we feel we have to do in order to feel alive and well. It’s been interesting to experience a full year without travel. For some of us, our livelihoods depended on it and I hope we start to see that industry come back and come back with further plans on how to reduce the carbon footprint. What we eat, what we buy, where we fly, how we spend our time on this Earth – it can make all the difference to a world of peace versus a world of war. It’s not up to the Earth, it’s up to us. For this month, make an attempt to reduce, reuse and compost. Recycling is a good habit to keep though much of that system is struggling to find the next process after China said no more. One of the main challenges with recycling is the level of contaminants in each pile. Throwing a half empty jar of peanut butter in the recycling bin isn’t the winning toss. It’s the bad apple of many similar bad apples in a batch of recyclables that contaminates it sending it all to the landfill. So I still say it’s useful to practice good recycling hygiene though. If we can follow the guidelines for proper recycling, I figure we’ll be building the right habits for when we get back on track. Again, the planet is just watching on, curious to see how much we expect her to figure it out, and she will. I think Mother Earth is more curious to observe how we’ll sort out our own messes!
