Aug
Something truly miraculous has happened.
I am riding a new wave.
It all began when I took Kofi Busia’s Yoga workshop, July 19-22nd. We practiced in the sanctuary of the Fleisher Art Memorial here in Philadelphia, and what better place to reach a transcendent state than in a house of worship?
The two definitions of what I am experiencing are here below, and while they describe in concrete terms what has happened to me, they can’t come close to communicating the kind of powerful flow of energy that courses through me minute by minute now. They can’t explain that I feel more grounded in myself than I ever have … that I feel like I am somehow no longer of this earth, but instead, flying inside on these currents I have created. Even those flying dreams I have from time to time, those dreams that make me want to return to slumber so that I can convince myself to take off again can’t come close to making me feel the way I do. And as a buddhist, while I try to practice detachment, and am successful every now and then, I can honestly say that my relationship with attachment is evolving; I feel that I can both savor the moment and let it go at the same time. New. This is new. This is a new place, and this new place features new dimensions of existence, like another planet with new terrain to explore- the possibility to experience bliss and hope, but know well, deep inside that everything is ephemeral and that it is wisest to relish each moment without assigning to it anything more than our most subtle awareness and appreciation for what it is. And in the same breath, to be able to allow myself every hope and wish and know that I have the power to make them all real. The only thing standing between me and what I long for is my doubting mind and the sludgy energy that the doubting mind creates.
Hope and love are the rays of sun that literally burn through the clouds in the mind to reveal what is real and what is possible, and since July 22nd, I am filled with gratitude that overflows its banks- a kind of grateful that stems from an awareness of myself and my power that I have never felt before. Thanks to a magical confluence of elements, and definitive choices I made, taking myself places I knew I needed to go, informed by my deep inner wisdom, I went from being stuck, in a dark, frustrated place, to standing on a summit, breathing clean, crystalline air.
“Transcendence - the state of excelling or surpassing or going beyond usual limits; going beyond, and ’self-transcendence’ means going beyond a prior form or state of oneself.
I have gone beyond the prior state of myself. And oh GOD, how I want to kiss the ground because of it.
This past week I was at Canyon Ranch in the Berkshires. What a beautiful, gentle place, there in those motherly mountains of Massachusetts … I went for a walk yesterday on the grounds and found myself at a crossroads in front of a babbling brook. I was suddenly overcome with emotion, and the only way I can describe the feeling is by describing what happened in my stomach … I felt it rise and expand in an instant– it swelled with a kind of mini-explosion of joy that flooded my entire system, and then washed over me the way the water in the stream below me was washing over the river rocks. I was immersed in a sensory bath– the sun on my skin, and sparkling through the trees, dappling the forest floor, the pungent smell of winter becoming spring mud, coming alive again, birthing … the gorgeous, calming sound of the brook, playing its way down over the rocks into a larger source, its destiny someplace far away and of course, the breeze blowing through my hair and cooling the tears on my cheeks that were streaming down into my mouth– and then the taste of those salty tears. All such a cycle, all so connected, no separation between my tears and the water flowing through that brook. No separation between my skin and the air around me, the sun on my body, the rich smell of the earth I was standing on.
