My heart is full of gratitude for all your support and all the love I have received from so many of you. Although this is a long process until full recover, last week was an inflection point and news started to be good. (If you have no idea what I am talking about you can read my first blog about this process HERE)
A few weeks ago, as I was listening the monthly webinar from a course I am taking with my teacher Sianna Sherman (urbanpriestess.com) I felt overwhelmed by frustration. It was the beginning of the Leo Moon and, with it, the time of the wild women archetype, with whom I have always felt very identified. An invitation to play and enjoy the wildness of summer and nature, while I was feeling like a feline in a cage. It was also the Celtic Holiday of Lammas, that represents the first harvest, the harvest of the grain. The moment to start collecting the fruits we have planted over the year. Contemplating my plans and projects, and the state of immobility I was in, I felt deeply disappointed, as if my crop had been swept by a hail, by a hurricane storm. I cried a lot. Tears are like sea water. The Ocean is what most connect me to my wildness. Tears turns frustration into surrender and, from that place, it is easier to feel gratitude for everything I have. I committed to connect with my wild woman to go inside and explore and play and enjoy the situation.
Some spiritual masters say that everything that happens is an answer to our prayers and our deepest desires. So I kept asking to myself why I had wished for such an intense injury. The first answer was very obvious. I really needed to rest. To have time without traveling and rest deeply. But I knew there was something else.
I went back in time to contemplate my initial intention when I started practicing yoga in 1997. Actually I was never thought that it will become such a physical practice. I wanted to feel well. To transform the sutile but constant insatisfacción and melancholy that I felt since I was a child into that inner peace that yogis talked about. Soon after I found Ashtanga yoga. Three years later Anusara yoga®. Asana became my main yoga practice. Meditation came later. Ok. Now asana is gone for a while. If you are a yogi you know what that means, Not easy. During the first days I could not even taken any of the restorative poses I know. For weeks the only possible one was Supta Badha Konasana, with pillows to hold my legs. None of the advanced asanas that I used to practice often could help me in this moment. Meditation and mantras could. Thank you!! I looked up into my journal the list of intentions for this year. To deepen my pranayama practice, to study Yoga Nidra…. Interesting!. I could not but smile. I created a daily sadhana that I have been adapting week by week. Everyday I did my yoga practice. And for a longer time than ever.
Another one of my intentions was to know and work on my shadow more deeply. I have been doing this type of work during the last years but I had the feeling that I needed to go deeper (as it is a time we do not need it). A hot spot for me is reactivity. One of the persons that is a clear mirror for me with this subject is my sister. I got injured in Spain, when I was spending a few days on holidays with all my family. All this time I have been in my home town, with my mom, in the place I grew up. And I have been totally depending on my sister and her car. I have spent with her more time time than in many years. I can tell it has not been easy. Sometimes when I am with her I feel I behave again as a little girl. Ans I am not exaggerating when I say that the inner work with my reactivity has been much more intense than the physical exercise for my leg rehabilitation. As a powerful synchronicity, the most difficult day, when I had to take a no return decision about getting surgery or not, the person that was there with me was my sister. I feel all the inner work has given rich fruits. Our relationship has changed over these weeks and now it is a more clear reflection of the love we feel for each other. Mmmm… harvesting.
The teachings of yoga say that the ego (the part of ourselves responsible for the feeling of individuality and separation and from which we live our daily life with our plans and our schedules) does not like chang. They also say that the Self thrives in change. This is the soul´s journey, sometimes hard. Yoga promises that the fruits are always sweet.
I also wanted more time to write and I am having it. I am curios to see how another one of my intentions will manifest after the big tear in my hamstrings: refining my Uttanasana (standing forward bend). I have until December 31st. I promise a picture.