Unexplored Depths

It has been said we know more about the moon than we know about our oceans, with a vast 95 percent left still unexplored.  Today as we ventured out over the Pacific seas to watch the languid movements of humpback whales, I was reminded of the vast expanses of our own individual consciousness and how much remains unexplored within us.  

Now on the fourth day of our retreat, we are dropping ever more into the depths of our breath through both movement and stillness.  The foundation of yoga---a platform built on awareness---reveals what lies beneath all the limiting concepts of who we believe ourselves to be; this power is at the center of yoga’s longevity.  In the modern world where complexity is often mistaken as superior, how could something as simple as intentional breathing be so transformational?  Where the multi-tasking domain of modernity fractures and divides, yoga unifies.  Each time we draw the mind back to the pure sensation of movement or to the ceaseless flow of breath, we experience both simplicity and profundity.   The Hawaiian greeting of aloha, used both for hello and goodbye, translates literally as “sharing of the sacred breath.”  We breathe and we remember who we are.  We dive into the unfathomable depths of who we can become.

   

On the second day of the year, an unusual storm swept in from California turning the sunlit southern route to Truth or Consequences, NM into a hazardous winter wonderland.  Our participants for our seventh annual "Breathe New Life Into Your Life" retreat---who were traveling down that day---had their work for the weekend cut out for them.

Having survived their traveling travail unscathed, they turned up to their first practice primed.  At our intention-setting ceremony, which followed our catered celebration the first night of the retreat, these dauntless souls poured forth their hopes for a new flow in their lives. We set out on our weekend expedition to tap new sources of inspiration and give rise to the inner ease that can only come from understanding and self-acceptance.

We watched our students struggle, open, and inquire as these reliably penetrating practices smoothed their rough edges and their breath came to sit with them like an old friend.  Even after all these years of teaching, I marvel at the power yoga, breath and meditation have to dislodge fossilized ways of being and bring resolution to tenacious internal conflict.  Our students are impressive, curious and trusting and Marisa and I continue to grow in our respect for them.  Offering these retreats, truly a labor of love, is also a privilege to articulate and illuminate for others these ancient, sacred techniques.  We are bearers of wisdom which we ourselves have uncovered, yet not without the guidance of our own teachers and all the others who have come before us.