Home: Yoga with Jenn at Yoga Sol: Carson City, NV: March 15, 2016
It is said by the sages you can't compel grace to befall you, but you can prepare. Yoga is all about preparing for what is, the daily ongoings of life. If anything this winter tour has been an exercise in preparing for twists and turns and cold and dark. Just when I think I'm getting the hang of it all, I get the news my bestie Gary Horton passed away from a heart attack.
Nothing but nothing could prepare my heart for such pain.
Lucy and I packed our bags immediately and boarded the long sad trip home. Upon landing I have a text from Rick our tour manager with a picture of David in the hospital.
As I was rushing over to the American counter for an immediate trip back across country, it keeps getting worse. Scrolling my texts are urgent messages from friends asking how David is and what happened. I'm learning he collapsed on stage. David assured me he was dehydrated from the flu and nothing more sinister than that. He was checked out of the hospital just about the time I walked through the front door of Jan's house
Hugging Jan and holding each other heart to heart was at once one of the saddest and one of the most healing of my whole life. It was both, and it was everything.
Since Thursday I've been in shock, grief, and fear. The thought of any yoga was too scary for I knew it would hurt way to much. Not my hips, low back, shoulders or neck, but my heart. I eased into a gentle movement class on Saturday, and finally today, I made it back to my home studio.
Many times on tour I've been homesick and doing my best to learn the wisdom of the old saying, "home is where the heart is". And now that I"m here I don't feel at home because Gary isn't here.
I'm struggling to feel comfortable at home. Grief has lodged herself in my upper right S1 and my heart feels like a tightly wound up ball of yarn.
Camel pose was awesome medicine to start to unstick my pain. It seems the only way to open your heart to all that is happening is to...open your heart. Jenn moved us through wonderful preparations in lunges and shoulder openers, and counterposed Camel with a supported incline supine baddha konasana while she read Radiance Sutra 26 (trans. Lorin Roche)
The One Who is at Play Everywhere said,
There is a place in the heart where everything meets.
Go there if you want to find me.
Mind, senses, soul, eternity, all are there.
Are you there?
Enter the bowl of vastness that is the heart.
Give yourself to it with total abandon.
Quiet ecstasy is there -
and a steady, regal sense of resting in a perfect spot.
Once you know the way
the nature of attention will call you
to return, again and again,
and be saturated with knowing,
“I belong here, I am at home here.”
Answer that call.
There is a place in the heart where everything meets.
Go there if you want to find me.
Mind, senses, soul, eternity, all are there.
Are you there?
Enter the bowl of vastness that is the heart.
Give yourself to it with total abandon.
Quiet ecstasy is there -
and a steady, regal sense of resting in a perfect spot.
Once you know the way
the nature of attention will call you
to return, again and again,
and be saturated with knowing,
“I belong here, I am at home here.”
Answer that call.
The mantra I belong here, I am at home here is a good way to help turn the grief corner. As my teacher Ravi Ravindra says, its not so much about understanding the Truth, its about withstanding the Truth. I don't have the mojo yet so I'll keep preparing, and opening, and praying so that one day, God willing, I will be able to find a quiet home in my own heart again.