Going Deeper

After the first night of yoga teacher training, I had a very vivid dream. I can still see it in my mind:

In this dream I woke up in the middle of the night and went to the bathroom sink to wash my hands. I watched the water wash down the drain, but the sound it made seemed strange. It was deep. A trickling that seemed to drip down much deeper than expected. I bent down to pull aside the curtain that I assumed covered the pipes and such under the sink but what I discovered was a whole new world. The water in the sink was dripping down into a succession of bowls- beautiful, earthy, thick stone bowls of various sizes were magically suspended in a seemingly haphazard way, but perfectly designed. The water dripped from one bowl into the next. Down and down it dripped, from bowl to bowl, further and further down until the light faded and I could no longer see the bowls- I only knew that they were there by the hollow dripping sound echoing back to me from the abyss.

I awoke feeling like my whole world just shifted. And it did. The deeper I go into my yoga training, the more I think back to that dream- that first understanding that I am now embarking on new territory.

Greeting the world with the spirit of openness, every new experience brings new understanding, a new shift of perspective. But these shifts can only come when we invite them in.

Want to invite your own shift? The next time you go to your yoga class, instead of moving through the postures in the same way you always do, try something different: Don’t focus on the physical shape of the form so much, focus on the feeling of the shape. Let your mind move away from judgement of “what this should look like” and let it move toward how the posture makes you feel, what thoughts it brings to the surface. Be aware how you are using your yoga practice…. is it just for physical movement, or is it to move you deeper?