Finding Sanctuary in the Heart

I hope everyone is healthy and finding ways to counter any fear or sense of powerlessness. In the midst of all the upheaval of the current global pandemic, attention is drawn away from our essence, and focused on our outer realms and survival. I hope you are finding ways to nurture your center, your heart, your diamond core sense of being.

I miss seeing many of you in class during this strange and scary pandemic. I miss a lot of things! These are the times when we need to settle our nervous systems and boost our immunity the most. There can be so many barriers to practicing yoga at home, and for this reason, I have begun creating accessible 5 minute yoga bites, accessible on my website.

At a class I was teaching last month, a woman with a stressful job asked me if there was something she could do for just a couple of minutes. This desire sadly reflected to me the quick fix, instant gratification nature of our culture. I could go on and on about this, and I thought about this a lot. Ancient traditions value putting the time in as a key to preparing oneself to receive the teachings. This _krama_, or sequence is a vital component of the path. As many of you know, I find immense value in the more esoteric practices, and want to make those teachings available the best I am able, but right now the simplicity of a short asana practice is potent and needed.

After pondering it a while, I came to the realization that, YES, of course there is something you can do in a couple of minutes. Everything has to originate from somewhere. There needs to be more access points for people to explore the benefits of complex wisdom traditions, to begin to attune to other ways of knowing, seeing, and being. When I really think about it, my personal practices can often be short as I adapt them to the rest of my life, but there is a certain timelessness when I really drop in. Although there is no one magic breath, or position, or meditation that will change everything in an instant, something that brings the practitioner into a state of connecting with our essence beyond identification with a job, title, or need to keep up an appearance, or with the limitations of body or age, or any of the things that impose the nature of reality on us from the outside. These doorways to the infinite allow us to drop these many layers of restriction, find sanctuary in the heart, and enhance our experience of embodiment in so many ways!