Another year older and what do you get? If you’re lucky, I believe you gain wisdom. What a year this has been! My 39th turn around the sun was a spectacular blend of amazing and painful. I taught hundreds of hours of yoga, built and developed this website, began my goal of publishing online classes, started my own yoga certification program, wrote a new manual, dissolved one business and started another. I got seriously injured, literally fell on my face (I have the scar to prove it), and battled internal and external demons for the freedom to be myself. I laughed, cried, stood on my own two feet, and learned to lean on others. I traveled farther and more often than I have in any other year on this earth. I worked…boy did I work! I broke down…boy did I break down! If I had to sum up the last year in a tag line it would be: when the student is ready, the teacher appears.
Those teachers came in so many forms! My close friends, my family, my husband have all given me amazing advice and support. They endured incessant phone calls, text messages, brainstorming, hand -wringing and freak outs. I would like to take a moment to thank them. I would be nowhere without my Tribe.
Injuries have also been a great teacher. They have shown me that I have an amazing power to deny reality. (feel free to stop nodding your head in agreement). They have also shown me that I am not as attached to this body as I had previously believed. There is a saying in Spanish "joven eres, y viejo serás". I came face to face with the fact that my yoga practice needed to develop past the physical. My meditation practice has become one of of the greatest gifts of this past year. I look forward to developing it in the years to come.
In the end I am reminded of this quote from Elizabeth Gilbert:
“…I’ve come to believe that there exists in the universe something I call “The Physics of The Quest” – a force of nature governed by laws as real as the laws gravity or momentum. And the rule of Quest Physics maybe goes like this: “If you are brave enough to leave behind everything familiar and comforting (which can be anything from your house to your bitter old resentments) and set out on a truth-seeking journey (either externally or internally), and if you are truly willing to regard everything that happens to you on that journey as a clue, and if you accept everyone you meet along the way as a teacher, and if you are prepared – most of all – to face (and forgive) some very difficult realities about yourself….then truth will not be withheld from you.” Or so I’ve come to believe.” Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat Pray Love.
First, you have to be brave enough to dream. Then, you have to be confident enough to believe, and humble enough to ask for help when you need it. My last bit of insight about this last year is that you have to be unapologetically authentic. The minute you become so, the universe will show you the way.
I can’t wait to see what this next year brings!
