dear love, it's been a while, again..
when i started teaching on line more regularly in 2020 i also started writing every week to share the ever changing zoom schedule and the writing became more regular and sometimes interesting :) the numbers on my zoom classes have dwindled again, but i keep meeting people or hearing from them 'I'm not practicing yoga right now but please keep me on the list' :) so maybe its time to share again.
Yogis, Yoginis, and Readers of Blogs,
Dear Yogis and Yoginis
How many ways can I tell you I love you? Maybe screwing up in love is one of the best ways to get to know yourself and others, but oy vey it hurts. Wether it’s family or friends, romantic or not, why it is so hard to express it sometimes and why is it so hard to hear it sometimes? Maybe because love lives beyond the bondage of physics and rationality. There is no satisfying equation to master or guarantee love, so we all get to know it through each other in our life and our communities. I imagine the variations and permutations of expressing love between two unique individuals are as many as stars in the sky. One man I knew said I love you to his wife for the first time when she was giving birth to their daughter, another didn’t mean it till they had children. A woman I knew only ever said ditto when others said it out loud to her. Still others tell everyone all the time, some never say it and one teacher described how much he liked telling strangers in the grocery store line ‘i love you’! Each one of us carry stories of love, some light, some dark, all revealing our tenderness and vulnerability globally in success or regret. Each story offers another way that humans try to love each other. How many times did we miss hearing it or recognising it as love? How many promises have we broken and excused because there was love involved? Or how foolishly we have mistaken craving possession of something for love? Or just wanted it too be true despite knowing it wasn’t? Once I lied and echoed back ‘i love you too, even though i knew they meant it that way and i didn’t. Even as I played dumb I knew I had lied and watched for years as that lie ricocheted through their tender places ripping and wounding again and again like a piece of invisible shrapnel. My inner laziness and lie lived like as a wound in the other. Before this experience i believed i would suffer my own lazinesses or short comings, not other humans. But we are in this together. Do you play games of guessing or fantasy to make up little measures to see if someone really loves you? Like if they forget this then that means they don’t love me or if they don’t show up like this at that time it means their love isn’t real? One of my deepest regrets was trying to withdraw my love from someone for their lack of integrity, but the joke was on me, the relationship disintegrated but my love remained, roaming my dreams and stalking my heart, and yes teaching my so much through my own suffering.
In the world of love we have blundered most of all and still it’s where our salvation lives. Love is our practice, our collective earth co-creation. We’re born into, thrown into it, seduced into it and discover life giving vitality from love! Even when too much time is cloistered away from it, our whole being suffers. Living is a commitment to keep practicing in the mystery school of love. We fail all the time when we commit to a practice. His holiness the Dali lama even talks about failing at meditation, and any musician knows that they only master a piece after hours and hours of practicing, in other words after hours and hours of failing. Yoga is no different, it isn’t a performance of mastery, it is the practice of an amateur, even after years of practicing. While we can’t successfully opt out of the mystery school of love, the things that help us through it are optional. You don’t have to practice yoga, meditation or kindness, but you are free to. When you channel your will and return to your practice again and again you also strengthen your enthusiasm and perseverance for life and in love. We can become more loving and kind through practice, through trying, through messing up and trying again, but it requires our participation, honesty, risk and courage. may you find the things that help you love more generously, more wildly, more kindly!
Keep your practice up and your heart on,
with lot o love, Rachel
