What might help?

2021-01-16

Happy New Year, one and all!!

Yes, it’s a bit past the usual time to greet each other for the New Year, but the way the winter holidays worked out this year, I am only just now feeling like I have really entered the new experience. Some of it is that the light is noticeably more abundant, some of it is the pace of events at work, and some of it is just the settling down of my own intentions for the next season or two.

I know that a lot of us are really struggling with this latest round in our struggle with SARS-CoV-2. I am hearing a lot more about difficulties with mental health, to say nothing of the greatly increased number of people I know who have had either direct or indirect experience with the disease. And to top it all off, we are rapidly approaching the one-year mark in this story. It’s a fact of our embodied mind that we are aware of the longer cycles of time on a level which is not fully conscious. Our bodies know that we have passed through the same long slow changes repeadtedly and it remembers what they felt like and adjusts expectations coming into the next cycle. Where were we this time last year? And then what happened? How is that coloring the way that I am looking ahead?

This matter of how the mind colors our experience is a central idea in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. And, as you might expect, I feel that the practices of Yoga are very helpful in dealing with times like these.

This time last year, I was freshly returned from a long training in Indonesia, and beginning to plan ways to share the new knowledge with you. And then we all had our plans hijacked. For me that meant learning to present the different aspects of Yoga online. So now, a year later, I find myself right back where I was in January of 2020, trying to figure out how to share a rich body of Yoga lore.

This time I want to ask you for help. I absolutely need help in understanding what interests you and what would help you the most as we (hopefully) finish up with Covid-19, and move on into the future that we hope for in 2021.

– D

This document was translated from L^AT_EX by H^EV^EA.