Kino MacGregor

This past weekend I spent with some great friends and with aforementioned young lady. She's become someone I admire and who inspires me in ways I never thought would be able to happen.

I used to think no one younger than me could possibly teach me anything, I guess I'm old enough now to know better lol, and have embraced what this lovely, on the inside and out, woman has to share.

I also had a bit of hard time for the silliest reasons. Comparison, something which I'm not prone to do and therefore almost never do. But when I was there this weekend, and before when I read her mini bio book Sacred Fire, I became . . . jealous, maybe? No, not jealous, envious. Here's why...

We began the practice of Ashtanga Yoga at almost the same exact time, I was 30, she 21 I think. But she took the horse by the reigns and found a good Mysore class, learned a lot there and went even further and went to India to study with Guruji (K. Pattabhi Jois) and began a process of learning that I only dreamed of doing.

I embraced it to the degree I could at the time and drove to Boulder, CO, to study with Guruji on one of his tours and decided that I was going to go the following year to India and leave work and be there for as long as I could. I allowed things in my life to stop me though, and didn't forge ahead as I'd planned to. I'd planned to because never before in my life had something make me feel like this yoga, it was amazing to me and I was in love with it. Problem being I was also in love with someone who was a practical thinker and who had no intention of helping me figure out how to get there, and I allowed him this role in my journey, so NOT his fault.

So, again in 2002 when I retired from the corporate world and had a severance package (and was single again) decided, okay, now I'm going to do it! So I look online only to find out that Guruji and Sharath were on tour and would be the entire summer, so I said fuck it and bought a ticket to Maui to study with him there and decided to stay for a whole 5 weeks so I could enjoy Maui and study with Nancy Gilgoff as well. Neither of which I have any regrets about and I still have a great friendship with Nancy to enjoy too.

Anyhow, advance a few years and I was working part time at the St. Louis Bread Co and teaching little Mysore style classes in Collinsville, IL, which were doing pretty well and I loved teaching this style of yoga in this format. It is what I was born to do. I'm just plugging away at my own home practice and teaching and living, not thinking about it at all. Then the itch starts to hit me again in about 2006-7, so I went to the Ashtanga pre-conference at the Yoga Journal Conference in Estes Park, CO. Loved it, it was awesome, but I couldn't see a clear way to make India happen, then I met Desiree Rumbaugh, started learning Anusara and healing parts of my body that needed healing, then I started practicing Kundalini Yoga as well more often ( I had been practicing it as long as the Ashtanga but only once a week on my day off, this time I got into it heavily and kept going. The energy working aspect of it was healing me in many other ways). So got further sidetracked away from my original Ashtanga path and almost left it completely, only to come back to it at the behest of friends once a week in late 2011, then fully 3-5 times a week in February of 2012 and fully again 6 days a week in April/May of that same year.

Then I met Kino in May of 2012 as well but it wasn't until going back to Chicago to see her again this year that that little demon on my shoulder was whispering about looking at where I could've been and such and such. That's all nonsense, I am where I am and my path brought me here, and she is where she is and we are two different people.

So now, I want to go to India again, this winter, December through February, to study in Mysore with Sharath and learn and learn and learn. If I eventually earn my authorization and further to my certification in the process, so be it, but otherwise I'm just in it for the learning and the growth and the yoga of it.

I love the asanas in this practice, they are like nothing else, I want to dig deep into them and allow them to move energy through me, moving past and through any blocks, emotional, energetic or otherwise, that I may have. I want to learn Sanskrit from Jayashree and Narsimhan in the afternoons and I want to interact with the Indian people and adapt to their way of life for the time that I'm there.

I'm drawn to this as if I've lived there in other lives and therefore tend to believe I did. I mean sometimes I can feel and smell things that I know are totally Indian and I've never experienced here in America.

So, I'm putting it out Universe. I want this. The thought of it makes me ecstatic, lets do this!!!