It's odd to be driving around, seeing things that I've seen hundreds or even thousands of times and recognising them, but also feeling like I've never seen them before.
I feel like since I've decided to leave St. Louis this is exactly what's happening to me. I'm sitting in this room in a friends house on a futon that I'm sleeping on that's unfamiliar to me. It's damn comfortable though lol, but not mine. In a room with not too much stuff in it but only a small amount of books in the corner and clothes in the closet are mine. Oh, and this lamp I bought when Tom and I moved in together back in October of 1999. Somehow this damn lamp has followed me from that apartment to Collinsville, to when I lived with Hugh and Steve, to my own apartment, to all five places I moved around to last year and is still here with me. My car is gone, so I'm driving a friends car that's very comfy and has ac in it and so I'm feeling foreign as I drive it around, it's nice in this heat to have ac too, don't get me wrong, I've just not had it in my car in over 8 years!
So all of my circumstances are altered and so I am seeing things, the same things that my mind is acknowledging that it recognizes, from the most different perspective than I've had before. I've lived here for a very long time and had the same "stuff" for a very long time, so have always recreated the same sort of little comfort zone in each place I've lived in these last 16 years. But I've swiped that rug out from under myself.
All this root chakra stuff being stirred up has also helped my very low back go out, which is no fun. It went out on me in Mysore as well my second trip, that was even worse! But to have it go out just when your practice was soaring sucks. I was very distracted and thinking of things instead of lifting my pelvic floor and the deeper inner muscle actions that affect moola bandha and crack, crack, crack. Three cracks. Now it's a mess. I'm feeling better. Had a chiropractic adjustment that got the nerves freed up, they were being pinched, and now it's just cranky. So I'm practicing less and slower but it's working in getting it all where it needs to be. We learn from injury, especially when it was something we did to ourselves! I'm learning, and learning and learning. And will be better for Mysore this time around than maybe ever.
So that pain adds to the surreal quality that life is already taking on around me, giving things more brightness, more color, making scents stronger and sensations warmer, or colder.
I read this passage this morning in one of the books I'm reading about experiencing the heart space. It also was an exercise in going deep within, feeling the void that exists at your centre, at the centre of all things, and then when I came out of the exercise I was also seeing things from that quiet, empty, dark space. Not that things were darker. They actually were brighter, the heat from the sun that was beating down on my flesh didn't feel hot and wasn't making me sweat anymore. The bright green of the surrounding trees and the grass was slicing through me. The smells of the creek at the park I was at were intense and took me away to the Ganga, which I've been thinking about so much.
It seems source is coming through me more and through the experiences I'm having in life this week I'm becoming more and more aware of source in every situation I find myself in. It's very interesting. I'm enjoying it. These new eyes. Or should I say this new vision, same old eyes, but seeing with a new vision. Feeling with a new depth. Experiencing with a different gauge.
I taught a private a couple weeks back and mostly focused on the breath with her, which is really the ashtanga way to do things, but then introduced movement along with the breath and when she left she was teary eyed and spoke of how she was seeing all the things in the neighbourhood differently. Colours were brighter, the sun was lighter, just everything. Maybe I'm experiencing a new level of this, which happened to me many years ago when I began living this yoga we call Ashtanga.
I want to bring this quality to everyones life, are you in? Come see me soon!
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