Everything’s Coming Up Roses
I've always been a little dense when it comes to recognizing patterns that show up around us. The spiritual side of yoga has always been the hardest for me to access, as it is - I think - for a lot of people. But there are opportunities for even the most skeptical yogi to learn to listen to whatever it is that might be guiding us.
All week I have had the concept of opening stuck in my head. It started on Tuesday, when I built my practice around heart openers, mostly because my shoulders have been so tight from all of the baby carrying that goes on around here. That said, I have found it impossible to ignore the clarity and space that I experience after that kind of practice, even if my focus was primarily physical. There is something exhilarating in the inherent vulnerability of heart-openers. It wakes you up. Eyes wide open, you just feel more receptive to things. It felt so good that I tried to incorporate that openness into the rest of my week - breathing deeply and standing tall. In a class I took yesterday we were prompted to chose a mantra. In advance of the "Sunday Scaries", I chose CALM. But before the opening centering was over it had inadvertently switched to inhaling O and exhaling PEN. I spent an hour and fifteen minutes breathing myself open.
Without any of this in mind, last night at dinner, we were talking about how roses are really going wild in our town this year. Looking at the bushes in my yard blooming in unprecedented numbers, something dawned on me. Maybe there really was some greater force putting the message to OPEN into my head.
We move with the seasons. Consciously or not, we take our cues from the same force that drives the natural world around us. We're all stardust. And this week it was as though nature was calling to the roses, signaling to them that it was their time to unfurl, and I had been hearing the message along with them, subconsciously integrating it into my daily life until it was impossible to ignore.