Oct 19th

October 19-
This is our last week at the yoga retreat. I honestly cannot believe it. It is also hard to imagine that Lynn and I both survived these challenging weeks. It was so much more challenging than I had prepared for. I guess that you can’t prepare for something like this. I caught myself totally immersed at times… there were moments in the beginning, and those moments stretched into minutes and finally into hours where I lost track of what was going on in the outside world. I was only in the present. I was completely focused on what I was doing. I poured my heart into the yoga, and one day I realized that the magical thing about fully utilizing every ounce of your heart is that critical mind cannot survive in the present. It is only living for the past or the future. There is no place for the worry in the present moment. There is no anger, no frustration, there is no pain. In the present you can only experience the energy of your surroundings. There was such a change from the way my mind worked in the beginning here. I was totally focused on what came next, on what I needed to do in the following days. Slowly I began to realize that there was nothing to do except give your full attention to the moment you are in. There was nothing that needed your attention more. Meditation was hard in the beginning. I couldn’t imagine my mind more active then in those 20 min of mediation. I thought of every single person I knew. My mom, my dad, Adam, Anna, Lexia and Tavish, my gram, my Aunt Suz, all my uncles and aunts, my friends from school, my yoga teachers, my professors, my preceptors... the list continues. I tried to think about what life would hold for me when we got MN and WI in Dec. I imagined my job, my house, my family. I thought of every single thing I could. It was scary for have the mind so quiet. My "ego" hated it… and slowly I began to see the beauty, the absolute freedom in letting your mind become silent. Eventually I looked forward to those hours where I could just be. I loved the feeling of the energy flowing through your body, finding your true energy center. I’ll admit that sometimes it was a treat to instead of totally quieting the mind, to simply focus on someone you love and try to send them as many positive emotional vibrations as you could. IT became a state of prayer for me. I know that I will keep meditation in my life forever. After feeling the effects of meditation, the peace, the perspective I couldn’t imagine life with out it.