"I am not afraid of storms for I am learning how to sail my ship." — Louisa May Alcott

I’ve just come off of another breathtaking weekend with the brave and beautiful souls in my yoga teacher training. I’m still in my pjs curled up in a blanket on the couch though it is nearing noon. My kitty Autumn is sprawled out on our ottoman giving herself a bath with my legs stretched out beside her. Every few moments if I glance at her, she will stop her bathing and stare back at me with her sparkly green eyes—like a human. A drizzly, foggy landscape is to my right through our glass doors—our back porch seeming as if it were just painted with a thin coat of water glazing the grey, wooden boards. Chip Hartranft’s nuanced translation of The Yoga Sutra is sitting next to me, and my day calendar, too—nearly overflowing with the many activities and commitments to come in the weeks before summer’s arrival. My energy is still buzzing inside from the flood of information I received both from Chip himself as our guest teacher this weekend as well as from my very own inner teacher who showed up ready to witness as well. Sometimes I feel that I have come so far in my inner unfolding. Other times it seems that I have only just begun. I looked on with curiosity at what Chip decided to write in my book when he offered to sign my copy. “To Meghan, A new friend on this pathless path,” he wrote. At first, I couldn’t quite make out the word “pathless” in his inscription—the “a” only very lightly recorded, almost skipped over. When I did finally connect with what he had shared, his words resonated deeply with this sensation of having traveled far and having just begun—like the paradox of pure-awareness with its description of having no qualities at all.

Although I feel deeply joyful and immensely grateful this morning, I have been thinking about grief. On Sunday, there was a yoga class offered before our training would begin. Knowing that we would be sitting for many hours I felt compelled to attend the class, to interact with the soreness in my body that I felt from the previous day and clear my mind—making room for more input of the dense information in our studies. Leading the class was a teacher I had never met. He had trained with one of my teachers and so his way was somewhat familiar and very precise. He was warm and kind but very much offered a blank slate in his teaching. I was able to fall deeply into a meditative experience of my practice dropping my eyes closed and nearly forgetting there were others in the room—my breath became long and far reaching, the gripping I felt around my heart for leaving my boys on a Sunday began uncurling. It was a strenuous practice with a focus on hip and heart openings. Our hips being the primary home of historical pain, the heart the place where we retract when love feels withheld, I might have known what was to come.

We were nearing the end of our practice, my mind was still. Lying on our backs, the lights were dimmed. I noticed a space in the back of my throat begin to soften and tears slowly heating up and coming to the corner of my eyes, my face felt very full and warm. My heart seemed to grow larger and larger like a belt buckle was being undone from having been tightened around it. Waves of energy passed through me and I allowed them to arrive like a gushing river through a dam being opened knowing its way straight to the sea. I wasn’t thinking about anything or feeling sad, I was just allowing these ancient energies that I no longer needed to hold to come through me like a storm—though it wasn’t violent at all. I was perfectly quiet in all of this. It was incredibly freeing to let go and in the end there was one image that came before me. In my mind’s eye, I experienced a thin layer of glittery dusty rain falling away from my body and there grounded on the yoga mat in the silent studio, I could feel the dust settle around me and be absorbed right up by the earth beneath me in its infinite wisdom.