The View from where I stand

So, just like we have been taught in our yoga practice; that the riskiest poses, the ones that take great effort, are also the most healthful for our bodies and ultimately, our spirits, so it is with our promises. A promise, or commitment, if meaty enough, once fulfilled often as the potential for life changing results.

However, what keeps coming back to me about this whole journey of The Promise Land, is the scope of our promises. Just like Sarah, Liz, Vicky and so many of us have said – you gotta keep it simple and you gotta do the work.

Sometimes it feels as if these big, grand sweeping vistas of promises (and intentions) are just that – Grand. They’re too big and esoteric and expansive and seemingly too risky to get to. It doesn’t mean they are not attainable.

You can look out across a field, or a sweeping plain, and be drawn into the expansive, endless horizon and all the possibilities that it presents in your metaphor, or you can take a moment and look down at your feet. You can look down at the ground beneath you and see the phat (I have always wanted to use that word as I expand my American vocabulary) blades of grass & the sea of dandelions and ladybugs (if you’re in Wilton of course) and all the action and activity at work, going on to create the possibilities that exist in that horizon. But they have to exist together.

So many of us spend so much time looking at the ‘big picture’, going for gold – staring at the horizon thinking of all the possibilities. Our ‘promises’, or our intentions, can sometimes be written in that horizon and yet, if we just spent a little moment bringing our attention to the ground beneath us, staying close to what we can touch we will see such great beauty, and intelligence and just as much possibility.

It is in the eyes of your children. It is in the smile of a stranger. It is in the kindness you bestow on someone you didn’t want to. It is in turning off your cell phones and listening to the birds (or ordering your coffee and actually engaging your barista). It is in stopping and asking yourself about your day, not waiting for someone else to ask you. It is in resisting the urge to talk negatively about someone else and focus on something beautiful about ourselves. It is in stopping in front of that homeless person and looking at him/her in the eye, and saying hello. It is actually stopping to take a breath.

I made a promise to get really clear on what I want in life (and in my days) and then ask for it. That is a big promise, and it has all the fixings to be vague and esoteric but I am starting at my feet. I am working every day at bringing my focus, and my attention to the ground beneath me. I will look up at the sweeping views, the horizon – that has its place – it all exists together - but I just start with what I want for Breakfast ;)

I have quickly realized that what I want doesn’t always present itself for me to ask for it, sometimes the work comes in me saying no, and sometimes the work is someone else’s no to me, but I have to trust that both are always my Yes. I am staying within sight of my possibilities, my promise, but my work is on the ground. Beneath my feet. In my heart. And that can be the riskiest pose of all.

I read this in class yesterday and this is one of my favorite excerpts from one of my favorite books: The Last Song of Dusk by Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi

‘In some fundamental way, we are all in total control of our destiny. Because destiny is what we build each day with our correct action. With our work, our Dharma, with the actions that are in complete abeyance to the Law of our Being. Now that’s precisely what makes it so crucial that you should never again see your life in terms of one singular existence, but rather try and imagine as if it were like the water…….see that rain? Well our life is like the water that tumbles from the sky and into the stream….and then some day, the stream arches into the river. Running with a mad fever, this river heads for the ocean. Where it rests and plays. See? But before you know it, that same bead of water will rise up from the ocean’s chest and soar into the great old sky to become the cloud it came from…and so, life starts over & over again. Thunder unfrees the drop, lightening announces its return and the earth sighs at its inception…oh, the old sky we all are, and the ocean we will always be’

Lyn G.