Maybe for the first time, I spent the Fourth of July with three Americans discussing politics (always a hot topic) and the world - we had two bottles of wine to keep us company and the discussion maintained a happy feel to it. We also had a gorgeous sunset, that I sadly did not take a picture of, because i was too busy enjoying it. But there's a picture above of what it looked it but this one I took from the balcony about 2 weeks back.
I have spent the last month and a half in France teaching yoga, discussing yoga, discussing sport, discussing passion for all things nature and food and it has been sublime. I'll speak about what I have been doing here in detail some other time. Today is a short post because we did manage to finish both bottles of wine and it is 11 pm - so, forgive me!
What I will about is a yoga class I attended with my friends here in Bergerac, in a gorgeous 18th century building converted to a lovely studio (sorry no pictures again) with a teacher called Patricia and the class was in French. Now I have spent a month and a half here and only now am i comfortable to speak the language without massacring it. Bergerac has weekly markets every Wednesday and Saturday - and my french speaking skills are all thanks to the cheese seller at these markets- he know i love cheese, he knows I understand french, so he goes into long discussions on how gorgeous the cheese is and manages to sell me a bunch of them every single time. I come home laden with these delicate packages of cheese- usually melting from the cycle ride back home at peak-heat hours of mid-day unable to contain my excitement.
I did two years of french in college - but our spoken practice was so minimal and such poor quality that I never developed the courage to speak it fluently - and hence never wanted to attempt speaking it at all. But now I have decided to head back and sign myself up for french language classes, so when I come back next year I can actually speak back to the cheese seller and buy more cheese. Goals.
Coming back to my yoga class in french - i was quite pleased with myself to understand 80% of the class - I remember getting confused with the word for neck, but everything else was pretty smooth - maybe yoga and yoga teachers do have a universal language that we all understand anyway.
In the class, Patricia said - Je suis ici et maintenant - and I suddenly went back to this song that comes to me whenever i hear the phrase. I can not remember the first time I heard it, whether in a cafe or a bookshop - but it immediately struck a chord with me and sometimes in shavasana i hear myself listening to this song in my head, with the voice in my head soothing me to an almost sleep state. I know for sure that i have spoken about this song in detail after one of my breakups in my blog.
Hearing Patricia say be here now in french suddenly made me realise how connected we are - I could immediately relate to her as a yoga teacher and as a fellow being. The depth with which she said those words told me that she was not just uttering them because that's what yoga teachers do, she said those words because she had lived through experiences that taught her the value in being here now.
I love that concept. Of course I worry about the future, about whether this journey of mine will be successful, of whether I will meet the man of my dreams, of whether I will continue to do the things I love doing when I am 80 years old. But sometimes, when I am conscious enough to pull myself back to stop & just be, i look up and look around and realise how gorgeous this moment is and how amazing it is to just be in it without expectations or without thinking about where i need to be next and how to get there.
One December I did not go home for Christmas and entire office was empty on December 24th - i should have ideally stayed home and enjoyed the day off (by working at home), but I had a friend who had put up Christmas decorations at the cafe at work and there was a gorgeous Christmas lunch planned with some friends - so I decided to go into work. And there was no work. Literally no work. Because the US was out of office and most of Singapore was out of office, so no emails & definitely no "ASAP" emails to respond to. I sat on a beanbag facing the window, looking at clouds go by - and I realised how beautiful that was - just to stop and stare outside the window - with nowhere to go and nothing to do. Je suis ici et maintenant.
I realised one of the things i terribly miss as a teacher is to be able to go to classes and be guided by my own teachers and practice. As a teacher you are constantly worrying about time and about how people might be feeling, if I am sticking to the sequence or not. I miss going to classes and being lead. I need to find that for myself in my new life. In fact one of the reasons I am slowly starting to get comfortable with money is because practicing with my teachers will involve going away on retreats and travelling and I will have to reimburse them - and I need money for that. If i see value in paying them for everything they teach me - I should be able to receive money for enabling that for others, without the guilt attached to it. I have a gorgeous book called - Awakening Shakti - the transformative powers of goddesses of yoga by Sally Kempton which speak about how invoking Lakshmi, the Goddess of wealth in your meditation practice will assist these kind of issues and I am trying to do that. Invoking Lakshmi.
Since I spoke about Shakti, I will end with this beautiful little piece of music about the devis in yoga.
May you all be able to convincingly say to yourself sometime soon, je suis ici et maintenant.
Bonne nuit
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