Every year during the second part of January we travel to the beach with my mom. Chris usually comes for most of the trip and my sister and brother join us for part of the time as well. This trip is one part family time, another part sun time, and still a third part book end to the previous year. 2014 was a journey in personal healing for me. It was not the first, and it will doubtful be the last, but it was chalk full of hard to swallow life experience that has left me more than a little wrung out, raw, and ready to move on. The intitiation of this most recent journey into deeper relationship with myself began during last years Beach Holiday. It was miserable weather. A real slap in the face for those of us travelling from the polar vortex of the upper midwest. But it was a perfect mirror for my insides at the time. Anyhow, the weather this year was glorious. And the sun shone on my mending heart in ways that make it feel just right to take a solid step into the new year. Hello 2015. I am ever so happy to meet you.
A few weeks ago, Maple's horseback riding teacher-and my friend, invited me along to see the movie Wild. I have not read the book. I had never heard of Cheryl Strayed. But my impression is that it is a universal story of our very human experience of walking through our own shadow as we navigate the path back to the Light. Cheryl Strayed wrote another book, tiny beautiful things. It is a compilation of the letters she recieved and the responses she penned as Dear Sugar- an advice columnist for The Rumpus. I devoured this book on my trip. There are many hidden and not so hidden gems in her writting but the one simple bit that I keep returning to is this:
"But the thing about rising is we have to continue upward; the thing about going beyond is we have to keep going."
I am in my own rising right now. My own going beyond. And as with most things, and much of what I intend to write about here, this feels like the path of practice to me. Much of what yoga is to me is found in the ways I continue, the shape of my keeping going. I do think that it is a path of wholeness. One where I hold the hands of all my parts- the ugly and treachorous along with the bright and bold- and walk forward toward the Light.