I’m feeling a shift…
It seems hard to believe that I’m actually saying this, as it has felt for so long that nothing would ever change. But yes, it’s true – I am feeling differently and my life is different than it was at the beginning of this year.
For starters the job has changed and for a while that felt like the real heart of the issue and if that would just change then everything else would shift. While there definitely ARE shifts that come with a career transition, as it happened, the changes in ME started happening before the job change.
I’m beginning to understand what it feels like to live from the heart, even though my brain is still trying to make sense of what that means. My sweet brain that has done SO much for me over the years really wants to know exactly what this “living from the heart” is going to look like – how do we define this please?? (and while we’re at it – why the heck is this so important anyways???).
HOWEVER – as my body worker/therapist told me today: “You don’t get to cinnamon (heart) by adding more cayenne (brain).”
LOVE this!!
Thankfully, through support of an amazing yoga community, a tremendous home environment that supports spiritual exploration and whose other members are willing to take a deep dive into these conversations and spend MUCH time supporting each other in the process, and many friends who have supported me along the way… I’ve come to see a few new things about myself.
More importantly I’ve come to believe these new aspects of myself and embrace the potentiality of what could be – even if that vision feels so far off.
So much more to say and I’m working on making the commitment to putting these thoughts to (electronic) words more regularly, but for now the most immediate gem I want to share is the power of mantra.
Over the past three or four months I have started to incorporate mantra into my life, both as a part of my meditation practice and also at various times throughout my day. I now have the Gayatri Mantra on a repeating loop and listen to it OFTEN. Today I listened to it (and changed along, of course) my entire drive home through a bit of traffic that otherwise would have stressed me out. Instead I kept hoping I would get through one more loop.
Obviously I’m not the first person to discover mantra, but I am very amazed at how different I feel in my body since starting to use mantra more regularly. And since that ole heart is in the body, it seems like a good way to get to a stronger sense of living from the heart.
Go figure.