SOL Yoga Centres - Latest Blog Entries

2012: The Age of Water

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 16:06:00 -0600

What is called in new-age lexicon 'the age of aquarius', is called by Charles Eisenstein 'the age of water'.

Water is, and always has been, showing us the Way of living in harmony with the cycles of life, in abundance, in interdependence.

CYCLICITY: “You can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.” was Swami Satchitananda's famous teaching. Yoga teaches us that there is a constant flux in our lives, in our emotions, in our thoughts. Balance is not a static point but rather a graceful navigation of the ebb and flow that we experience. If we can approach the waves as non-problematic, even as opportunities, then our enjoyment of life will soar. There is a mysterious, even magical, timing that orchestrates the unfolding of our days, to be in harmony with this natural force is a truly worthy practise. Remember that at the peak of the wave, you are on the precipice of coming back down and at the very bottom you are about to move on up. In our current epoch of creative change and course correction, it is vital that we hone our surfing skills. Pay attention, breath, stay open, flow and look to mama ocean as a teacher.

PROVIDENCE (origin is in Old English, meaning to be taken care of and provided for): Our imprisonment in mind and the illusory separate self has entrained us to anxiety and scarcity. Happily, the prison door is not locked and we can walk out right now and claim our birthright of at-oneness and abundance. Nature (and water) is provident, unless we try to control it and monetize it because of our misidentification with the illusion of separation and scarcity. The belief in our disconnection leads to a deep emptiness, a modern existential malaise that only unity wakes us up from. It is time to ask ourselves what is a beautiful, fulfilling simple life. It is time for sufficiency and a life lived in accordance with natural laws. Watch how water gives to us unconditionally and take responsibility for taking care of the Earth in turn. The reward will be contentment.

INFINITE RENEWAL:

“When our water here

becomes saturated with pollution,

it gets led back to the original water, the ocean.

After years of receiving starlight,

the water returns, sweeping new robes along.

Where have you been? In the ocean of purity.

Now I am ready for more cleaning work.

If there were no impurity, what would water do?

It shows its glory in how it washes a face,

and in other qualities as well,

the way it grows the grass

and lifts a ship across to another port.

When the river slows with the weight of silt

and corruption, it grows sad and prays,

Lord, what you gave me I gave others.

Is there more? Can you give more?

Clouds draw water up to become rain;

the ocean takes the river back into itself.

What this means is

we often need to be refreshed.

Water is the story of how we are helped.

The qualities of water are showing us

how we move inside grace.

-Rumi

We are made of water – over 70% of us is H20 – and that means we too can we renewed again and again.

And then we can help. Truly graceful!

The Gift of Waiting

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 14:56:00 -0600

"Today like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened.

Do not open the door to the study and begin reading.

Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.

There are hundreds of ways to kneel

and kiss the ground."

-Rumi

What can we each contribute to a more beautiful world?

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 15:04:00 -0600

These thoughts from Charles Eisenstein's book "Sacred Economics" inspire me today:

"We are here to create something beautiful...the truth is that more for you is not less for me; the truth is that what I do unto you, so I do unto myself; the truth of living is to give what you can and take what you need.

....and we can start doing this right now.

When we realize that life itself is a gift and that we are here to give ourselves, we are free. After all, what you have taken in this life dies with you. Only your gifts live on.

What do we imagine to be the source of what we give? Ourselves? No. Life itself is a gift, life and all that nurtures it.

Fear of receiving is also ultimately fear of giving. Together, they are a fear of life, of connection. To give and to receive, to owe and be owed, to depend on others and be depended on --- this is being fully alive.

Gifts, along with stories, are the threads of relationship, of community. The attitude of the giver: 'I give to you freely and trust that I will receive what is appropriate, whether from you or from another in our gift circle' strikes a deep chord.

We are here to give, to create that which is beautiful to us: it will keep us light and free, and we know that as we give, so we shall receive. We are born into gratitude, and born into the need and desire to give.

Let us look at the world with eyes of 'What opportunity is there to give?' and 'How may I best give my gifts?' Hold that intention in mind and unexpected opportunities arise. And quickly, any situation in which we are not giving our life gifts towards something that is good become intolerable. Bow into service each day.

Albert Einstein says: 'Strange is our situation here upon earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to a divine purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that we are here for the sake of others.'

Our hearts tell us that a more beautiful world is possible. Let us trust this knowing, hold each other in it, and organize our lives around it.

Shall we settle for anything less than a sacred world?"

With gratitude to Charles Eisenstein for his inspiration to live more simply, to be more mindful of our deep connection with family, community and the earth, and to understand that each one can contribute to a more beautiful, balanced world. Namaste.

The Yoga of Poker

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 08:41:00 -0500

Walking through the woods of Connecticut, immersed in philosophic discourse, I found myself quoting Kenny Rogers:

“You got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em.

Know when to walk away, know when to run

You never count your money, when you're sittin' at the table.
There'll be time enough for countin', when the dealin's done.”

With a wink and nod to my Alberta roots where line-dancing to this song was mandatory phys.ed curriculum, this is rich teaching on life and yoga. I often draw comfort from the poker metaphor when I am having a challenging day here in Earth-school. It is not the cards I am dealt but what I do with them that matters. I create my reality through my perception and my perception is malleable through deep mental, emotional, physical and spiritual work. Taking responsibility for what I do with what I am experiencing allows me to reclaim my power and this feels good.

Kenny takes the poker metaphor even deeper. He captures the timeless wisdom of being a warrior of discernment. When is it time to stand my ground and be fierce? When is it time to let go and move on? The answer is, of course, always within me, sometimes right at the surface, sometimes so deep that I doubt that it’s there.

I have just returned from the first module in a yearlong apprenticeship in Integral Psychotherapy with Robert Masters and Diane Bardwell Masters and the first tool I was given was the mantra of “TRUST MY INTUITION”. What would life feel like if I knew that I knew? If I knew I was guided by the greatest wisdom possible from WITHIN? And if I acted from that deepest knowing, living by heart? I find myself sitting taller, lifting my sternum to shine my heart, breathing deeper into my belly and feeling my feet claim their place of this earth when I remind myself again and again to trust my intuition. I do know when to hold’em and when to fold’em and knowing that makes life seem much less scary and much more exciting.

The other mantra I have been using frequently in my adventures of late is “PACE MYSELF” and the second verse speaks to me about this. I have often in my life been impatient, demanding and fixated on the outcome. Shocking, I know. I launched out of the gates early in life at full tilt determined to get “it” done fast and furious. In retrospect I don’t even know what “it” was. Life is in the living, I now realize, not the finishing. I am grateful for yoga for slowing me down enough to catch up with myself, to get grounded and present. There is so much space in NOW. Space to meander and celebrate and savour and enjoy and breath and be. That is “it”! Life is a process and I am learning and there will indeed be time enough for counting when the dealing is done. Yoga reminds me on a daily basis that there is all of eternity to sort things out and I can relax. In fact, relaxing is the only way to sort things out. In the hurry and worry, clench and constriction I only tie myself into more knots and trash my energy. Relax, breath, pace myself. AAAAAhhhhh!

In the poker game of life what we are gambling with is not monetary but is our freedom. WE are all healing our way to liberation. In Robert Masters words…“to heal is to make whole, to reunite and integrate all that we are. To heal is to no longer let our separateness separate us. Then we are together, even when we are apart. One step at a time, learned by heart. Home is where healing brings us.”

Our freedom is in intimacy with all that we are, with all that is, with every aspect of this beautiful, challenging game we are playing. One of my adventures in the last few weeks was to be in a bridal party of a yoga wedding. It embraced the loveliness of time honored marital traditions while playing the edge of incorporating meaningful yogic rituals and the vows ended with the offering “I set you free” . Our freedom is to be found not by avoiding the sometimes messy, sometimes exhilarating thrill of the game but by diving in and playing it with our whole being.

“You have been walking the ocean’s edge keeping your robes dry, dive naked a thousand times deeper. That’s where love flows. “ -Rumi

APOLOGIES IN ADVANCE IF YOU FIND YOURSELF HUMMING “THE GAMBLER” SONG FOR THE REST OF THE DAY. Come to yoga, it will free your mind.

The Yoga of Michael Jackson

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 11:18:00 -0500

Yoga is the bridge between unitive consciousness and individuated experience (infinite and finite) and Michael Jackson lived a life that clearly straddled these two realities. He was an open channel for receiving, composing and performing music that would unite nearly a billion people in mourning his death and celebrating his life. MJ’s music and his story captured our collective imagination because his artistry was pure, directly downloaded from the collective mind, and because his life was our own light and shadow amplified. He is us and yet not us.

We all watched, with the guilty pleasure-pain of schadenfreude, his misadventures and hyperbole strained antics. Whether or not we admit it, we watched because we recognized our own fears, our own fragility, our own inability to run that much energy through this body of flesh and bone. When we saw how intensely he played out our own dramas, we felt ameliorated with the knowledge that we weren’t suffering so much after all. The horror of watching celebrities crash and burn through their humanness somehow makes our own lives seem ok. And yet we all envy them for their power and the sheer energy of having that much attention pouring towards them.

The triumphs that interlaced MJ’s tragedies were incredible examples of yoga teachings embodied. Yoga is ultimately an adventure in non-ordinary realities, without having to leave this incarnation yet. MJ’s triumphs, his X-factor of talent, originality and charisma, came not from having an ingredient the rest of us lack in our make-up but rather came from having less filters and editors than the rest of us do. He was not like us, in that he had less limiting beliefs about what was possible musically. He incarnated with a special mission, a Personal Legend to live, and he let nothing stop him from fully becoming Michael Jackson. He was born to be who he was and he didn’t have a filter that would have blocked the universal, cosmic energy from fueling this destiny. Too many of the rest of us refuse to be who we were born to be because we would rather be someone else, we lack the courage to step up or we simply believe it’s impossible.

MJ showed us how to live in the super-human realm of infinite possibilities. He lived in the non-ordinary reality which says that at anytime, anyone can create something that has never existed before, if it is your destiny and you are steadfast in living it. This creativity is possible to a gentle surrendered being that channels through the grand archetypes of our souls. MJ loved the archetype of Krishna. His living spaces and his rides at Neverland were covered with iconic images of the playful, musical, charismatic Hindu deity, who unequivocally taught that life is supposed to fun. His openness let him live the energy of the archetype, making him simultaneously human with all its bittersweetness and also larger than life, somehow connected to something Bigger. The reason we are fascinated and curious is that each of as a soul yearns deeply to bridge that gap as well and live both, to be yoga. May the life of Michael Jackson inspire us all to expand the realm of what we hold to be possible. May the life of Michael Jackson inspire us all to live fully and fearlessly who we were born to be.

What's in a name?

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 15:51:00 -0500

We frequently get asked about the origins of our name "Sol Yoga" so I thought it would be worthwhile to tell the story...

As many of you know, four years ago I went through a great do-over in my life, re-arranging everything to commit to the path of yoga (even though I had barely even done any yoga yet!). This was a dark, raw, tumultous time and I had a few great friends who pulled me through. I had the nickname of "Sunshine" then, even though I didn't feel all that radiant. I was shattered but as Leonard Cohen astutely observed "it is the cracks that let the light in". And everyday of yoga since then has meant more sunshine and lightness and lightheartedness for Mom and I.

Mom's past life as a Spanish Gypsy morphed Sunshine Yoga into Sol Yoga (and also explains how a german girl got the spanish name of Marita!). When it became SOL Yoga it also came to symbolize our vision...a yoga centre that celebrates the Sweetness Of Life.

There are of course other acronyms for SOL as well:

Summer Of Love (Summer '09 here we come!!)

Speed Of Light (at which time and space dissolve and anything is possible)

Sooner Or Later (the ever patient yogi's credo)

Sanctity Of Life (life IS sacred)

Sh** Out Of Luck (when we were ourselves sh** out of luck we surrendered to the sweetness of life. With heart's full of gratitude and love, our luck changed. This is also an appropriate time to explain another Sol yoga mystery...my Ace of Hearts tattoo. It is a symbol that lady luck is yours when you choose LOVE. All-ways.)

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 10:24:00 -0500

In the laboratory of self study that is my yoga mat, I have dedicated much attention to surrenderfulness. (Mom says I made that word up. Maybe. It works for me. I have a feeling of fullness in surrender.) Most of us come to our practice in willfulness. In fact, many of us live our lives as a willfulness-fest. Strive, struggle, try harder, get serious, push, achieve, control, orchestrate while dodging the bullets of things not turning out exactly as you insist they should. In yoga-ese this is being rajasic, our cultural affliction of chronically over-doing it. Often our bodies are what abruptly end this mode of operating for us. An override switch goes off in our body. We get sick, have an accident or get injured. Or we have a psycho-spiritual overload. Finally a voice inside that we can no longer ignore. The body, mind, spirit says stop…now we are going to learn surrender.

This was my story. Chronic headaches, low-level anxiety, and a deep soul-longing for some deeper connection brought me to the yoga mat. The first step was to learn to let go. As one of my teachers said, let go of the steering wheel because it’s an illusion that you are even driving the car. This is a deep feeling of thy will be done. This is faith that everything is working out perfectly. This is a sweet feeling I didn’t even know existed before yoga. Wow!

What I adore about the path of yoga is that boredom is not an option. When you think you have figured something out, there is another gem of transformation. The rug pulls out from under you providing yet another wild ride of evolution. So as I started feeling quite comfortable in my state of surrender, a princess-like resignation of whatever will be, will be, I started to see in the mirror of circumstances the sister of our rajasic nature. Tamasic energy is inertia and laziness. I realized that the dark side of surrender is apathy and a diminishment of life force energy. Calling this state surrenderfulness is a misguided sugarcoating of being out of the flow of life.

All of us in our perfectly imperfect humanness will know times of rajas and tamas. There is great value in living both ends of the stick. We learn through contrast.

Yoga lovingly invites us to find the middle path, our Sattvic nature. This is the path of equanimity and harmony and balance. As with all Truth, this dives into the realm of paradox, a language the heart understands best. Can we use our will to create and manifest intention while detaching from the outcome? Can we honor our burning passions and desires while graciously accepting what is as it is? Can we have the discipline to follow-through while relaxing enough to sustain and nurture ourselves? This is a road I am gingerly learning to tread upon. It expresses itself in a healthy body, high vitality, enthusiasm and a masters degree in discernment

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 10:22:00 -0500

The Universe Makes it Obvious: Heart Shaped Rocks and LOVE on Mount Kilimanjaro

Having dedicated a vast portion of my life thus far to the study of the meaning of life, I am happy to report I am starting to see some recurring themes. In philosophy, in religion, in yoga, at the bottom of a wine bottle, in a bakery, on top of a mountain, wherever you choose to look, there seems to be a few lessons that just won’t go away for those of us with the nagging urge to experience an existence of sweet, uninterrupted rapture.

In this living-well-game there seems to be kindness, compassion, present moment awareness, forgiveness, humour, faith, optimism, grace and allowance. However, the captain of the team always seems to be LOVE. I don’t mean “love’ as in I love yoga or I love coffee or even I love you. This is LOVE we are talking about. This is enlightenment, baby. This is the dissolution of self into the collective, the end of duality, the state of Samadhi, that promise of orgasmic lovejoy coursing through us 24/7.

One of the things thirty years on this planet, in this body, have taught me is that the unending pursuit of living in LOVE is the most worthy use of my time and energy.

And the Universe sighs, “I really thought I made that obvious?! Could I have made it any clearer??”

Okay, there were signs about the significance of love before, but I was busy, too busy to notice. So here I was on the mountain path, climbing to Africa’s highest peak, 7 days of pure awareness and deep conscious living, just walking and breathing. The Universe saw that now I might actually pay attention and took the opportunity to Make it Obvious.

Climbing mountains heightens your senses, melts you into the moment and focuses your attention in such a poignant way. Everything slows down and you see, smell, taste, feel and hear your world as if you had just been born. There is innocence in each step.

I knew such present moment bliss on the slopes of Kilimanjaro. I was thrilled to hear the crisp sound a bird’s wings make as it flies through the air, to see that trees dance with the wind so gracefully, to smell the red African soil, to feel the flutter of invisible angel wings brushing against my sunburnt skin and to taste the fresh kiss of walking inside a cloud.

Armed with acute awareness and wonderful openness, I could actually see the obvious signs the universe was providing. It was the mineral kingdom bearing a message.

We started finding heart shaped rocks on the second day and they continued all the way to the top. They came in all sizes and were unmistakably hearts, there was no room to interpret them in any other way. All four of us (and our 11 porters, guides and cooks!) saw the heart shaped rocks. Not one, not two, but dozens in a day.

Then as we approached the saddle of the summit, there were words spelled out in rocks. We were nearly at 4700 metres and the landscape looked distinctly lunar. There was no vegetation, only red earth and copious lava rocks. Fellow travelers had decorated the landscape with their offering to the summit gods of words spelled out with stones.

There it was in 4 foot tall letters, in front of me, LOVE. Everywhere we looked someone had put their own love offering with the classical coupling of initials. We walked for hours through these fields and I searched for the ultimate sign…huge letters declaring “M.W. + _._”. Nope, the universe wasn’t about to make it that obvious! We laughed at the strange, kooky romantic comedy we seemed to be in.

The stones of Kilimanjaro were urging us to love, be loving, be loved, live love and to follow our hearts.

Living lovingly is an amazing path to happiness and freedom. The measure of our mastery on this path is the state of our relationships, with ourselves, with a partner, with our children, with our co-workers, with our community, with our world.

The intensity of our interconnectedness is what makes this path so powerful. By dedicating time to stilling your own inner self critical wars, you improve your relationship with your beloved, you become less judgmental towards your family, you bring peace into your environment and you hold space for the whole world to heal. This is the revolution about to occur in the world. As we learn as individuals to have mutually fulfilling, open, truthful, kind relationships then we will know how to lead nations with love and how to evolve mindfully as a species. Our entire future as a civilization rests on our ability to make this work.

So I dedicated my summit climb to following the Path of spiritual partnership and LOVE, as the rocks had suggested would be an appropriate use of my resources in this incarnation.

The metaphor of a path isn’t completely accurate because you don’t actually go anywhere. There is no destination other than arriving back at the beginning with decidedly more wisdom and a few scars as souvenirs. The child I was knew this secret of LOVE without walking any path or reading any book or doing any yoga. So the path can be a maddening paradox…there is no where to go and yet you’ll know when you’ve arrived…the path leads to pathlessness…reaching the peak teaches you life was just as good at base camp.

One of the beautiful gifts of yoga is that it provides the time and space to meet yourself, get to know yourself and fall in love with yourself. This is really the beginning of the walk along this path. Can we awaken to our experience and our essence? Can we witness with compassion our patterns, our conditioning, our fears, our doubts, the stories we tell ourselves about me, myself and I? And can we find the truth in that mess?

In yoga class, I heard the rumblings of my own heart’s song. I felt at a deep cellular level what I was meant to live. My truth was whispering to me and I liked what it had to say.

This is an ongoing process of forgiving ourselves, accepting ourselves, being extraordinarily kind to ourselves. Taking time to commune with our inner self, to relax enough so the body can tell us how it’s doing, to be still enough to hear our spirit is the foundation to build all other relationships on.

I filled myself up on this practice of self-love for many months, hungry for the nourishment to my body, mind and spirit. I redesigned my life to make room for retreat, for silence, for cultivating a flourishing mind, and for teaching others how to look within.

In a quiet, serene, renunciate lifestyle I discovered how to live a lush inner life . Now I feel happy for no reason. I delight in the small details of my day, like standing at the oceans edge and breathing the salty air into my lungs. I feel safe in the world, content that I have enough and that I always will. I no longer wake up with my fists clenched up tight, symbolic of the scarcity I once felt in the world. I am clinging less and my body is stronger than it has ever been and I have a pervasive sense of ok’ness rather than impending drama.

Then one day, I started to see signs of over- indulging in self-inquiry, I had reached the peak of this mountain. I could see the first strains of self-obsession. I felt like I was in continual therapy about how to live without ever actually getting out there and living. While I appreciated my own company, I didn’t want that to be the only true love I ever found.

Besides, there were many moments when the tasks I am called to fulfill energetically seem far too big for my shoulders alone.

I recognize vast momentum now to the raising of our vibration as a collective and the energy is shifting with such speed, that at the end of a day I long for someone who understands this new world with me.

Then I discovered in my study of Patanjali’s Sutras that the karmic reward for Svadhyaya, spiritual self-study, is that the angel of your dreams appears as your next teacher. Yes! Where do I sign up for that please? Can he please have broad shoulders, strong hands, smiling eyes, plenty of charm, like lots of adventure, love intense philosophical inquiry, want to meditate with me and be really really kind? Can he be attentive and affectionate and like listening to my latest epiphany? Can we read together and breath together? And be a yogi, please. Pretty please.

This angel of my dreams as my teacher is not a standard issue boyfriend or lover or husband. I have tried all of those with limited success. The results were always moderate to mild pleasure followed by intense confusion and suffering.

This is an angel to love, in the form of a man. This is an altar to worship our innate divinity at, in the form of a spiritual partner. Could there be a connection between two people that would flow with ease and be about pure joy? Could sex be sacred? Could this be an opportunity to practice deep allowance and continual gratitude? Could we understand the paradox that it is freedom that binds, holding that repels? Could there be holy reverence for merely affecting the quality of the other persons day, a total awe for the gift of sending your partner into their day with a big grin on their face because they woke up next to you? Could I do this LOVE thing with another, one special chosen person, my angel? Could mastery of unconditional love with this angel be dedicated to together serving the emerging unitive consciousness of humanity while living a really sweet life of simple pleasures with each other? The next steps of the path emerged.

I tripped over some heart shaped stones in the middle of Africa and began a journey down a mystical path of spiritual partnership. This is the beginning....a perfect place to start from.

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 10:17:00 -0500

A Pilgrimage of Patience

In January 2007, I completed my childhood dream of climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa’s highest peak. I had felt a calling to climb this mountain my entire life and somehow knew the trek would contain a transformative life lesson. The teaching of the mountain turned out to be the same as the major theme of my life as yoga teacher…living a life of sweet patience.

Mount Kilimanjaro is a temple of patience, where the penitent fall to their knees and ask for a release from combat with Time. Original sin in this church is mindless rushing and senseless busyness. This is a place where you come to learn how to never again feel a scarcity of minutes and hours. The mountain keeps repeating the mantra of slow down and enjoy and breath and let go of your suffocating stranglehold on Time.

Leave your watch at home, should be the first line in every guide book. The official flower of the mountain is a small, blazing orange bloom called “Impatience’. Every African on the path greets you with the Swahili mountain motto, ‘Pole, Pole,” “Slowly, Slowly”. The guide meanders in front of you, setting an excruciating snails pace, pushing the revved up Western mind to question, “could we possibly go any damn slower?”

A week of super slow walking made me to reflect back on my former life as addict to high speed living. When I first came to the yoga mat in 2000, I started getting startling insights of awareness into how little I took care of my body, how poorly I nurtured my soul, how impatient I was, how I carried a low level anxiety through the day. I was heavy with unawareness and the burden of always just being busy and tired. My life was a perpetual to- do-list. Being able to turn off my cell phone for an hour and half was my first yogic epiphany. I was impatient, always in a hurry, and I was waiting, never feeling like I’d arrived yet.

Waiting is the direct opposite of patience. Waiting implies life will get better when “x” happens or “y” arrives. Unfortunately, when they do, there is always something else to wait for. Waiting is being at war with what is. It is deferring feeling good NOW for feeling good in a non-existent, yet to be determined future. It is always now, no matter how long we wait.

Patience is a complete acceptance of what is, as it is. It is signing a peace treaty with time, declaring that there is plenty of time for everything and all is coming in perfect temporal-spatial sequence. This is a place where moments become luxuriously long. There is no longer any need to rush and yet you get more done. Patience is being in the flow and trusting the process. It is contentment. Relaxing with what is. Miraculously, contentment in the moment feels so good, that the immutable law of attraction starts tossing a multitude of good things your way just for feeling good. Being okay with losing means you win. Utterly accepting what is changes our relationship with everything and begins the process of positive change. Allowing others to be exactly as they are causes them to become more like you would wish them to be. To stop the struggle…stop struggling!!! This is the patience I learnt in yoga and Kilimanjaro was the sweet pinnacle of this practice for me.

Climbing the mountain heightened my senses, melted me into the moment and focused my attention in such a poignant way. Everything slowed down and I could see, smell, taste, feel and hear the world as if I had just been born. There was innocence in each step. This was present moment bliss on the slopes of Kilimanjaro. I was thrilled to hear the crisp sound a bird’s wings make as it flies through the air, to see that trees dance with the wind so gracefully, to smell the red African soil, to feel the cloth of my pants swish with each movement and to taste the fresh kiss of walking inside a cloud.

Armed with acute awareness and wonderful openness, I felt patience blossom in my heart and enjoyed each and every step. And I knew deep in my heart that patience is an essential component of the art of living well.