Summer, I love you.

A season is by no means a significant amount of time. Three months, four if you’re lucky (and it’s summer). Give or take a hundred days, not even a third of a year. And at this point in my life, years are beginning to lose their luster for grandiose blocks of time, as they fly off the calendar as fast as months did in middle school. Yet, a season was plenty of time to change my entire life.

This summer was one for the books—and by this I mean quite literally one full of books. It was also a summer of airports, as I flew across country, across countries and into interstellar dimensions. This summer was also one for community, where I was welcomed into the arms of different tribes across the world. This summer was about leaving improvement behind and accepting perfection as it is. This summer was the beginning of my life.

And so was yesterday. And this morning. And probably tomorrow.

If the summer was one thing, it was a realization of lightness. This lightness was not something I carried pre-May.

Before heading into summer my life was one dictated by restriction, practice, guilt and imperfection. Routine and rhythm were things that held me together. I was bound to my practice as much as I was to the surface of the Earth.  I withheld pleasure for piety, in hopes of one day reaching an ultimate goal. I even caught myself feeling guilty shades of superiority over others adopting less “conscious” lives. The one measure of the perceived success of my pre-2012-summer lifestyle was that I felt like I was in control.

Boy was I wrong. This summer started out like the twisted ending of one of those psychological horror movies that somehow convince you (the viewer) that you’re the one killing all the people in the film. Everything I thought I had under control was flipped upside-down. It was shocking at first, but much less difficult than it had been in its previous incarnations (for these realizations have occurred before in lesser degrees of intensity). The main objective was to reset my spiritual ego.

What is a spiritual ego? Well if I had ended my blog post with “This summer was the beginning of my life,” you would have got an extreme does of Yogi Ego. Basically, for me, my egoistic self is searching for one thing: control. It wants to be in charge. Whenever I think I have figured out life, that is when I’ve let my ego take control. This summer was a gentle slap in the face that told me life was much less than I was making it out to be—this being an extremely positive, relieving, and loving thing.

Life is for experience! This summer’s oeuvre was a reassuring mantra that everything is equally as important as everything else. This means that I am exactly where I need to be, doing exactly what I need to be doing and so is everybody else. This liberating realization was the posture that broke this yogi’s head open. And I surrendered my thoughts, preoccupations and fears to the universe willingly.

We spend so much time trying to be something else that we forget to honor who it is we are. In the complicated maze of desire, we lose sight of achievement. We focus on a future that never comes, preparing, practicing and pondering what might be. We never get there because it is an illusion. There is no where to go.

And for some the illusion is perfect. This article is not to say that one way of life is any better than the other. It is only the recount my own realization. At this point in time my current state of consciousness is perfect as was my state in May, last October and when I was five. All stages, outlooks and understandings are perfect. It is not the shape, context, or content of the state that matters, but the progression through them. Change exacts experience, which adds to the richness of life.

As I find time in between my coursework, I will gladly share with you the specifics of my summer. But until then revel in the awesomely emancipating idea that you are already there. In fact, there is no where else you could possibly be.

Much love.

New Mexico and Enlightenment?

Food and love.  Two intensely simple words I discovered within myself during an intense meditation at a yoga retreat in Espanola, New Mexico.  After intention, practice, and a lot of listening, I understood what it was I wanted to do for the rest of my life.  Food and love.  This epiphany wasn’t accompanied by bright lights or sounding trumpets, but rather a very familiar and strong voice: my inner voice.  This is the voice that resides inside all of us.  The voice that is usually in an endless chatter, constantly making absolutely useless contributions to any sort of progress.

I was astonished.  Astonished not because I received an answer, but rather that I had accepted the answer I had already known.  I realized at that moment – and even now as I am typing this entry – that the answers to our lives’ largest questions have already been given, already been recorded. In many cases we are already achieving the answers without even the slightest inkling of their comprehension.  It had been I who was blocking myself from understanding what I wanted to do with my life.

This experience in New Mexico taught me that I already know everything there is to know.  I have access to every question I want answered.  Call it the collective consciousness, the unified field, heaven, bliss, enlightenment, the soul, Jesus, Mary, or Joseph.  Call it whatever you like.  Millions of names and references all address the same thing.  This thing resides inside everyone human being and everyone can access it.  It is not whether one knows something, but rather what one can realize.

If I have access to everything there is to know, why don’t I know everything?  My answer to this has come through meditations.  Repeated meditations that is.  The more I meditate, the more my mind can perceive.  I become more intuitive, more in sync with my surroundings.  I am calm and flowing.  Think of if this way, the balance in my life is always existent whether I am balanced or not, meditation just allows me to rediscover how to find it.  There are many other positive benefits from repeated spiritual practice (Understand that meditation is but one of the endless ways to attain increased awareness and consciousness), but all stem from increasing my capacity to access the inner pool of knowledge.  As I meditate more, I physically and mentally lose blocks that impede my relationship with the field of pure consciousness.  In other words, the more dedication and practice, the more I allow myself to receive information and the more knowledge I realize.

The information is there.  It always has been and always will be.  No new information can be created, it can only be discovered.