Don’t know you, but spring is my favorite time of the year.
A time of renewal, re-opening, and rediscovery of how the brighter days feel like. Now, at the threshold between the dark to the bright, nature invites us to make greater space for the fuller version of life and opening to the “purna” (fullness) of the spring and summer seasons.
Spring is also a time of re-assessing, re-evaluating, and perhaps discerning what is calling your time, energy and attention moving forward. Maybe time for a “Spring Cleanse” in your home or in your heart:
What is important to you? What wants to grow? And what needs to go?
If you have read this letter before, you know I am falling in love with meditation. Beyond a way to find calmness and balance on a daily basis, meditation to me is a practice of finding “the Self:” the mystery, benevolence, and eternity within me.
As I shared with some of you before, when my mother passed 18 months ago, I truly felt what eternity meant. Since then, there were grief, some regrets, and unresolved mystery, yet beyond all these one thing has remained and never went anywhere. Hard to describe in words, it is a feeling or experience of touching “something” that is way vaster than what my mind could ever comprehend. Lucky for me, a “something” I have been able to connect to often enough to know, deep inside me, that it exists.
The death of a loved one is not the only medium to experience eternity, but it certainly can accelerate the process.
Meditation is not the only way to remember the mystery, but it certainly can accelerate the process.
When we take time to be in nature, connect to our body through mindful movement, massage our own feet or hug a friend, we open ourselves to this mystery too.
There is truly nothing “woo-woo” or weird about it. In every breath, life is urging us to remember: “There is birth, and there is death” – an inhale and an exhale. The end of the breath is not the issue. Rather our forgetting of the common denominator, aka life itself, nature herself, or love in its essence might well be what causes our suffering – the unworthiness thoughts, the separation stories, and the like.
Just like winter and summer, life and death are not to be held separately. There might seem contradictory at first, but as yogis we recognize opposites don’t last – if we dare to hold both ends long enough.
Just like the fullness of summer needs the emptiness of winter to exist, our rediscovery of the mystery and the feeling of eternity needs our very forgetting in the first place. When we embrace this, we remember our inherent freedom, “SvaTantrya“. This teaching is at the heart of yoga and what – basically – makes it a nondual wisdom tradition.
What feels bad one day and what feels good the next will not last, but it is a continuous opportunity to see beyond… And there, you can only see for yourself!
In a nutshell, this is the essence behind what I am committed to offer you this year, and moving forward.
A meditation immersion on May 7,
a “Fullness & Emptiness” retreat on Sept 28,
an in-depth yoga study and teacher training starting on August 9,
and even a playful arm-balance workshop coming on April 29.
They are all opportunities to embrace life in its fullness and its emptiness at the same time, to hold ourselves from close and afar, to dance with the dark and the bright, to play and to rest with the same attention.
As always, stay tuned for more humble inspiration from me on the blog, instagram/facebook and God knows where (podcast interviews coming soon!)!
I hope to connect with you soon.
Thank you for reading and riding this mysterious life with me.
Cédric
