Are We There Yet?

After graduating from Cornell in 1992 and delving into the textile and clothing design world for more than six years, my supposedly envious life in an apartment overlooking the Po River in Turin, Italy, was not exactly satisfying. I returned to New York to embark on a graduate studies program in Childhood Art Education at the New School. Two semesters in two of the best schools in New York City later, I found myself in Cyndi Lee’s yoga class at Crunch gym in mid-1997, laughing, crying, and knowing I had found a path.

Cyndi’s first teacher training was at the first OM Yoga studio on 14th Street, and I will never stop thanking her. Her style was a revolution for me, and I began teaching at her studio as soon as she’d asked. I met John Friend, founder of Anusara® yoga, in the summer of 2000 and slowly began the long, demanding road to Anusara certification. While on that road I met Dr. Douglas Brooks and Hugo Cory; they have each profoundly influenced the texture of my teaching—helping me to translate the yoga mat into real-life relevance and experiences of grace and gratitude in our daily living.

Recently, about fifteen minutes after receiving word that Kris Carr was interested in my writing (a complete honor), and just seven minutes after watching the Crazy Sexy Cancer trailer for the third time (and weeping, again), a sparkly conversation erupted with a colleague on the subject of “home.”

As a collective, we long to find “home” within ourselves. In my search for home I’ve traversed ashrams, meditation, drugs, seva, chanting, yoga, childbirth, parenthood, teaching, social networking and back. What I’ve found is that our true home is a place of fearlessness in the heart—your heart, my heart, every heart. Furthermore, and much more importantly, home is not some fixed point toward which we aspire; it is steadily expanding state.

So the question remains: Are we there yet? The answer is a resounding YES.

“We need not find our way back home to our divine beginnings; we need only appreciate that wherever we wander in Consciousness we are already where we need to be in order to be fulfilled.” -Dr. Douglas Brooks offered that in a discussion about affirming what already IS. Our yoga practice grounds us, even alkalinizes us, and shifts our vantage point to a place or gratitude, where we can sense that ever-present expansion. There are no fixed stopping points in the poses—if you watch yoga practiced in the Anusara method, you can see that the parameters of the body are always growing.

The only definite is that expansion is always occurring. Now comes the practical question: How do we uphold this expansive awareness in our real-life interactions? How can this fact of eternal, ever-present expansion keep us from contracting within ourselves [and reacting] when we encounter challenging moments during a regular day?

The one-word answer is GRATITUDE. Gratitude is the most expansive attitude we can claim: when we are thankful, we invite levity, more space, more abundance. When we are grateful in a difficult context, we manifest a pause between an occurrence and our reaction to it. With thankfulness, we imprint receptivity on our bodies- we can take in more. With every incident of focused gratitude, we return home to our expanding hearts. Especially when it seems improbable or impossible, use one deep, expansive breath to create the conditions for gratitude to emerge, and you are home.