back from Kripalu

and am realizing my whole life is a yoga retreat.


and I'm reading Natalie Goldberg again.

From "Long Quiet Highway" :

"Writing became the tool I used to digest my life and to understand, finally, the grace, the gratitude I could feel, not because everything was hunky-dory, but because we can use everything we are. Actually we have no choice....And we can't avoid an inch of our experience; if we do it causes a blur, a bleep, a puffy unreality. Our job is to wake up to everything, because if we slow down enough, we see we are everything."

Love this! :.......

"what all writers ultimately do is pass on their breath."

ah!

I can't believe how much I resonate with her personal story (did she read my diary?), and am intrigued by the connections between writing/yoga/meditation....how space, presence, and integration are keys to knowing yourself, and how to know yourself is to connect more deeply with the world and be of some service. And how you have to be real.

"Actually, the suburbs were ideal for developing a life of cloistered aloneness, a monk's or a writer's life. ...I had to go back and reclaim, transform, what I had inherited. Eventually I had to stop running from what I had been given."