Shared In Person on September 11th, 2017
On this day of remembrance, our yoga teacher training group felt pretty far from home. We woke up in a foreign country, on the opposite side of the world, remembering the martyrs who lost their lives 16 years ago — a time that feels so long ago, but at the same time, strangely recent. Our group is a diverse one, as is the community that comprises the entire of the United States and from this, one thing is evidently clear: there is no right way (or wrong way) to feel. We feel fear. We feel inspired by a sense of duty. We feel connected to our community, while we still keenly feel our losses. Some support our current administration and some feel contention against it. Many of us remember exactly where we were that day, and some were too young to remember but have grown up in a world shrouded by that day’s events. It’s all real, and it’s all okay.
Earlier in our training, I was being led through yoga nidra and I was asked to internally recite my intention three times — it was at that moment that I realized that I didn’t have one. I chased several mantras around in my head, but none seemed to fit the moment, so I settled into the nothingness and just let myself be. Unprompted, an intention rushed to fill me, inspired by nothing other than (what can surely only be) divine intention: “change the world with love.”
As citizens of the United States, we’ve seen what fear and hatred can cause — and that is not a legacy I wish to leave, so I’m challenging myself to change the world with love. But why stop there? Let’s change the world with love and radical acceptance, compassion and above all — forgiveness. We’ve been born in a time and a country where we have the opportunity and influence to do just that, so it’s about time we’ve assumed the responsibility to forgive and to love.
As citizens of the world, we have an obligation to remember than the divisions we create, the lines we draw in the sand, are entirely arbitrary. This has never been truer than now, when my tiny group of American yogis are the strangers in a new and different culture — and we have been wholly accepted with nothing less than elegance, kindness and humbling generosity. Eastern and western, black and white, human and animal, wealthy and suffering… It all seems so silly! Our very cells are made of the same stuff — and at our deepest center, our souls are all the same too. No matter which country we live in, the color of our skin, or the God we worship — we all have the same fears and the same happinesses. We all want to protect our families from the things we deem threatening, whether it be a hurricane, unfavorable legislation, people who look different than us or religions that seem foreign. If we look towards the root of the acts we see as hateful, we might realize that they really stem from a place of love — but if one person can feel love, then anyone can feel love. We all have it inside us, when we are ready for it.
Yoga teaches us how to deal with being human. Our capacity to feel is what sets us apart from the other animals and plants of the world, with whom we share so much of our DNA. When the world seems too much to bear, and I just wish to run and hide from the reality of it all, I step onto my mat and mull over the true meaning of the word namaste: the divine light in me honors the divine light in you — which honors the light in all people of the world. Feel how you feel. Be as your are. Let love and acceptance flow from your soul like it was meant to — and let’s change the world
