This past week has been a challenging one. It’s been filled with deep emotions that included sadness, helplessness and a sense of wondering if things will ever change.
Last week I was fortunate to have fours days in San Francisco with my teacher, Judith Hanson Lasater, and a beautiful sangha of fellow dedicated and long-term yoga practitioners. We’ve been studying together this past year on the theme of “embodied empathy” and much of what we were practicing required deep inquiry and reflection. When I’m away studying, I’m often quite disconnected from what’s happening in my local area so I hadn’t heard the news of a tragic event that occurred in Palm Springs until speaking with my husband that night. Two of our local police officers had been shot and killed about a mile from our house and the nearby was put on lockdown for a few hours as the situation was assessed.
Upon hearing this news, I didn’t go online to find out more but simply went to bed. However, it was obviously on my mind as I awoke at 4:15 am thinking about what had happened. I began to weep. I lay awake in the early morning hours feeling a deep and profound sadness about what had happened. Having been in my practice for a few years now, I knew that it was okay for me to just let myself feel everything that was arising without the need to change, tamp down, alter or try to fix the experience. So I cried as I thought about the affected families and local police force. I cried for our own precious community that felt suddenly and violently violated. I cried for all of the violence and sadness in the world and wondered if we would ever reach a tipping point where violence would no longer be part of our daily lives. And I cried because I couldn’t see the end to it. I allowed my heart to crack open and weep for all the deep wounds.
Then I allowed myself to think about the perpetrator. I wondered at what point in his life was he no longer held in unconditional love. At what point did love abandon him in his life…when he was a month old? Year old? Ten? The reason I thought about this is because I believe we can’t be in unconditional love and be violent at the same time. These two places do not exist in the same moment. And then I thought about the moments in my own life when I didn’t feel held in love and it was that moment that I recognized what I needed to do…offer myself love.
This awakening to my own truth led me to my thought of the week, “Love In, Love Out’. We must bring love into our own hearts, offering ourselves self-compassion, self-empathy and self-love. We must fill up our own well of love so fully that it can’t help but spill out into everything else that we do. When we are holding ourselves in a place of love, we cannot hurt others or ourselves and this gets to one of the strongest tenets of our yoga practice-Ahimsa. Ahimsa is the first of the Yamas as written by the sage Patanjali a couple of thousand of years ago and has profound relevance today. It is the practice of compassion and love for all beings and the planet. It is the practice of non-harming or non-violence toward ourselves, toward others and toward the earth. When we hold all in reverence we are steeped in the practice of yoga.
So this week, with so many of us suffering on many different levels, we can offer ourselves love. Breathe love into your own being. We can offer love to others. Breathe love out into the world. Let this become the most powerful mantra and purpose-filled intention of today.
Love in.
Love out.
