The Yogini Diaries

Dear Doubt, I’m sorry, but I’ve had enough. It’s over between us. That’s right, over.

The first gate to the deeper love is right here in your own heart. It opens through the longing to meet another without masks, to experience real intimacy without having to compromise who you are.

Perhaps you have been told that your longing is needy, that your visions are naive…your love of beauty is a luxury, and that the face of the One that you have had the blessing to glimpse within your very own heart is but a fairy tale.

Over the course of my life, I’ve accumulated a long list of things I like and don’t like, eat and don’t eat, wear and don’t wear, do and don’t do. A self-created box of The Way I Am, kept neat and tidy, stored safely in the corner and wrapped tight with a pretty pink bow.

In times of stress, women don’t move to run or fight ~ they reach out to protect and connect. Oxytocin is a woman’s natural de-stress mechanism.

The new world grows out of this fertile brew made of our outgrown clothes, our errors and awakenings, our dreams and prayers, and the luminous horizon we sense there—in the pause between the breath, in the gap between thoughts, in the softening of the heart. You are a holy compost pile at the very edge of evolution.

What a ride it is, this life lived in a woman’s body. The moment we think we have found a shelf to rest on, a sort of “aha, so this is how it works”, we are again thrown into new territory.

Prayer doesn’t have to happen on our knees with our hands folded. Simply being present with this moment is prayer. Prayer can be dancing, it can be singing, it can be opening your arms wide on a hilltop screaming at the top of your lungs. It can be closing your eyes, floating in the ocean, listening to the pulse of life.

For four years I had the honor to meet with a very special circle of girls. They were fourteen young women and we started to meet when they were in sixth grade. The story that follows is about a practice we did together the first time we got together.

Being Indian, the word yogini is not unfamiliar. A yogini for me is a woman who burns with the fire of her practice, who is uncompromising with her soul-work, who continually lives on the edge of her consciousness ~ forever aware and awake.

You are the light of awareness embodied in time and space. Embodied awareness brings forth embodied consciousness, which is radiant light.

We have recently been having team meetings discussing some of our values at Awakening Women, we would like to share them with you here.

The water of my body is frozen in jagged angles, damming the regular rhythmic flow. Life has been like this for me. A steady weather pattern. The winter then the melt. Eventually, always a period of sun. Learning to watch weather has cultivated ease.