Strangeness of Change

Very very strange.

In the last three weeks, circumstances of my life have combined to move me most decidedly off my mat.  Even mostly off my meditation cushion too.  I've probably practiced an hour and a half total in the last three weeks.  It just is as it must be at this moment, but very very strange.

I've never been a teacher who doesn't practice.  My practice informs and completely feeds my teaching.  And so I'm approaching teaching from a foreign land at the moment. Lucky for me, I'm a planner, which means I actually have notebooks full of sequences and themes already written out for me.  I don't actually know why I keep them because I'm always changing things and shifting in reaction to what the classes need. But in the last few weeks (and most likely for the next several) I'm totally grateful that I have them.

I'm sitting in my boxed up eventually-to-be yoga room and on the shelf beside me sits the Bhagavad Gita in two translations.  I'm reminded again that it is ours to do our dharma.  Get on the mat.  Step off the mat when needed.  Teach from fresh deep inner experience or rely on years of remembering and training to make it through a rough-ish patch.  At any moment an unexpected but not unwelcome shift may arrive and the dharma changes.  Fight it and howl and whine or just simply step onto the next path.  Either way the change has come.  Ours is to do our dharma, and let the universe take care of the rest.

Very very strange.