A story for anyone who has ever felt ‘not enough’. The end is yoga ❤️
She had a peculiar kind of sadness that was difficult to locate. Like fog, it spread and had no form. You couldn’t call it this or that, or say where it originated. It hung inside her, cold and damp, obscuring all else. She felt second rate most of the time.
Let down and feeling unimportant, she stood by her secret garden gate and sighed. A silent tear slipped down her face, followed by a pure white feather.
She gasped. She didn’t think she’d ever had a feather fall so close to her face before, never mind a pure white one in timing such as this. She picked it up and ran it’s fluffiness across her cheek. It was perfect. It could not have been more perfect. Her mum felt near. She’d used to say ‘when a feather appears in an opportune moment, help is near’.
She’d been digging at her allotment. She loved it there. Secluded. Safe. No one to judge her and find her wanting. She loved clearing the beds, getting the soil ready for it’s winter rest. There was something so lovely about a clear, raked, healthy looking bed, full of worms and life.
Sometimes she wondered if she could clear her life. Just gut it, rake it smooth and allow rest, letting the natural life in her reinvent itself. She was also full of life, she just felt over used and uninspired. Second rate whatever she did. She just longed to stop. She wanted to rest like the soil in winter. She was sick to death of all the expectations. She just wanted to be like soil. On her keyboard I and u are next to each other. Soil and soul are one letter apart. She was soul weary.
The meditation she was listening to as she dug, was on shadow work. The author suggested she stop and listen to her heart. Why not. She put the kettle on in her little cabin, on the camping stove, and sat with her oracle cards. The card she pulled was soft pink and spoke of the softness of acceptance. She felt to open a book randomly, feeling it would compliment the card. As she touched the pages, before she’d even opened them, she felt ‘mother mary’. She looked and gasped again. It was a chapter on mother mary. The fog inside seemed to disperse a little in that moment of awe and unseen connection. How could she have known? And who was it that whispered that to her?
As she read the words her heart cracked open. Unconditional love. Love without conditions. How would that feel? The author urged that it was with her now. Innocence and mystery were enfolding her.
She sat gazing, silent inside. Silent and expanded. Nothing had changed but she had. In the silence she tidied the plot, finished tending to the soil and as she touched the gate to leave, a beautiful white egret flew over her head, like a small perfectly white heron. The inner fog shifted yet again. Beauty and innocence were dancing all around her, seen and unseen.
As she walked home, unbelievably a second Egret flew over her head as she approached the ring road in the city centre. She’d never seen one so peculiarly close to town before. Her day just got more and more mysterious and grace filled. It was as if these pure white creatures and their feathers were telling her that on the deepest level, no matter how she feels, she’s also always pure white. She can’t be dirtied or degraded by others opinions of her. She felt something in her sparkle briefly, inside the fog. A deeper truth waiting to be found.
A few days later she was given another key. Her eye kept falling to a book on the Yoga Sutras. She opened it randomly. It fell to a page that spoke about purusha and the atman. They are a part of you that yoga believes is your truest self. A layer of you that holds everything in it’s awareness, that cannot be dirtied, judged, less that anything or anyone else. It simply is. It’s always whole and always home. Pure white, always.
She gazed. Something in her knew this, was truer than any outer circumstance. She could choose to inhabit that place more often. It was never touched by change or aging. Her deepest truest self or being.
Always whole. Always home. Always enough.
Deep peace descended and bloomed within. She could live here.
Intu-Yoga 