Following Our Flow The phone rings and shakes me out of my state. I let it ring out as my eyes come back into focus, noting with surprise that it is dark outside. As the silence falls again, I step back and look at the painting. All of a sudden, all the various elements of the canvas fuse back into one, as if I have suddenly put on my glasses and can see it as a completed piece for the first time.
By: Jiya Julia Randall Do you ever find it difficult to get dressed, apply for a job, ask that hottie out on a date, or speak your truth? How often have you come up with a perfect idea, followed it through to a certain extent and then abandoned it in favor of something more within your comfort zone? And what about those moments when you feel yourself overwhelmed with a “vulnerability hangover” - the closing down sometimes experienced after revealing too much of ourselves?
We all go there - some of us more than others. Self doubt is one of humanity’s biggest handbrakes, holding back the vitality and success of so many beautiful intentions. To have an ego, or sense of ‘I-ness’, is to have an image and a sense of separation, and for nearly everyone self-criticism rears its head at some point in their lives. By: Jiya Julia Randall What does it mean to live to your full potential? Kula cofounder Jiya Julia describes how to move through obstacles and realize our dreams! Interested in exploring the process yourself? Check out one of our upcoming Yoga Teacher Trainings. Is it promoting your sleep, or is it waking you up? Sometimes, all we need for knowledge to transform into wisdom is a simple moment, a morsel of understanding frozen in a few words, thoughts or actions.
From ground level, Costa Rica was a luscious playground of thick jungle, paradise beach, and the life and revelation of a yoga teacher training. From above, through this plane window, she shows herself as a veritable universe of mountain and sea, peacefully existing on scales of time and space that we humans can only dream about. The vastness of the view below me somehow humbles me, helps me feel held in something infinite. It has me contemplating… What is Awe, and how is it connected to our sense of belonging in this world?
By Jiya Julia Randall The cottonwood drifts. The river dances. I stare at the surface of the water, quietly moving with a deep purpose, as if nothing could ever stop it from reaching the sea. This water has condensed from the sky and filtered from the land for miles around, running along rocks and gullies, sliding down the trunks of trees and through the soil of the earth. It gathers here, swirling and foaming, full of life force, still moving. As I watch, it just keeps going, seeking out more and more of itself. It will grow until it returns to the sea. I feel the river that I am, the conjunction of so many paths, so many incoming currents and outgoing flows. I think of the flow I am in right now, this bubbling pool of so many different and coinciding situations, the result of all the rivers that run in myself and the people around me.
It gets me thinking. How many billions of raindrop moments is this day a product of? Perhaps a shower of life-giving raindrops are falling into my being right now from unknown sources. How many more rivers of wisdom and people and knowledge and experience will flow into me in this life? How many more seeds will I help to grow? Somehow I know how it feels to merge back with the sea. I think back to times before, when the winter storms washed me out. And to times when my inner world seemed dry. How could we, as flowing rivers of life, ever become disconnected from our source? We are the sea. But to be human is to be complex. We are also a blend of all we have ever experienced. The echo of past shadows is always there, reverberating behind the current moment, shifting and warping what we see into what we understand. The truth is, within every soul-river there is a layer of life-compost. We all have our ways of clouding our true nature. Sometimes the biggest hurdles in life are the boundaries we put around ourselves. The choices we tell ourselves we need to make. The things we tell ourselves we need to achieve. The repetition of statements, like mantra, - "I can't do this. I'm not enough" - that confine our beautiful being into something smaller. The inner voice worms into every action and tries to direct our winding and free paths down the straight and narrow, the easily controlled. If we listen fully, this voice has the power to bury us. But the truth is, we're a river, a source of life. Deep in this compost of our souls, there are seeds. Through our thoughts, our words, and our actions, we allow seeds to grow into beautiful things. And even when they seem buried in the suffocating soil of our minds, these seeds are firm, and solid, and real, fed on rich experience and rained on by our love. Not only are we flowing rivers of life, but we support a flowering oasis of creation all along our paths. Who am I? What is the essence that forms me as a human being? Why am I different from those around me? These are questions asked by all, as we try to find our place in the world and understand our purpose here. We understand what it is to be conscious, but what do we mean by that? Do we mean our conscious ability to interact with the world? Or can there be a more subtle interpretation of the word, some deeper awareness of the aliveness of ourselves and the beings around us? |
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