Love is the most humbling force I have ever experienced in my life.

Having donned many costumes, earned a degree, been a professional, and traveled...I can honestly say that the most important thing I have ever done is love somebody.

I am not a parent yet, but I have had hundreds of kids pass through my life who didn't care if I was cool, who didn't call me Momma because of my clothes but because of the way I held them when they cried.

I was just a kid when I started teaching but I, like most of the teens, I spent time with, was an old soul.  I saw their sufferings and battles through high school and remembered my own daily with compassion and all my heart.

I grew up in an upper middle class family in Pleasanton, CA.  My freshman year of high school, my maternal grandmother was diagnosed with breast cancer, she was 63.  It changed the course of my whole life, not just because at 14 it was to be the first time I came face to face with death, but for the choices my parents made when the news was heard.

At the time my father was a Chevron executive working in the University as a trainer.  When the news dropped down, everything became inconsequential.  My father gave notice at work, the company refused to accept it and instead put him in a factory job in El Paso where he laughed at himself for his blue uniform embroidered with his name.  A blast from the past, my father began his career at Chevron washing oil barrels at 18.  Suddenly a lifetime later, not even for his own mother, he was there again and the whole family relocated.

For the first two months it was only my mother and I.  Having been spoiled beyond imagining, I rebelled at this very tender moment.  I love my mother for never losing focus.  Having the choice between diverting her attention from her mother who lay dying and her daughter who in an effort to get attention dove head first into cocaine, my mother sat by her mother's bedside and let me cry my own way out.

It is a moment in my life that I know I can not regret, because for every time I came home from school scowling and stomping around while my grandfather gingerly helped my grandmother inch her way from the car to the house, I now have learned that it isn't all about me.  But if I could change that time, I would wish for more time feeding her.  I would wish for the wisdom to stop everything I was doing and just sit in the energy of her love as her eyes watched me cross the room.  The way I did when I flew across the ocean from my blissed out post tipi hillside in Maui to sit with this grandfather, who, when he saw me, gingerly placed his hand upon my face, a twinkle in his eye and a smile in his voice..."My, Zonia."

I think perhaps on the road to love and service, there are times when  a person starts to feel that they aren't feeding their own soul, that somehow they should be cooler or having more fun...at least that is what I was feeling when I got here almost two months ago.  I just wanted to be alone.  A sure sign...that I probably needed it.


I put myself on time out to feel everything I was feeling and in the course remember everything there was to remember so I could re-value the journey it took for me to get to where I am.


The journeys I have taken in my life have helped me to arrive at best one of all...that it is worth giving everything for love, even if I am uncomfortable, tired, overwhelmed..its the only thing that really matters.

I wish I could say I remembered all of this before my grandmother passed away, but I didn't.  I fed her once...she cried.  I didn't understand then what deep emotion went into the reversal of roles, but I do now.  

My destructive behavior continued through high school, crossing the border into Juarez, alcohol poisoning, and concussions were a mainstay that crescendoed with a night out partying...two hits of acid and a lot of cocaine.  I died that night and I had a vision.

I can still remember the feeling of being on a gurney rolled down a hospital corridor clink clinking along the cracks on the floor.  I could hear my friends drift into the distance and the sobbing of my parents from an imagined waiting room.  When the sound of doors opening  hit me I was engulfed in white light that overtook me not with love but with Universal sorrow of the deepest kind.   It was an understanding that what I do affects everything and everyone around me.  That I had a choice to be a force for healing and accept divine guidance, or continue to add to the pain of the world and live in self-imposed separation and isolation.  

I awoke to hands beating me on my chest and a knowing that my life was a gift.  I was never the same.

My father picked up and moved us to Arizona.  I met a holistic healer began working at his clinic where he practiced naturopathic medicine, acupuncture, chiropractic, nutrition and, most importantly, yoga.

I became a vegan and changed my body chemistry back to its natural state.  I immersed myself in the faith of my youth and became a missionary.  Graduated high school became a teacher at 20 and held those kids through drug abuse, alcoholism, cutting, gang bangs, divorces, beatings, heartbreak, suicides, arrests, pregnancies and low self-esteem.  I held them and I held myself.  I let go of all my ego because truly I had been one of them and the only thing that saved me was the love of my parents, both my physical ones and my spiritual ones.  I thank them for their vision of me happy and whole and the love they were willing to give me to get me there.

 I am grateful that I get the time to remember.  Mostly, though, at the end of the journey that takes days, weeks, sometimes months to recap...what I remember is not just the bliss but also the fierce love that doesn't give up.  It doesn't give up on me...it doesn't give up on anyone.  It just begs us to return to it, to live it, to share it, to be the hands, eyes, words that will give comfort to ones praying for it to come.  Not because they are less enlightened or evolved but...damn...shit happens...and some of it hurts so much it will be the force that helps us to grow for the rest of our lives.

We will hit the wall, feel it again, be humbled, face our choice to be happy anyways and use it like a slingshot to grow just that little bit more....and when we hit the wall...may there forever be people in our lives that believe in us...that know us to be strong, good, true....who will free us from the net of our own past and help us to step forward...changing the net to wings....and take flight again  into the soul bursting freedom that...love is.

Thank God I am not a teenager anymore.

But I remember the fight against the world, rail against the system, and, for God's sake, be anything but what my parent's want me to be attitude.  It's how we get to this...being.

IN-dividualized.  Not able to be divided.

I was a high-school teacher for 12 years from the ages of 20-32.

I always liked the rebels...who can forget Zar with his mohawk and leather jacket sitting in the bottom shelf of the bookcase trying to get a rise out of me...It looked uncomfortable...but what did I care...He starred me down.  I smiled a half smile...comfy? Yea.  Ok.

I walked away and kept teaching while silently laughing to myself, catching out of the corner of my eye him sliding around trying to really be comfortable with his neck jarring his head towards his chest and insisting on answering questions so everyone would look his way...

It seemed cool to begin with...he was an individual and unique...and also too damn smart to stay stuffed in the box for more than 5 minutes.  Shagrinned he went back to his desk. I looked at him...didn't say a word...it wasn't that comfortable he mumbled.  I smiled. Better?  Yeah.  He looked up and found no measure of judgement , he sat up and the gleam that got him to the shelf in the first place came back.  We smiled together.  He was glad he had at least tried.  

I wasn't that much older than him...and Lord knows I had more phases in high school and changed them faster than Clark Kent in a phone booth.  I went from skater...I hit pavement and decided that wasn't for me. Cowgirl full get-up with ropers, decided I hated the way the jeans rode up when I sat down.  Grunge...it was easy, shirts were huge...then I got a crush and realized the Eddie Vedder look did nothing for me.  Went vampy with low cut shirts and short mini's...couldn't do all my crazy monkey antics without tearing the hose...went Mod...softer, with clunky shoes...stayed that way until I realized I loved Led Zepplin and commiserated with Janis.  Started beading and wearing bell bottoms...same shoes...Got my first tatoos out of high school started wearing overalls by day and sexy silk dresses by night.  Fell in love with swing dancing, flipped and everything with the high heel mary janes and retro dresses.  Went to San Francisco started salsa dancing.  Moved to Tahoe, became a ski bunny and wore high heel boots in the ice that weren't functional...hit pavement.  Moved to the foothills became a writer, ran in the rain like Pochahantas.   Moved to Maui...wore florescents and ditched my bra...hell ran naked on the beach at sunrise to drums.  Became a sweat lodge momma and reconnected with my great great grandmothers.  Wore moccasin boots...fell in love with country dresses and braids just to make it back at 38 citified slightly angsty teen loves tatoos, black, and red nail polish...

And I...I realize that it's all me and every person I meet is a facet of those adventures in self-hood.

Now it's just a matter of choice...what other persona could I try on...in the end the center stays the same.  It's all just costumes...I love costumes.

I think about Zar with his mohawk desire to fight the system and the day he sat in the shelf...did that persona become a box...did it get uncomfortable...has he changed or in that moment of extreme selfness...did he hit the target first try and that get up has defined his entire life?  He would be 28 today.

As much as I want not to be my parents...I see my mother smile and strike up conversations with every stranger in her radius joy flashing...oh...that's me.  I watch my dad outside under a tree with a content smile on his face...yup that's me...and dressing up for an Opera...that's me...as much as barefoot in jeans hands in the dirt is.

And I realize...being individualized is being a part of the whole.  Being whole is having many individual parts of ourselves...all of which we have allowed to flourish and love...and as I collect myself together from the ancient past to my own past, I again realize that there are still two  more of my life times to go and rather than getting boxed into one part of myself...I'll take them all and everyone who represents some part of me...I honor the medicine of that part of me is easy to take and like and that part I'll deny...instead I'll take them as my friends and relatives...befriending every part of myself...and being grateful for my human family...because it is all so fun and we are all in this becoming unique unable to be divided from Source core energy journey....together.

Thanks for being you.

I awoke this morning with a sense of joy bubbling up in ways I wasn't expecting.

It started this week after weeks of meandering back in time to where I came from both spirit and ancestral, the deconstruction period back to the original seed I am supposed to carry forward.  Having retrieved the seed, I knew the next phase was following the trail back to my little self, I call her Zoniacita, and helping her bloom the seed.

I prayed with tenderness and humor, "Please, God, teach me how to open and heal my cora-zonicita. I just want her to feel whatever she needs to in order to be authentically happy again.  I identify my recurring pattern and do now heal the glitch in my brain that is circling over and over again and giving me a mental disease.  Treat me like I am dumb, Creator, and make it really simple to see and understand....because right now, I think I might be retarded."

Truth was...that lost in the roles I live day in and day out...I hadn't done the one thing I really needed to do.  Cry...It reminded me of the scene in Always with Richard Dreyfuss and Holly Hunter.  She goes by a river...one scene shows her balling her eyes out alone.  The next clip she is happy and smiling.  No one knew but her.  It is cathartic and waters flowing are life cleansing the heart.

Anyways, I cried...a lot...it was pathetic.  I even laughed at myself a bit.

Side effects of crying a lot where people see you...fear.

My parents got upset...

I told them people pay me to cry with them...did you know it is so hard to find a place to cry in the world that people have to pay for it?  If this is my home...please let me cry.  I am not broken.  All tears aren't sadness and they aren't a sign of weakness.  My tenderness is my greatest strength.  

Hold your space.  Don't commiserate.  Just let me heal myself whole and put all my pieces together because it has been so long since I had the time and room to do it.

When I hold space for people.  I reflect to them that I know they are strong.  I reflect to them they will receive whatever they need.  I reflect to them that no matter where they have to go, I will remember them happy.  And magic happens they let themselves feel into their own answers and divine connections.

So, my parents let me.  They let go of the control.  They let go and so did I.  They stopped seeing me as broken and I stopped having to act like feelings are a tragic flaw. 

 I breathed into my heart cords...all of them...felt all the joys, sorrows and sadnesses and pains and laughter and losses and longing and came back to the one thing that mattered....the love.  I wanted to keep my connections to those people and places in times when they were the healthiest.  No matter the outcome.  My focus became the dream and my emotion all gratitude for the many experiences I have imprinted upon my soul...

And then there was the biggest cord of all...the one I heard voices telling me to breathe into as if my life depended on it...because it did.  So I took it seriously and took my deepest breaths day after day into the spot on my chest where my hands rested in peace and I realized the cord was to myself.

The first thought I had was...I like tatoos.  I laughed when I started with that one.  My parents hate tatoos.  I grew up with them pointing at tatooed kids and saying, "Bah...look at that...." And I did.  But with my own eyes...with my ears I heard..."Wow...look at that :)"

It was the best moment of the week, the differentiation phase and the re-experiencing of my individuality. It started me laughing.  I kept repeating it...I like tatoos.  

I dyed my hair...Thank God it washes out...I don't like it...but...I did it because I wanted to and I remembered the many phases I went through growing up...red streaks, bleached bangs.

I woke up this morning..."I'm a rock star." Not only was my hair black, I was aware of my tatoos and realizing that I had a once in a blue moon hangover.  Very funny, Zonia.  I giggled.  Wow...I haven't done that since my 20's and of all places at an Opera fund raiser that was anything but proper with 4 twenty somethings and a couple of 40-50 somethings...all together laughing...It was so fun.  They all had known each other for so long no topic was off limits, feeling intrinsically loved and accepted they giggled at their foibles and as I got folded into my unlikely tribe of artists and musicians, I blossomed.

I love artists and musicians...they get the medicine ways. Live from your heart. Of course you live that free way...I play violin for a living...Isn't it cool to do what you love?

Yeah.  It's cool.  I get to teach yoga and do massage all over.  I get to plant seeds and visit my family all around the world.  I get to spend most of the day praying and practicing...and I always get to say yes when people need someone to talk to...lunch at the park...yes, please...and by the way...thank you...I needed that too.

People ask me what I am going to do when I grow up...I am grown up, that's why I do what I want and, by the way, this is what I do...and for the last time you got sick and I did it for you....you are welcome.

And most importantly...to myself...Its nice to see you again, not in your roles or your practice...but in your heart.  And yes, self...I apologize for trying to change you.  You are perfect exactly as you are.  I promise to stay close to you...because the closer I am to you...the closer I am to God.

And God, thank you for all my lessons.  Thank you for everything I was asked to give up and sit in a room by myself with no distractions for the past two months  praying and doing yoga to look at myself and take responsibility for the ways I had to come back into alignment with my center in order to gain my fluidity...kinda like doing yoga on my friend's pirate ship in Sausalito...but only in life...like living from the still center, but dancing with the flow...

Thank you God for my cousins, nephews, brother, parents, and friends....for taking me to do things I would never have chosen to do myself.  Turns out I can shoot a bull's eye with a pistol...just call me Annie Oakley and with ear plugs...I don't mind screamo that much....I also like throwing a baseball.

Thank you for all the crazy radio stations I have been browsing.  Interesting to note,  I have just realized I  I actually like Christian Rock, Rap and Techno, and Spanish ballads and...yes, those genres have really awful renditions...so bad they are funny.

Thank you for integrating me whole so that I realize I am complete.  That I like my company and that love is everywhere....partnership can wait...I am falling in love with myself again.

Self, in practice of loving my next partner as a whole integrated self-directed connected to God soulful being, I allow myself to treat me with the same kind of respect I should give another being.  I give myself the space to unfold, blossom  and become everyday.  I don't judge myself, I forgive myself, and I trust my desires will be in right relation to the direction of Source energy, Mother Earth, and the Medicine of my Heart.

I am not just a healer, I am also healing and I can take my own medicine.  Right now, the medicine I need for balance is to love myself and remember who little "I am" is.  I am sure that along the road I will also need the medicine of "collective it isn't all about me" too, so I will remember to take my medicine then too.  For now, I practice this..."whatever the hell I damn want"...medicine.

I give myself permission to listen to my body and eat whatever I want and sometimes not eat at all...because I trust myself and know that I love to be healthy...I am not going to make a bad choice.  I give myself permission to go outside barefoot and get dirt all over me because I like it....and if I don't want to take a shower everyday...I won't. And if a totally dorky dance song comes on that makes me happy, I am going to turn it up and dance in the car in traffic because the today when I did it...the people in the cars around me got happy and laughed, waving at me and saying, "It's nice to see someone happy."  

Yeah!  Because I like the way it feels.  I don't need to change.  I am as perfect today as the day I was born and I was born to do this....it's easy...I was born to be me.  Isn't that Lady Gaga?  Bless her song writing soul...so true.

The journey from the ancestors back to the self is a winding road looping through the spiral staircase of our genetic codes.  To unleash and remember where this body came from and its experiences as a total whole now manifested as the being sent forward from original seed  is to send roots down deep into the center of Earth and access memories held  in store for the time when we would need it most.

But we are not only body...we are spirit and not bound by lineage, stories or time.  To journey to the truth of that self we must diverge from the set course of those who would never have traveled the many roads and  belief systems to the soul seed that remembers we are far more than our Earthly attachments.  We are far more than our ancestors, religions, and our parents' visions for our life.  We are part of a Universal whole that is bound to all beings seen and unseen, in this galaxy and far beyond our knowing.  

Connection is our primary purpose in being born.  Yoga's union in action beyond the mat.

The connection with the original indigenous seeds who would remember how to live in harmony with the planet and hold space for all the beings planet wide and in the mist of generational separation.  This requires a contraction into the past and a remembrance of why and how the ancestors submitted to this multi-generational life cycle of evolution and creation.

The connection with the star nation is the coming of full circle back to our selves.  It is the original blueprint manifesting  in order for us to evolve from animal to soul.  Star nation remembers itself as a human form and the many experiences that cause suffering, they however know that in the end the way we have expanded and added to Universal Consciousness is the most important journey of all.

The circle and cycle as it was originally implanted by Source.

Man made is linear...nature is circular.  

Though we may not truly understand the concept of time and the omnipotence of a creative force that can hold together the thread of past present and future under the umbrella of NOWness, we can begin to grasp time, not as one who is looking at the scales of a snake through a hole in the fence, but one who is looking at time from a wider perspective and seeing the snake that has brought us all here as eating its own tail.

When star nation and earth tribe unite, we have a prismatic color spectrum that unites all people, beliefs, and systems into a rainbow of possibilities.  We can choose to see that moment when the prism strikes and alignment is possible as the VOID but truly it is the place of conception where everything is born.  It is the still breath when sperm meets egg...it is the moment when the cells begin to divide into the orginal 8 cells of humanity.

8 cells.  8 chakra.  A complete whole human being in harmony with spirit.

Are we in harmony with spirit?  The only way to know is if we are in harmony with love for all beings, not just ourselves.  This is the tenet of right relations.  That we begin to think not only of our own freedom, but of the generations to come.  That we are willing to be uncomfortable and release ourselves from attachments of all sorts in order to allow places, people and events to come into alignment with Universal order.  

In the energy system of the chakras, the heart is the uniting force that guides us to understand where we came from so we don't make the same mistakes again and also so we can preserve the very things people of the past were willing to die for and manifest through course of action and will.

That I do speak often of my ancestors and their stories, I also have guiding me my unborn children.  I know not if they will ever manifest on the physical plane, but I see them in dreams playing in a field under a giant oak tree.  

This week as I visited the gravesites of my ancestors, I joined a force greater than myself that is love and Earth combined in wisdom with my life experience as a travelling medicine person.  I have gone against many spiritual beliefs of both my parents, been willing to face my fears and let go of things I held true and valued, I have made medicine teas and sat in sacred circle and I remember two tenets that are not to be broken in ceremony.

Never let anyone get between you and the fire.  Never let anyone get between you and the medicine.  

They are two separate tenets.

One is the relationship with the fire, God, eternity, your soul...when we say not to let anything get in between you and the fire, it means not even yourself.  Get out of the way and let the fire do its work on you.  At every part of the ceremony there is something else happening.  As we pass through the time of darkness, when we are away from the sun, that is when we are shown the things of our heart that are making ourselves and connections, and we are all connected, sick.  IF we are to rid ourselves of the disease of the HUMAN collective mind, we must look at the places in our lives where we must right actions and take responsibility for the words, thoughts, prayers, and ideas that cause imbalance in a world of excess and consumerism, however love driven and honestly innocent the intentions were.  Sometimes...we are wrong.  Do we trust the inextinguishable Source of all things and allow that being to move us in the direction we must travel to heal, not only ourselves but the collective connection to Source as One Medicine Wheel for all peoples, not just the ones in the tipi, and certainly not just for the stone we are.

The other is you and your personal medicine of your heart.  It is expansive and free.  It speaks truth, sings it, lives it, prays it and moves us in the direction of our dreams.  It cures dis-ease born of sadness, shame, fear, and isolation.  It opens us to the possibility of joy, courage, celebration and connection.  It views us as the source of either great happiness or sadness.  It teaches us how to open and where. As the sun begins its route back to morning, we are purified by the fire, we are then born-again as divine beings who can trust our hearts to be good and know that if we get off track we are willing to change. Humility mixed with supreme confidence in our heart's guidance system.

The roots of a tree...in relation to the Sun.  Father Sky illumination and shining a light on the dark places of ourselves where we have forgotten to look.  Mother Earth, blessings and perfectibility of bliss.

Standing in two worlds...star nation and earth seed.  Living in two consciousnesses, Father Sky and Mother Earth.  Brought together in one little being who is both spirit and ancestor, you. 

To be of this current generation, we are flowing along on an ocean of consciousness that requires we root and ground down, but it also demands that we learn how to fly free.

It is for us then to honor the teachings of both worlds.  The world of technology harnessing not dominating the codes of nature.  It is the empowerment and celebratory essence of rainbow tribe festival people rooted with the experience and wisdom of tribal heart cords.

I am grateful that I did not grow up in the land of my ancestors, because my ways have flourished to encompass and understand the mountain people of India and the Islamic on their knees, as well as the Christians on pilgrimages in front of crosses, and the Hawaiians with their stones.  I have seen God in every place and detail of all peoples.  

I honor the ways of others as well as the way of my tribe.  Passed down in stories, I know my great great great grandmother Maggie who massaged and realigned bones is with me in sessions the same way I know my heart cords have the power to tell me  when to come home because I can hear the heart prayer of my parents needing help while care-taking for my 99 year old grandfather.  Living on the land in Maui and loving the bliss of my life, it is a cord stronger than my own experience.  It is the same cord that stood me to attention to be at the bedside of my dear cousin as she miscarried at 3 months so I could hold her son Christian in my hands until he grew still.  All of this without even a phone call.

These are the defining moments of my life, every bit as much as the tapestry of the travels I have taken on my own.  To be sure I will never forget the hillside in Ulapalakua where I watched the sun set for months, nor will I forget the sound of birds chirping at my window while I worked and lived in the jungle of Huelo.

It is in my blood to honor my relations, but it is also a part of my youth and joy to dance 5 rhythms in Nevada City with my friend Mike who wears a big tye-dye shirt and for me to bathe naked in the hot springs on Big Sur Coast.

I know who I am from the roots of my tree to every branch and leaf.  I know who I must become, like the hawk that soars through the sky.

And though I force myself to look in the face of the beliefs of others to know where it is they are learning love, I can not deny the essence of myself that has brought me home, or the one that will lead me to the land where I see flowers.

There will be many times in my life that will draw me home to El Paso where I learn to let go of my youth, but there are so many more that will draw me forward to live life to the fullest now and forever young.

May we all honor the medicine within, make peace with those who have disconnected us from it, and give reverence to the medicine without...reaching for the stars and beyond the limitations of the potential we have been gifted.

A living scale of balance, aware enough to know when we need more for ourselves and when we need more for others.  It is the balance between red tantra and white.  It is the love that binds it all together at the center...where our own essence lives...and only we can ever know that.

Two weeks ago I began not only performing newly channeled ceremonies on others, but also on myself.  Not sure how they would affect me or my life, I began anyways.  First with The Roses, a ceremony designed to heal ancestral connections and sexual wounds.  I then proceeded on to The Sun, a ceremony designed to help tap into personal strength...then The Forest, which connects us like children to our place as a collective whole on Earth...and finally, The Moon, a ceremony to connect with the Divine Mother and be guided by unseen forces. 

 Though I would not have performed all these ceremonies on any ONE person and certainly not all in one week,  I did perform them one right after another on myself.  Each day I performed it on myself...the next couple of days someone would come along who needed that exact ceremony.  

And so I proceeded, allowing the energy to increase and all the while watching with an observing mind.  

As my ceremonies transitioned, so did my yoga practice.  At times I had the insatiable need to run and at times the energy ran through the night, I would awaken with the thought "I am dying" and I would assure myself..."it's ok, you agreed to it." 

 I continued to reaffirm that I was willing to let all patterns and belief systems that were blocking me to genuine connection and guidance from the highest source to die away from me.  I wasn't sure where my practice was going but I was determined to change...I kept moving and my backbends were deeper, my lunges stronger, my practice seemed never ending...continuously I was drawn back to my mat. 

One fine day, just before performing The Moon, I received a message of pain that rang through my back like a bolt of lightening...slow down...it said.  It was so powerful a lesson that I had no choice but to listen immediately.  I dropped to my knees and asked to put my awareness on the place of my greatest pain. When I did, I realized that I had actually been moving so fast and letting go of so much that I was not in healing mode...I was in a healing crisis. 

It was at this moment that I decided to video tape myself doing yoga.  Viewing myself as a student and now taking the teacher role, I saw that my feet and hands were not activated on the mat, my hips were out of alignment, my right leg shorter than my left, my right shoulder was twisting forward, I was lifting my hip into side bends, and, yes, voice in my head...I was not breathing my spine slowly to its full extent, I was using my muscle and power to create change.  Somehow I had moved from co-creator to creator and I was not allowing myself to be guided to the greatest places of healing by the breath of life that knows me more intimately than my mind ever could.  Thank goodness for the divine reflection, a mirror to me of what was happening inside reflected on the outside on video.

I performed The Moon directly after this and was rewarded with a deep stillness and peace that pervaded my every cell.  It came to me in the night like sparkle dust on my chest and ignited love memories of all the moments for which I am grateful.  They floated through me and returned me to my breath.  The thoughts and voices that had been driving me for weeks to push harder, faster now encouraged me to lay still and just breathe.

I started over again, the same way I started doing yoga 10 years ago after my accident.  I focused on my feet.  I spread my toes and felt into my hastabhanda,  RE-membering what it symbolizes I breathed my awareness into the center of my joined feet and said, "I choose to live a life in right relation to the Earth.  Please, guide my feet."  I stepped one step and took a deep breath through my pain.  I came down to my knees and bowed down saying, "I give myself over to the divine consciousness and allow myself to be moved to the greatest place of my healing."  I came up onto my hands and knees and breathed into my hands and said, "I give my hands over to you for the healing of others.  Please teach me how to give and receive in balance."  I sat with my legs extended in front of me and focused on my heels.  I felt the right leg lengthen and I breathed into my right side.  "Please, help me to balance the male and female within myself.  I forgive all relationships and take responsibility for the way they have turned out.  I allow myself now to be guided to understand what right relation is."  I took a seated side bend and opened my chest, now attentive to my sits bones instead of depth, I felt my torso lengthen and lift out of my hip.  "Surrendering myself to the medicine of my heart." And I felt the throbbing of my uterus...and breathed healing energy into my own sacred space.

Twice a day I did 6 postures.  It took me 2 hours.  

In the meantime, my life unfolded in visions of the El Paso landscapes, the place of my birth, I started painting, teaching  yoga as slowly as I performed it, doing healing work, aware of my feet and letting go of my muscles so  the energy flowed through me, not to me and, finally, the week ended at the gravesites of my grandparents...all of them...5 generations back...and I let go of dreams associated with paradigms I do not believe in from my core.

As my body came back into alignment, my heart came back to the center.  From the center of my core I felt the medicine of my heart and know that though I am not my grandmother and will not live in a kitchen passing salt, there are other ways of giving in little ways that all day long say "I love you."  Though I am not everyday walking the small steps with my grandmother to the bathroom, I do know that I get to through my aunts and uncles who are serving their mother in the same ways she served them.  I am also not the same woman, who I love and admire for her strength, who gave 50 years to a man who came and went when he pleased had other children with other women and left her to care for 7.  

I see the trials and tribulations of the women of my family who gave their power over life and their sacred space to men who didn't appreciate or love them until they were gone.  My grandfather who kept my grandmother's memory alive 20 years after she passed, never loved and appreciated her so much as when she was gone.  I honor the women of my lineage for their strength and I add my freedom from religious doctrines that bound them to situations they would not leave.  I honor the women of my lineage for the forgiving hearts, and add to it the example of my father, who has never strayed, who has loved my mother since they were in high school, and who everyday teaches me what a man of honor is.

To be sure, I do not know where my practice of the last two weeks will lead me, but I am grateful that it has returned me to center and aligned me with my path as a medicine woman., who sits in the strength of her sacred space, holds ceremony, and realizes the power she receives is from the Earth, and even the Mother Earth knows she needs the sun to give life, and life, it is a gift to us from the dead, and they watch over us in the stillness of dreams uttered by children yet unborn but remembering us as their grandmother who stood for the medicine that we pass forward.  

I am grateful to yoga, for the union of my mind-heart with my body.  Thank you for the connection of the present with the past and future.  May I ever acknowledge all the stories that created me and slowly learn to unwind the wounds of the past so I can soar into the unknown blessed future.

Harnessing the love of the Goddess for the healing of all beings.  Mother/Father this is not for self, but that I may serve your little children: