finding the self in no self

It's been almost a month since I have come back from Saint Vincent. That trip and the choices since have ignited a significant change in me...one that was a long time coming and a reflection of the years of work I have done to get here. When I returned from Saint Vincent I returned with a renewed vigor for myself and my own growth. I recommitted to my yoga and spiritual practice and the integration of my past lives with my current Peace Corps life. This was not necessarily a conscious decision but more so a movement of soul. Let me give a little background.

My life has had its fair share of difficulties, challenges, edges that were mostly self imposed. I have taken high roads and low roads only to find myself forking to the left more than enough times. Somehow I have managed to always redirect my course and use the former twists and turns to ignite the next chapter all the while secretly, intricately interweaving the pieces to a form that has not yet presented itself...yet. What I have found as life has moved on and I have made choice upon choice is that those interwoven pieces somehow became lost...forgotten. Some, while painful and difficult to remember, were the pieces that truly define who I am on a deep level...a soul level. As if they are the pieces that have always been...joining me lifetime after lifetime in the hopes that the creases will get wrinkled out and the smooth form will take hold. As if they join me minute by minute in the hope that one day I will reconnect and all the pieces will take hold. I'm sure most of what I am saying makes no sense outside my own head...and even in there I'm not sure it was very clear until my return from Vincey and my commitment to stepping back on my yoga mat. Somehow that seemingly simple gesture, which I have performed hundreds of times before, turned on all the pieces of myself and the remembrance of who I am...truly...and how I wound up here.

Peace Corps is an interesting phenomenon. It is two years of your life where you constantly live in a state of uncertainty...of yourself and the world around you. I have spent the last year and a half in what seems to be a constant state of fight or flight mode. It has become such a common place to me now that I think I have just settled into it as normalcy. But when I stepped onto my mat this time...I realized something bigger has been happening. In the year and a half that I have been here I have relived every challenge, every difficulty, every hardship, every bad choice through different teachers. Same scenarios, different faces. While I had a small realization of this a few months ago...I didn't truly realize it until I was sitting in meditation one day and it all came flooding back. All of it. All of the memories and pieces of me I thought I had lost..all the pieces I worked to forget. I saw it so clearly...my experience in Peace Corps has been all about letting go and letting love. All of this time on this island has allowed me to reorganize and realize the deepest and truest nature of myself. When I opened my eyes from that meditation it was as though everything had integrated. And I let go. And I joined myself again in this world. In peace.

This morning as I was beginning my yoga practice a yellow breasted bird came and sat on the windowsill for quite a while and joined me in welcoming the day. In that moment I knew without a doubt every little thing is gonna be alright.