There was a little card in one of the Ashram classrooms that had an image of Krishna playing the flute, his body gently curved.  The text said “Keep thy Mind fixed on Me.” That little card has been on my mind for years, almost decades. I have wondered: what does it mean to keep my mind fixed on the Divine? And how do I do it?

Every time I come to the Ashram, I receive some kind of message or something to work on from the Divine. This summer, I received a clear message: Attune to higher frequencies.

I love looking up the definition of words.

 Attune means: to make receptive or aware of
Receptive means: able and willing to receive
To Attune is to become aware of; and to become able to receive.

I went further: the verb tune means to calibrate your instrument or to set your receiver to the desired signal. That makes me think: What signal do I want my instrument calibrated to?

I initially was thinking that putting my attention on higher frequencies was putting my attention on the good, the beautiful, the “better states” of being. 

I began to see how that creates a dichotomy of good/bad, preferred/not preferred and sets up resistance. Everything, everyone and every state of being is Divine energy, is frequency. Some states of being feel heavier and more dense than others and have less flow. Some states of being are lighter and have more flow.

 What if I just put my attention on the flow of energy, on the unmanifested form, on the subtle?

Later, during satsang I practiced becoming aware of energy, the energy of the Temple itself, the energy of the community joined in song. It is beyond feeling or sensation, it is a subtle sense, an awareness. The subtle energy that flows beneath, around and within. I felt it pick me up in its current and swirl me around in its waves.

It reminded me of my favorite quote from Kundalini Yoga for the West.

“When you see the life-giving rays even in the most desperate human tragedies, that is the moment when you become aware that you are a handmaiden of Divine Mother. You have set spiritual energy in motion.”

The spiritual energy that swirls beneath, within and beyond the gross, is constantly in a wave of creation and dissolution. It exists beyond and beneath the pairs of opposites – good bad, high low. It is ever cycling and recycling through the whole gamut. By putting my attention on it I activate it and it lets energy flow rather than stagnate.

The next day I was out with my friend Jo-Anna (a karma yogi) and my son Benny. The road at the far end of the garden was too steep for my comfort in my mobility scooter, so we had to push it up the hill. Without words, the three of us worked together like a single unit. Normally, I would be ashamed and embarrassed. I really hate that scooter and that I have to use it. I would have been berating myself for getting into this mess and making apologies and excuses, feeling bad that I had inconvenienced my companions. But I didn’t. The thoughts didn’t even cross my mind. As we got to the top of the hill the clear blue sky seemed more expansive than normal. A wave of energy came from the sky and opened my heart wide where I felt an enormous surge of love and appreciation for all of us.

Deep Gratitude

Since I have this challenge with my body, I find I need to reach for the Divine even stronger, with more persistence and tenacity. I rely on practices to do so. 

I have been doing this practice lately that I call deep gratitude where I take a fairly mundane thing like a spoon, or something you wouldn’t normally think to be grateful for like the sewer system and dig deep into appreciation for it, like keep following the line further and further, digging and digging, polishing and polishing, until it is no longer a mundane or forgotten thing but it is glowing with life-giving rays, with Divine Light.

For example – a vase on the altar, maybe it’s from the dollar store, a mundane ordinary thing but I think about the person who lovingly filled this with flowers and water and I think about the person who made sure this whole shape was symmetrical or programmed a computer to do so.  And I go all the way back to the sand that was gathered to create this glass and the people who discovered that you could burn sand and make glass and whoever made the calculations to determine the strength of this vessel to make sure it didn’t break too easily but remains light and dainty.

This was probably mass produced far away, and I think about the people working the factory who may think they just work in a mundane factory but they have made or pressed a button to make this vase that now adorns our altar and forms part of a portal to Divine energy. And now this vase becomes special as we think about all that has been put into it being here and all the people who have contributed to it. It’s no longer a vase but a marvel of human ingenuity and cooperation that evokes a feeling of awe and wonder.

And now doesn’t it have a new meaning?  Isn’t it kind of shiny? You can do this with anything – socks, book cover illustrations, your feet, the water system that you rely on.

That’s how I line my path with glowing gems. As I look at things with Light, then everything shines Light back at me.

It is so shiny at the Ashram. I can barely let in the gratitude and appreciation for this place, for this community, for my husband and son who support me. When I open myself up to the deep appreciation and gratitude for all the magnificent things about this place, it is so big that if I were to let it all in, it would drop me to my knees.

Practice: 
We can practice sensing the subtle energy. Close your eyes for a moment. start with feeling sensation – clothing on your skin, air on your face; now move beyond your body and the immediate space around it. Can you feel the energy of this room? Become aware of the energy of this room vs outside of this room. Become aware of the energy of a garden. Can you sense, feel or imagine the energy that is moving within the plants causing their stems to push through the earth leaves to unfurl and reach up? Can you sense, feel or imagine the energy within a butterfly that moves its wings as it flutters gracefully in the air? Can you feel sense or imagine that same energy within you? This is the flow of energy that animates your body. It is the same as the energy that makes the wind blow, the garden grow and the wings of a butterfly move. Become aware of it. 

When you can see the life-giving rays… you have set spiritual energy in motion.

Practice:
Choose something mundane. Something within your current field of vision, in this room and follow the thread of appreciation until you feel awe and wonder.

Nicole St. Arnaud has been visiting the Ashram since 2006 and completed the Yoga Development Course in 2015. When at the Ashram, she can always be found in the Beach Prayer Room before dawn which is her favorite place on earth. She has certificated in Iyengar Yoga, Yasodhara Yoga, Heartmath, Reiki and Conscious Parenting. She also has Master’s degree in Environmental Design and worked as  a professional urban planner.

Then summer, when a garden is in its prime – lush, high production; seems that this is what a garden is all about.

But for me, there is something surprising and soulful about a garden in the middle of autumn, when it has been through more than half of its life cycle, yet still flourishing in unique ways in the next to last phase.

I, myself, am in the autumn of my life journey, the phase where the end of life is more fully in my consciousness, and I’ve been exploring how to bloom now, here, in new ways. The reality of my mortality infuses this season of my life with a deep sense of gratitude, humility, commitment, and sacredness.

Sacred Questions

As a participant in one of the Ashram’s first online courses on discovering the sacred, I realized that a sense of sacredness in my life had been, paradoxically, most present for me in the few times that I’d accompanied loved ones as they prepared to die. In those spaces, I was aware of forces not entirely of this world so very present in my experiences of witnessing their sacred passages out of this human realm – and I was left with many questions.

It was my longing to understand death better that led me, at the age of sixty-two, to study conscious dying and death doula practice at the Conscious Dying Institute. Many insights emerged from my studies, perhaps none more impactful than beginning to make peace with my own mortality which brought with it a deep and genuine sense of gratitude for living.

And then something more happened for me. From newfound peace and gratitude, emerged brand new questions around purpose. In what some call the “third third” of our lives, I wondered if there was still more to become. Was there more of my Self to unearth, to release, to seed and grow into? Were there new roles for me to play, different yet based upon all I’d been before, in my family, my community, my work in the world?

In my long career as an educator and coach for social change leadership, most recently as a co-founder of the Wolf Willow Institute for Systems Learning, I’ve spent decades supporting incredible, amazing leaders from all walks of life – almost all at least twenty to thirty years younger than me.

Now, my attention turned towards my peers, those still passionate about wanting to contribute to a better world yet also heeding an inner intuition that called for changes to the focus and quality of their leadership. What would it mean to intentionally seed purposeful, new ways of knowing, being and doing at this point? What would it take to consciously, bravely say ‘yes’ to this inner calling to elderhood?

Soul Work

I wanted to learn more. I stumbled upon a book called “The Inner Work of Age ~ Shifting from Role to Soul” by Connie Zweig. As I read it, I became excited about the author’s explanation that older adults are not yet finished growing up!

The final stages of life can be a profound time of human development, one that we have been preparing for in all our previous steps and stages. A critical phase that, if we are privileged to live long enough, offers us unique opportunities for continued growth. Even more interesting to me, was evidence that this stage of life holds tremendous purpose and potential, not only for individuals but for society.

Carl Jung wrote, “A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species.”

To my mind, this statement connects natural aging to natural meaning and purpose for the health and well-being of all of us. I was reminded that we humans are but one species, a part of the natural world of this planet, and subject to natural processes that likely hold relevance for resilience and well-being. This resonated deeply with my soul and filled me with longing to step out more fully onto the natural course of an entire human journey. I developed a new sense of determination and commitment to be all that I could be as I enter the elderhood phase of my own blessed life.

“We suffer from ageing illiteracy.” writes renowned gerontologist, Bill Thomas – and as my own interest increased around how to make the most of the last decades of my life, I had to agree. I began to seek out sources of new learning and development about this part of the life path and discovered programs that promoted new, positive perspectives on ageing.

In September 2022, I enrolled in one such workshop at a beautiful leadership retreat centre on one of the islands off the coast of BC, and stepped into a new circle of fellow seekers, all of a certain age. That phrase, ‘a certain age’ is a funny one – meant to be used when you want to mask your true age, most often used to refer to women, for whom growing older is experienced, in this youth-obsessed culture, as particularly cruel.

Yet in this program on ageing, the phrase was flipped for me. Here was a group very ‘certain’, as in, sure of themselves. We affirmed for each other that older age held new promise and we were eager to develop new mindsets that would support living lives right to the end of life, with purpose, passion and pride.

The good company of my fellow participants breathed new life into my explorations and a seed was planted in my mind. I began to dream of designing a program that might offer even more – not only supporting positive attitudes about ageing but also framing our interest in ageing as whispers of the soul, with deep relevance to the state of our world, and the urgent need for all humans to show up now in our fullest, most mature, most heart-centred selves.

How might we of a certain age truly be part of the necessary transformations in society? My biggest hunch was that if ageing of body, mind and soul is a natural process with genuine purpose, then some of the most profound lessons for we humans might come from Mother Earth.

Whispers from The Garden

On the sunny, October afternoon that the glimmer of an idea emerged connecting ageing and social change, I was sitting on a weathered, wooden bench in the large garden at the leadership centre.

My gaze moved all through the garden, noticing hints of the season that had been and also of the fallow period that was to come. Most of all, I was struck by the unexpected bounty and beauty in ‘the now’ that was all around me!

As if the garden itself was speaking to me, a most provocative question drifted into my mind: What blooms in an autumn garden?

I wandered through and imagined the garden as metaphor for the autumn season of our human lives, looking for clues to answer my questions about the purpose of this time for me and others.

I wondered if the garden somehow knows it’s in the final stages of its life cycle. If so, how does it respond to that conscious knowing? Whether it does or doesn’t, what occurs naturally that is for the good of all the elements present here?
Wandering and wondering, I jotted down the thoughts that flowed through my mind, a stream of new awareness, a rush of fresh questions. All that I was witnessing became a source of deep reflection, prompting powerful questions for me to hold:

• Producing and harvesting seeds appears to be one of the chief purposes – What seeds for the future have I been producing? How am I sharing those? Where might they root?
• Some plants bloom with no purpose except to provide beauty, eliciting in me a sense of awe at the colour, shape, texture, scent – At this stage, how might I define beauty more fully? How can I contribute to beauty in my world? What effect could my beauty or my beautiful offerings have on me and others?
• There are plants that are reblooming – Are there any parts of myself ready to bloom again? What shape and colour will my reblooming take?
• There is thoughtful pruning taking place now for the sake of future growth – Is there anything in my life that is taking up too much space? In what ways? What if I cut it back?
• Some plants, like kale, have more sweetness in the autumn – What aspects of myself have grown or could grow sweeter? What effect does that have on me? On others?
• Many plants have grown hardier with time – Are there aspects of myself that have grown hardier with time? In what ways might this matter?
• If a plant or part of the garden has become overgrown or too large, one of the dangers is that its shade has negative effects on the growth of other plants – Does the shade that I cast get in the way of the growth of others?
• Late in the season, some plants’ key purpose is to offer shelter and nutrition for busy pollinators – How might I offer shelter and sustenance to others with different roles and/or lives than mine?
• The compost pile is growing; in fact, it is immense in the autumn – What is composting within me and in my life that is potentially a resource to the people who are coming after me? How might this matter in the world?

Transformations

These seemed critical questions for moving towards an understanding of social purpose in the eldering stage of life.

A year later, I and two dear colleagues from Wolf Willow Institute returned to that center to pilot a program based on a deep inquiry into eldering and transformation in these tumultuous times. The circle of diverse participants included an Indigenous Knowledge Keeper, an artist, a community organizer, a foundation director, a grandmother, a lifelong activist for social justice, an academic, a counselor, and a leadership educator, among others.

They were all interested in deepening their understanding of what this older stage of their lives might hold as meaningful both personally and professionally. Over the next few days, we explored across cultures and life experiences, our understandings of the keyword, “eldering” – clarifying that term as attached to older age, and dialogue around cultural appropriation of Indigenous traditions, and spiritual roles of Elders.  Our focus considered lessons from many different cultures but was mostly taking a deep dive into our personal understandings of eldering and elderhood – learning from and with each other.

Together we wondered about the process of “transformation”, both the individual experience as well as at a societal level. We told stories to shed light on lessons from our life journeys. We identified and welcomed parts of our shadow selves to support our wholeness. We explored our big questions around mortality, life purpose, wisdom and humility through art, Indigenous traditional knowledge, time on the land, and developmental frameworks.

We reviewed complexity leadership capacities and discussed how those might look subtly different in actions we might take at this stage of life. We stilled internal and external noise to be in touch with our souls.

And we created space to admit that this, one of the final stages of adult development, is not easy. Not at all. It calls for us to keep our hearts wide open despite feelings of vulnerability, grief and fear. Richard Rohr, the author of “Falling Upwards, A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life”, writes, “This is perhaps our major stumbling stone, the price we must pay to keep the human heart from closing down and to keep the soul open for something more.”

I come upon hints of that “something more for the soul” in all kinds of places. It tugs at my heart when I gaze into the eyes of my grandchildren or when I hold the hand of an old friend. When I catch my reflection in the mirror, it can surprise me, yet also helps to ground me.

And lately, each year around October, the invitation for my soul to consider “something more” whispers to me in extraordinary ways in the hush and splendour of an autumn garden.

Cheryl Rose is mother and grandmother, as well as a leadership educator, a systems coach, an accredited death doula and end of life educator. She was one of the principal directors for the national Social Innovation Generation (SiG) partnership. She was the Associate Director of the Waterloo Institute for Social Innovation & Resilience (WISIR), a founding director of the Rockefeller Global Fellowship in Social Innovation, a Senior Fellow at McConnell Foundation and a core member of the design and delivery team for the Getting to Maybe Social Innovation Residency at Banff Centre. Most recently, she co-founded and is a director at the Wolf Willow Institute for Systems Learning. Cheryl mentors systems leaders and social innovators across the country and is revered for her kindness, her practical wisdom and her capacity to connect and uplift those at the front lines of change.

The whole class as one entity immediately sat up very straight. They all looked at me, waiting for the next instruction. A question registered in me at a deep level: What was I to do with the power I had been given in this classroom? What was my responsibility?

Unfortunately, we have all been trained to defer our power to authorities in school, in family, and in work. Even more unfortunately, teachers often don’t realize the power they hold.

As a teacher, I see that as soon as I sit in the chair, students will often give their authority to me. People want a dividing line between the teacher and student, a line that says the teacher knows more. They want someone to tell them what to do. Yet a good teacher should be searching for ways to foster independence instead of dependence. A teacher’s job is to see the potential in people and want to draw it out.

Through teaching I learned how each mind is unique. I also realized that there is no dividing line between teacher and student. What is a teacher?

A teacher is also a learner, a learner of minds. I am learning; they are learning. We learn together. We all have a duty to help each other, like a big sister or brother stepping ahead first and helping others take the next steps.

I remember my own education and how I was drawn to windows – looking out. I wanted to sit in the rows by the windows. I wanted what was happening inside to connect with what was happening outside.

What we were learning in the classroom didn’t have any relationship to my life. There is nothing that we did in the school that related to the environment in which I was living. We learned things in our workbooks; the workbooks were marked. It was what someone else thought I should know. It had no real relationship to my mind, my life outside the classroom.

We have been conditioned to think of our lives in classroom boxes, in neat rows. Our everyday life is segregated from the life force that wants to truly know our selves, our minds, and our purpose.

How do we connect with this spiritual life? People tend to keep it separate, have a different classroom for each part of their life – one for work, one for family, one for spiritual practice, one for recreation – but no connection is made between them.

What each person needs are the tools to explore the mind so that they can find the potential within themselves. We often learn on an intellectual level, but there is another kind of understanding that comes from what we call the heart.

Teachings or spiritual tools allow access to the heart by revealing obstacles that have kept us in safe, mechanical ways of living, just like those neat rows in the classrooms.

The teachings are available to all who are sincere; the path is open to everyone.

The basic principle involved with teaching is to ask what is best for each person. We all have what we need within ourselves. The task is to unwrap ourselves from the covers of conditioning, asking, “Why do I want to wear this wrapper as my real self? It was a protection once; someone put it on me or demanded it from me. But now I have other choices.”

That’s what a teacher does, she tries to get you to remember what you know, put it into the context in which you are living. Then your life can expand.

Spiritual tools can open minds to a broader perspective, put life into a context in which we begin to feel gratitude for what we’ve been given, because things start to make sense. You will discover that there is a purpose and a reason to life. You start to learn about your mind and how it creates the world that you live in. The inner life reflects the outer life.

Life is inconsistent. There is no right or wrong, this or that, up or down, yes or no, in or out. Often there are no answers.

This goes against what we have learned and adapted to through education. These dualities are extremely limiting. There is a bigger context to every situation.

The more possibilities you allow yourself, the less confusing and chaotic life will seem. There are millions of possibilities and many answers to every question. It is not right or wrong, but what is appropriate for the situation, what is serving the best in yourself and others as you see it. Even if you make a mistake, you will learn from that mistake.

Question life around you, learn about the place of questions, and the freedom of having no answers. There is a place inside that can remember, that knows. There is an inner teacher that can discover the teachings.

A spiritual teacher is only a conduit for the teachings, an inspiration and example on the path.

In my teacher I saw something I wanted – a straightness, a light and an intelligence. Often a teacher is someone who can see another dimension to life, who has had an experience of the Light and how it works. They bridge the gap, make a connection between the sacred and the everyday, not leaving it at an intellectual level.

The question of teaching really comes back to the questions we can each ask ourselves. What do I do with the power I have been given as a human being to think and to make choices? How do I envision the future? How can I become more considerate, kind and helpful? What life do I want to create for myself? How can I step out of my old concepts? What is the purpose of my life?

Swami Radhananda was president and spiritual director of Yasodhara Ashram from 1993-2014, and a living example of the quality and integrity of Swami Radha’s teachings. Swami Radhananda passed into the Light on January 28, 2021.
Originally published in Ascent Magazine.

Collage by Swami Radhananda

How can one go further without welcoming Winter, knowing it will be cold and have an element of desolation
but also sensing the beauty of this bareness?
-Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

Grief into Growth

During one of my darkest periods, I left a well-paying, approval-generating job because of the costs of the work culture to my life force. Then I paused and wondered what mattered most for my next job. To my surprise, the response that came was to work with kind people. There was a lot of room for interpretation in this answer and I applied for many positions. The one I took was with Bereaved Families of Ontario (BFO), in Ottawa, a small non-profit organization which provides grief support.

One of the orientation requirements for my new role was to participate in the peer support groups BFO offered. At the time, my body winced from grief – two pregnancies, a relationship, a home, parts of the job I’d left. Despite sharing this in my job interview, I’d been hired. Secondary and less conscious losses also exerted an influence – identities, hope, self-esteem, capacity. It was hard to leave the house.Part of me wanted to want to live. Other parts didn’t or couldn’t.

Walking into a church basement for my first experience of Support and Share night, I was struck by two experiences. The first was the concentration of undiluted sorrow that filled the room – thick and undulating. The second was that encountering this place of sorrows was more comforting than anything anyone had said in response to learning what was hard in my life at that time. Here was a place where I could be as I was, feeling what I was feeling, in community.

Larger than the suffering was the power and space of non-judgement, one of the guidelines for participating in a support group. Being there nurtured acceptance of what was – the fact of endings, the emotional landscape that came with endings and hard changes, the need to move towards what I wanted to recoil from for shifts to happen.

Listening, I was surprised by how many times I recognized myself in what was shared in the group. After hearing one woman after another wonder about the correlation between choices she had made and the loss of her pregnancy or infant, I saw the collective female gaze mirrored in me. The Light of the group opened the possibility of dropping an evaluation of failure from my experiences of loss.

Women who were further along in their grief journeys were finding pathways to positive relationships with their bodies, the place where the beings they loved had lived and died. People whose losses seemed impossible to me, calmly facilitated groups. I was able to say and ask things I couldn’t speak or ask anywhere else. The distress that fortified a perception of separateness when I tried to bear it on my own, revealed our connective tissue.

Over time and through experience, I learned that most people who were compassionately witnessed following a loss and authentic with themselves, expanded. They became more compassionate, honest, generous, and accepting. They emerged from a time where they wondered if they would ever laugh again or feel whole to a place where they had energy for new projects and an emboldened orientation for how they wanted to show up in the world. Many of these people powered the largely volunteer-run organization that was BFO. Many went on to serve life in other ways. Here were the kind people I needed and was called to meet.

Honouring Our Pain

Grief is like mycelium, a hidden understory of connection that lives within. When one loss is acknowledged, other losses needing attending are also touched. So while someone may have come through the door because they lost their parent or friend, I might learn that the one they were equally missing was the german shepherd who died two months prior or the family farm paved over for a new suburb. I heard many people mourn for more-than-human beings. Many times, I did the same. Conditioned to feel threatened for naming what they’d learned to disenfranchise, participants sometimes pulled back after these spontaneous disclosures. Speaking these losses is like the Sanskrit seed syllable ‘ah,’ which stands for all voices not yet spoken, all voices not yet heard. The resonance of these shares always touched me deepl

Gradually I realized that I wanted to offer a place of welcome for a specific branch of hidden sorrows, now called ecological grief. At the time there was no name for the emotional consequences of anticipated or actual environmental changes, the need to mourn the loss of ecosystems, landscapes, species and ways of life. How would I find the people who needed it? Would anyone come? Is it possible that the land needs this to? Is it possible to give the land a voice in these processes?

Two weeks later, a colleague and friend asked if I would facilitate a workshop for exactly this purpose.

As life on earth intensifies through a convergence of human-induced crises, this work is both what I need to sustain my resilience and part of what I understand my role in the ecosystem to be.

This autumn, I’m calling the workshops that I’m offering Cultivating Climate Courage in Community. As part of these gatherings, each person is invited to express their pain for the world in pairs or small groups. While this is happening, the role of others is to bear witness. I call this a practice because for most people it’s uncomfortable. What I’m learning from grief and yoga is that these places of discomfort are edges to lean into, fertile for learning and growth. Leaning in requires bravery. The challenge is to stay open.

Scholar of Systems Theory and Buddhism, Joanna Macy, whose body of work I structure my own on, calls this practice honouring our pain. Joanna is precise in her choice of words, suggesting that we not only endure these uncomfortable sensations, but honour that which is difficult to feel. When we learned that part of the truth of our land is that She holds the unmarked graves of untold numbers of Indigenous children or 70 percent of the Northwest Territories were on fire last summer, many people felt something uncomfortable inside.

According to systems theory, if we miss, dismiss or avoid these sensations, we block the feedback loops we need to regulate, to self-correct, to make the decisions we need to make for life on earth. These sensations are life’s energy moving through us, Divine Mother’s blood. From this perspective, sorrow, fear, and anger aren’t weaknesses, nor something to be ashamed of, but intelligent responses to the threats facing our planet. They’re integrity trying to come back into the system.

So we practice being with each other’s suffering without turning away or trying to take it away. We witness to learn what’s needed to be in solidarity. We witness as solidarity. The reason we practice is because if we can’t stay with what’s hard in ourselves, another human or any being, we look away. When we look away, parts of ourselves or other beings get left behind.

According to evolutionary cosmologist, Brian Swimme, 95% of future life is dependent upon human awakening. When I try to be with this on my own, it’s too much. That’s one of the reasons I facilitate group work. The Circle can take and compost far more than my individual nervous system. So far, the Circle has taken everything in.

Later on in the workshops, we plant ideas, wishes, poems and prayers in these composted emotions for new and ancient ways to live and relate to all life. At last weekend workshop’s, people spoke pledges to tend a community garden for native plants, convert an old home into a green home, show up as the father he wants to be. All these seeds and seedlings rooted in a common desire to try to pivot towards life.

Seeing with New and Ancient Eyes

The seed I always want to plant is the same. I want to be like wild Rose.

It’s late autumn as I write this story. Ferns erupt like green fountains from brown and copper leaves covering the forest floor. I walk the mud road to a place where Rose grows on the shore of Tenagadino Zibi, the air here carrying salty scents from the river.

Rose’s leaves are yellow and khaki. We greet and I ask to harvest a rosehip to plant seeds in my new garden, then stand still and wait. Sensations arrive in my body, vibrations by which plants communicate. The feeling like a bulrush going to seed in my heart. Rose consents.

At home, I eat the bitter juicy fruit, spit thirty-seven seeds into a bowl – small, hard, white potential. Come winter, I’ll sow them in plastic containers filled with soil. The seeds like most metamorphoses, requiring darkness to grow.

To me Rose is plant, elder and bodhisattva. In my experience, Rose emanates love as a vibration, as medicine, no matter how I show up or how long it’s been since I last stopped by. As far as I can tell, Rose constantly and freely emanates love to anyone and everyone.

So, I’m literally planting the seeds who are Her offspring in the hopes that they’ll grow and survive transplanting into my garden next spring – in support of pollinators, in support of my human and more-than-human neighbours, in support of my nervous system, and to bring this teacher near – to deepen and expand my apprenticeship in love.

I want to grow the capacity to emanate love as self-care and planetary care. I want to remember to emanate helpful vibrations throughout my days and nights, as a way to balance the costs of my life on Earth, as an offering to contribute to rebalancing the world.

What seed do you wish to plant for yourself, for Earth or for someone you love and are missing?

Robin Macdonald is a spiritually-rooted facilitator, moving at the intersections of social justice, earth care, spirituality and mental health. Part of the Scottish-Irish diaspora living on unceded Algonquin Anishinaabe territory, also known as Wakefield, Quebec. Robin is a restorative justice practitioner, communal grief and Work that Reconnects facilitator, Yasodhara Yoga teacher and writer. Core to her work is the role of community in healing and thriving. Learn more about Robin’s work at Grief Into Growth and about Joanna Macy’s teachings.

Nature Mandalas by Barbara Brown
Collages by Robin Macdonald

At a very young age, I noticed that everything vibrated, even inanimate objects. Eventually, along the way, I noticed that the vibrations also had colours. Trees would give off the most glorious colours, in varying shades of nearly transparent, almost metallic in appearance, sea greens, azure blues, rose pinks… the trees would mesmerize me for hours as a little girl.

The waves of colours from the trees would swirl and wrap around me; I would feel draped in the trees’ essence, cocooned and protected by their powerful energies. Within the colours, I felt they contained very powerful divine information and by just being around trees, I was basking in their goodness and unconsciously absorbing their wisdom. I spent a lot of time in the woods growing up.

Even the night sky was colourful. I knew that the night sky was supposed to be black with white dots for stars, because that was what I was told, however, whenever I looked up at the stars, I would see rainbow halos around the stars and the moon, I would see streaks of purple and magenta zigzagging between the stars, I would see rays of colours shooting out from orbs—but imagine my surprise the day I found out that my peers could not see those colours! I was SHOCKED because I had thought that everybody saw those colours as well.

Tasting Colour

I also used to think the Northern Lights made noises—a beautiful ethereal whistling-like ringing that would oscillate up and down my spine—because I could feel the vibrations from them so I assumed they were singing, until someone told me that no, Northern Lights do not make any noises, they are silent. WHAT??! No, they are not! We just cannot hear them with our physical ears, but we can hear them with our inner ears. That was what I told myself anyway—because it was either that or I was crazy. I especially loved dancing because I could feel the beat of the music—dancing was a full-body experience for me.

I also started noticing that I could TASTE colours and sounds—even though I could not hear sounds with my physical ears, I could hear sounds inside my head. That unique ability came in handy when it came to mnemonics—it made me a very good student! When I said certain letters in my head, I would see different colours and realize that each letter had its own unique shade of colour and musical tone!

My deafness and my ability to see colours set me apart from my peers, and henceforth the isolation and alienation started to creep in because I found I could not relate to any of my peers or even the adults around me. How do I explain to people that I can taste the colour purple?!

However, as kids are wont to do, I shrugged it off and carried on, comforted by the safety of my colourful universe that I could retreat into anytime within my mind. But it was somewhat of a lonely existence. The more people I surrounded myself with, the lonelier I felt. I knew that this loneliness I had, other people could not fill. It was a loneliness for myself—I felt disconnected because I had a hard time connecting with other people.

Dissipating Loneliness – Embracing the Void

I had, back then, assumed I needed to feel connected to people in order to feel connected to myself. I now know that I only need to feel connected to myself. The loneliness is a homesickness for home and home is where the heart is. When I feel at home in my heart, feeling connected to myself and knowing myself, the loneliness dissipates. I thought I was lonely because I didn’t feel like I could connect with others but I was lonely because I didn’t know how to connect to myself.

As I progressed further in school, I started to get bullied for my deafness. People were quick to assume that I was dumb as well because I could not speak very well. I battled many prejudices and unconscious biases. To survive, I had to grow a very thick skin, one in which insults couldn’t penetrate, but the goodness of the world also could not penetrate the barrier I set up to protect myself from the constant bullying.

My sense of isolation grew. I started questioning myself. I stopped loving myself. My sense of self-worth withered away. A void opened up in my heart, a black empty void—the darkness. It started off as a very small void, I did not understand it but it grew and became a part of me. I then started to associate the void with Ego because very much like Ego, from a perspective, it is loud, colourful, tempting, appears to be your saviour, a know-it-all, overly confident and upon a closer glance, you start to see how empty Ego really is.

Fast-forward to me as an adult: I am in university, I have friends, I can hear, I can speak, everything looks good on paper. But the void was still there—my darkness was there, growing bigger because I did not want to look at it because I could not comprehend what it was. It was scary too—it felt like a blackhole trying to suck me in and I felt like if I got sucked into it, I would forever lose the sense of who I was.

I then tried to fill the void with food and alcohol and relationships that weren’t good for me. Alcohol seemed to fill the void the best temporarily so alcohol was my way to feel “normal”, to fit in, to go out and socialize and go against my introverted nature because I felt that was what we were supposed to do in our 20s—go out with friends and drink and have fun. It wasn’t fun but alcohol was a blessed relief from having to acknowledge that I had the darkness within me and I did not know how to confront it.

Eventually, I found meditation and yoga. An elder encouraged me to meditate and take a few yoga classes. Meditation calmed my monkey mind down enough to have clarity—it was through meditation that I realized I wasn’t living my truth; I was simply acting out a script that was programmed and put into place for me by society, family, friends, and the school system. Yoga helped me get unstuck and finally take action—by going against the grain and the script. A path opened up for me. Yoga gave me the courage to confront my void instead of running away from it or filling it up with food and booze.

My first class—I found that I couldn’t even touch my toes, despite me being athletic. Then I realized yoga wasn’t about being able to touch your toes, but it is about what you learn on the way down. The deeper I went into a pose, the deeper into my subconsciousness I went. I knew that the void had something to do with my subconscious self. I was terrified of my own subconsciousness and Ego because it felt like it would swallow me whole if I got too close to it. But by avoiding that darkness, I was abandoning myself; denying an aspect of myself because it didn’t fit in with my current narrative of who I should be.

That was when I started to realize that my body had its own innate wisdom, its own memories, even its own consciousness—all within my subconscious. My body was constantly trying to tell me something except it could not talk or articulate through words. I realized the only way I could listen to my body was through yoga. I also realized that doing yoga was one way to listen to my body. I realized that in order to get out of the void, I had to go THROUGH it.

So that was exactly what I did for the next number of years—yoga and meditation. I even quit my current job and dropped out of university to pursue the Yogic Path. I spent HOURS in poses, contemplating and meditating and listening to my body. I pushed myself to the limit. My body and mind rebelled at first—I would push and it would push back. But I kept at it and kept pushing myself physically and eventually my body started to “give in” as it started to trust my mind when I asked my body to go deeper into a pose or bend.

I embraced the void. I embraced my own darkness to see my own Light. In the embracing of the void, I realized that within the void is creation. It is the spark of life. Within the nothingness, there was everything. The void is the birth of creation. I realized that my void was merely a SEED! But I had to nurture that seed, weed my garden of my mind, water it, and actually LOVING that seed, in order for the seed to blossom.

It was my own ignorance that made me think that my darkness was something to be removed or eliminated or avoided when in truth the darkness was my best teacher. The loneliness I felt, I realized, was the only remedy to fill myself up from the inside, rather than from the outside in. Knowing and understanding myself was the best way to fill my spiritual cup. Instead of feeling fragmented, like there were pieces of me scattered everywhere and I felt like I spent a lot of time trying to find those missing pieces and trying to put myself back together, I started to feel whole. Knowing myself was the glue that kept the pieces of soul together.

Seeing the World As How We Are

Sometimes I forget to take the time to get to know myself. Sometimes I forget to take care of myself. When the pandemic hit, I went into survival mode and strayed from my daily yoga practice because I simply was too busy for such luxury. But by doing so, I started to forget who I was and I lost sight of myself. Traumas started to accumulate, and I know trauma is stored in the body, creating blockages all over my body. When I stopped doing yoga as often, the traumas started to take root in my body and I knew I had to do something about it before the roots of trauma grew and took hold and changed me into someone I wasn’t. The traumas were starting to cloud my clarity.

We don’t see the world as how it is; we see the world as how WE are. This is a saying I’ve always adhered to, as a reminder that my perception can be easily skewed and distorted by my senses and traumas. I now realize yoga isn’t a luxury; it is a necessity for me because yoga is a means for my subconscious self to release old energies that no longer serve me, to make room for the new. But as long as I was holding onto that stagnant energy, I could not heal and move forward. Like dancing, yoga is how I balance my energies.

This is where Yasodhara Ashram comes in. Coming to the Ashram was like remembering who I was. Doing the Hidden Language classes was like a homecoming reunion between my body, mind and soul. Being in the woods cocooned by the mountains; in the silence I heard my own essence. With silence, I could hear more. I know God took away my hearing so I could hear Him more. Being at the Ashram proved that. And without that void, I wouldn’t have come to know my own Light. The void was where my Light was!

Original artwork by Jenny Valdis