Aligning with Grace

There are days you feel lost, perhaps confused, and you might be moving with no sense of direction, and even feeling a lack of purpose... There are times you pray for insights to shake you out of the emotional or spiritual chaos you are experiencing or the perceived turpitude you may be regretting... And the needed insights come, often, from very unexpected places. Perhaps a friend says the right thing or points you in the right direction... Or perhaps, you receive the desired message from a perfect stranger - by simply being in the right place at the right time... Or, maybe you go to a yoga class, like I did today, and your teacher talks about samskaras , imprints that you've created, which leave you feeling like you are stuck in a rut, in more ways than one. And then, all of a sudden you realize, you went to that class to receive the perfect message for you in that moment! I find that many of the greatest insights I now receive, arrive from almost perfect strangers, on Twitter, ...

A new month arrives - its welcome energies - crisp and clean - signaling a major shift. The days are growing shorter, and I look forward to the coming fall season and all that it will bring. New months always remind me of opportunities to begin again, and new seasons offer that as well. This time of year invariably issues a call to journey into greater introspection as well... We step into the last quarter of the year, and it issues an invitation - like Anusara Yoga - to step into the currents of grace, on and off the mat. My teacher, John Friend , the founder of Anusara , shared these insights on Twitter in the last couple of days: "Grace = Growing Revelation as Consciousness expands." "Our stairway lies on the whispering wind of Grace." This summer brought illness, unexpected time for reflection and reassessments, and a challenge to grow more deeply in many aspects of my life. Change and growth are never easy, but they are, as John Henry Newman once observed, t...