Today marks day 23 on the road. We have started another blog for RV travels and adventures specifically. I will still be using this blog as my personal blog. If you wish to keep up with our adventure and journey with Nancy you can find us at thejourneywithn.com!
Im still so sensitive since mama dying. I already am some what of a worry wart so adding in a big lifestyle change along with losing a parent has had my chakras off balance along with a really overstimulated root chakra probably to compensate for the sense of uprootedness in life.
This is a learning phase in my life. Including learning to the play guitar! I have been playing everyday for a week. I was wondering when this learning phase was going to come. Do you notice the different themes and patterns in your life? During my learning phases I consume books. I can read one book in a matter of two or three days before moving on to the next one. After the learning phase comes the application. Learning how to integrate it into my life. After integration comes the fun part. Sharing.
My last learning phase like this was when yoga first found me. If you have ever asked me how I got on this path, then you’ve already heard this story. When I started this blog post I didn’t think I would be sharing it, but that is the beauty of blogging without a plan. You never know what is going to come out.
Gregg and I had been dating for about six months. I was coming out of a really dark period in my life. I was drinking really heavily and not treating my body with respect. I didn’t even know that treating my body with respect was something I should make a priority.
So even though my life was less dark, I was still drinking pretty heavily on the weekends- partying. Most weekends after Gregg and I started dating I would drive to Clinton from school at Mississippi State and spend the weekend with him.
One weekend everyone else had gone to sleep and Gregg and I were laying on the floor drunk. I remember asking Gregg if God was real. I started crying feeling lost. Gregg went to his bedroom and got a book titled “Be Here Now” by Ram Dass. I went back to school and started reading the book. I didn’t really know what I was reading. All I knew is that somehow the foreign pictures and words seemed so familiar and made sense. As if I was remembering what I have already known from past lives before. When I was reading Be Here Now for the first time, I only read the brown pages. The second, third, and fourth times reading it, I read it cover to cover including the white pages.
I resonated so much with this book because it filled in the blank spaces that Christianity left. I was raised in the Presbyterian church as a little girl and later was baptized in a Baptist church in Clinton. As I got older, my knowledge grew and I had questions. So much of what I had learned in church flew directly in the face of what I was learning in school, through various states of consciousness I had been experiencing, and what my heart was telling me. I had blindly accepted everything that Church told me as truth because that had been the only reality I had ever known until now.
So I move in with Gregg a few months after he gave me the book. About three months later, I started working in the same office with him. I had taken a year off school to figure out what I wanted to do with my life so I was working full time during that period. I was on my lunch break, and stumbled upon Rachel Brathen’s also known as Yoga Girl’s instagram account. She only had a few thousand followers at that time. I found myself scrolling through her posts crying. Feeling more deeply moved by her pictures and words than I had felt in a long time. So I left right then and went to Target and bought a yoga mat.
I started practicing at home with videos online. I took her words to heart. They became my mantras. I was learning so much through her. Then I saw she was reading a book called the ” Power of Now” by Eckart Tolle. This book changed my life. How I interacted with the world was completely different. It made so much sense and I was becoming less anxious. My heart knew these things I was reading and experiencing as truth. Not long after this I was taking yoga at a local studio about three times a week. If she could understand all of these truths I had been learning about and that she is talking about through this yoga practice, then I was going to practice until I understood them too.
I started reading Be Here Now again. Every time I read it, I learned something new. I loved it so much that Gregg proceeded to buy me every single Ram Dass book that was written. Probably fifteen or so. I don’t remember. I read all of them. At this point I have pretty much given them all away for other people to read.
I couldn’t read fast enough to feed my starving heart and mind. All the holes that had been left empty through the dogmatic teachings in the Church were being filled. I was coming to know Jesus and his teachings in a whole new light. A deeper understanding of every religion, people, the heart, and body.
A few months later I gave up eating meat. I could no longer know what I had learned and actively be a part of and continue to give money to an industry that actively killed sentient beings and their families.
Everything happened so quickly.
I had stopped drinking so much, I stopped treating my body poorly. I learned it was a temple and I had to treat it that way. That included what I put in it, how I talked to it, who I let it around, etc.
I was happy, less anxious, not searching for something anymore. My heart was healing.
Six months later I started teaching yoga to Gregg at home. A full year after that I was teaching yoga at a friends studio two times a week. After teaching for a year at her studio, I would go on to get my yoga teacher training this past July. Now my practice in all encompassing to every limb of yoga and not only asana which is how it started. Its a practice, everyday.
Now here we are. I am traveling around the US in an RV teaching yoga and breath workshops. Life keeps getting more and more magical and meaningful.
However, I am back to a learning phase. So I am consuming books just as quickly as I was when Gregg first gave me Be Here Now.
Although I can sometimes be impatient, I am excited to see where this next phase leads.
What are some of your favorite books you’re reading right now?
I just recently finished The Alchemist and it has made it to my top five favorites. Maybe Ill share my list of books that changed my life with you soon !
All of that to say, where we invest our time, our energy, ultimately, our love, is where we invest our life. What are you investing your life in?
Hoping you are having a beautiful Day!
LOVE AND LIGHT
) I will learn how to read road maps, how to change a tire, hell maybe even how to change the oil. There are so many factors that could go wrong along the way. But there are so many things that are going to go right also.
Land Of lizards 