Peace, Love, Freedom, Boots & Yoga

It started with a pair of boots.   A pair of outrageously expensive boots.  OK, well they weren't really outrageously expensive, but at that time, in that moment, the cost was something I couldn't rationalize or justify.  It was just one month before I would venture out into the world alone for the first time in almost twenty years, and I was suddenly very aware of every penny I was spending.

Perhaps it didn't really start with the boots.  Perhaps it started long before the boots, on a night, just one week shy of my 40th birthday, when my world was shattered into a million little pieces.  On a night when I realized everything I thought I knew, everything in which I believed, everywhere I thought I was going, was simply an illusion.  I didn't know which piece to pick up first or how to pick it up without its jagged edges reminding me, in a painful wash of crimson, how fragile life really is.

Ultimately, I realized that there was not enough super glue and duct tape in the entire universe to put my world back together again, and the decision was made that I would set out on a new path.

Along came these boots.

These boots, so clearly made for walking.  These boots that somehow screamed peace, love, freedom and hope to me.  I resisted the urge to buy them immediately, yet my mind kept wandering back to them.  Eventually, I splurged.

Not long after the boots came home, I began my 200-hour yoga teacher training.  It was a journey begun in the most painful time in my life.  I questioned the timing, I questioned my ability to focus.  In fact, I questioned everything about myself.  My gut told me I needed to do it, and I tried desperately to ignore it.  Upon hearing me say "I don't think it's the right time..." my teacher confidently responded, "This is exactly the right time."

And it was.

One of the first exercises we did was a meditation during which we were asked to think of a symbol that we drew immediately afterward.  Though I really hadn't been thinking of the boots while meditating, the image that came to me was that of the winged heart, and the words peace, love and freedom were circling in my mind.  I sketched this.


Later that evening, we discussed the extremes of pain/hate/aversion and pleasure/craving.  According to our studies, along that continuum, there is a middle ground wherein lies "peace, love, freedom and yoga".  It was a powerful moment for me.  A moment in which I was reminded that succumbing to the pull of the intuitive mind creates freedom and space for us, but that we often look so long and hard at the past, at the coulda, shoulda, wouldas, or at the desire to have something more, different, better, that we deny ourselves the ability to be present and to simply follow our hearts... our winged, peaceful hearts.

Although I did not know then that Metta Yoga would eventually be born, I did know, with great certainty, that I wanted my life to center around peace, love, freedom and, of course, yoga.