Solitude is one thing. Loneliness is quite another. I can't speak for anyone else, but for me, contemplative practices that happen in community can make it easier to remember all kinds of things. Such as how the inquiry into truth (yoga) can seem to take infinite patience, how everyone else is also finding their way, and why good humor can save your life while it's busy coming true.

Tread across any terrain, any darkness, and stop. Kneel down by the creek. Your hands comb over the cool moss on the ground and you do nothing else other than feel and hear and see. Take it all in. Curiosity absent any agenda.

Our commitment to, and sense of urgency about, knowing nothing but the truth seems to amplify with time. Once we have more than a few decades of grownup life under our belt, our tolerance for fanciful thinking or concepts that feel contrived putter out. My recent personal experience is that thirst for the unvarnished truth gets magnified when faced with unexpected loss and its onerous sidekick, grief. When the stakes feel high and our hearts are tender, our appetite for extravagant leaps of faith raw peters out

One of the most liberating, if humiliating, revelations for anyone daring or foolish enough to try to teach a subject as complex and vast as yoga comes from surrendering to how little we know about what’s best for an individual practitioner

It's an ongoing lifetime education for any of us bold or foolish enough to sit in the teacher's seat — learning to look at a room full of differently 'posed' bodies. With instruction cues focused less on the gross outer forms and more on the imperative to breathe into harmonious, liberating alignment from the inside out.