The Magic of Time and Place
I’ve been thinking about my own personal “Herstory”. I can look at my life through many lenses and timelines. Right now, I want to look at my life through the lens of yoga and see what that timeline looks like, how I started this yoga journey to where I’m at now. As I write this, I think this is the third or fourth iteration of what I want to talk about. I start writing, go down the timeline in chronological order, it starts to be too many words, I get tied up in whether or not I should be more detailed or more broad with my story. I think to myself, how much would folks read this if I went all in? So I stop writing and start over, repeating the cycle.
Which in a funny way, is what life is like, right? We start something, want to share it with the world and then stop because we think that it will be too much for others to listen to or read.
My life has been a series of adventures, wrapped up in timelines of about 5 years. I have lived in 5 different states, and I have had a major life event happen in each of those spots (but that is for a much longer blog post or newsletter) When I try to think of how yoga has flowed in and out of my life, it’s hard to sum it up in 500 - 700 words. It’s been woven into my life since 2008 when I took my first yoga class as a P.E. elective in college. Then, yoga found me again when I lived in Austin, Texas in 2018 and has stayed a part of my life in some form or another through personal practice, teacher training, teaching classes online and in person, and starting Stag Moon Yoga. For the last 8 years, the practice of yoga has been a constant in my life.
Timelines are funny like that. My mentor calls it "Ebenezers”, which is a marking of a timeline, it’s the key milestone or highlights of a journey. Ebenezers are gateways into the timelines we have walked down. I can zoom out and look at my life through many different lenses. The lens of the different places I’ve lived, the creative moments, yoga and spiritual practices, the experiences that defied and shaped me into who I was becoming and who I am right now, the healing journey that I have gone through and still working through. Even now, I can see myself moving through a timeline that hasn’t been written yet but I can see the fragments of how I want it to go. The common patterns that I see throughout my own Ebenezers timelines are curiosity, connection, and trusting my intuition.
If you were to take a moment to map out your own timeline, make your own Ebenezer, what would that look like? Would patterns emerge? Would you create one big timeline or break it up into smaller events?
That’s the magic of time and place, it’s a gateway into how you have arrived to where you are at right now. Take some time this week to reflect on where you’ve been and where you want to go.
