After that bout with the flu, I came back full force today. I feel great. Being off for a few days forced me to relax, sleep and recover - something I have not been doing, at all. It was almost nice, if you cut out the part where I was near-vomiting and felt like everything hurt; apart from that, it was awesome...right.
As my friend Tomi told me during my first attempt at making chutney, "everything is a lesson, if you can learn from it." This said as I was frantically looking for a recipe as I was assigned to preserving various fruits and veggies by utilizing equal parts sugar and vinegar, all while making the base of my chutney a local shrub called salt bush...which most animals (people, indigenous creatures and the random passerby) viewed as a weed. Win? In the end, yes. My plea for help was turned into an opportunity to try something on my own, without explicit direction or a safety net. I was tasked with doing this by a coordinator at the reserve i called home summer's past (hippie, sustainable reserve = best most magical best best ever); no instructions were given except for "use salt bush to make a chutney...there are some recipes in the kitchen, somewhere.." I learned from this open assignment, after my initial hesitation and fear: Would I screw this up? 25 people are going to eat it...what if it sucks? I'm going to make 10 jars of it...man, that would be a lot of suck. Lessons are everywhere, if you just look.
I learned that even if my salt bush chutney did suck, I would know "exactly what not to do next time" (Tomi's kind wit). And if a lesson could come from this, then even a negative result could have a positive outcome. Lessons are everywhere, if you open your mind to them. This is a goal for me. Find the lesson; discover an opportunity to grow. I learned from my bout of flu that my body needed sleep. My body needed a fresh start. My body needed me to stop fighting what it was obviously asking for: release. Release from the constant tug of war between the yoga and my resistance to its release; an adamant refusal to feel all that I was feeling.
Lessons. Look for them. They're there.
Class: Samana
Instructor: Renee
Studio: Open Door
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