Another way of sensing

I can't believe it has been over a month since my last entry. I have actually been to a major learning center for ten days to take the first half of a Foundations in Ayurveda course. One would be able to study Ayurveda forever and would still just be scratching the surface. That being said I am glad I went because I learned a lot that has already found its way into my teaching.

It was hard for me because the hours of the course were long: 6:30am to 9pm, leaving no down time, something I really need. But I plugged away within this structure, a bit confused because I am sure downtime is part of a balanced life. I am still waiting for the "how to heal from trauma" course that doesn't further traumatized people. I will have to wait a bit longer. The blessing and the curse of the situation includes there being eighty people in the class: a blessing because this many people were serious about studying Ayurveda and a curse because a group half this size would be maximum for the kind of interactive learning experience I like best.

It's been a week since the course ended and I am still recovering. I'm still hoping that perhaps the course and the ancient truths I will learn will help me get out of the fog of grief I've been lost in for a few years. The loss of a good friend to a car accident and my mother's inappropriate estate appropriation left me with a heaviness it has been hard to come out from under. I have learned from Ayurveda that this heaviness may be called guru.

It is also interesting being a beginner to Ayurveda and yet not being a beginner in some ways to some of the ideas because of my at least 25 years of teaching yoga and practicing shamanism. It is hard to know where to put the part of me that is not a beginner. For example, we have a great assignment this week about exploring the sense organs, becoming aware of our relationship to them and how we can connect with them to enhance our life, health and spiritual path. The usual sense organs are ears, skin, eyes, tongue and nose.

So I had a dream about my proprioceptive sense and simply knowing, like a third eye knowing. My guides seem to want me to remember this sensing, even though it is not a part of the beginning Ayurveda that I am learning. So today I will honor this proprioceptive sense, leaving the rest of the week for the other five senses. It used to be hard for me to take a course and feel very entitled to hold fully to what I know. I embrace that I am both a beginner and not a beginner and spirit is speaking to me.

I had a dream about being part of a course and sometimes I was teaching and sometimes other people were teaching. We were all appreciating the different talents people brought to the table and celebrating the ways of knowing that everyone seemed to have. I was enjoying this appreciation. We were beginning to become teams of people with complementary talents rather than any one person being the expert. People were being healed by the way we were working with each other. We seemed to just know how to do this from a deep place inside ourselves...