The Healing Power of Transition

Have you ever had a week where a single idea pops up at you from a million directions at once?  In my life this week the theme that started to emerge was transition . It cropped up in yoga classes, in conversation with friends, even at Pulling Down the Moon as we adapt to our cool new website and e-commerce system. Transition is also all around outside. In Chicago the mountains of winter snow outside my door are melting – revealing the shoots of tulips already breaking through the earth. Of course, as a yogi, I believe that the themes emerging in my outer life contain clues to my inner life. So when I went to my yoga mat this week, I meditated on transition. 

At Pulling Down the Moon our fertility yoga practice is a style of yoga called vinyasa,  a flowing series of postures. As I practiced this week I turned my attention to the transition between the postures rather than the postures themselves. What I found was fascinating. Moving from one pose to another with awareness was much harder than moving without awareness. Between each pose I discovered an infinite number of experiences of breath, balance, strength and mastery.

Finishing that week of practice, I had what we call a “yoga insight (or satori, in Sanskrit).  Transition is the place where life is actually happening!  Each finished pose is gone – belongs to the past – and each “future pose is fantasy – belonging to an idealized future. Yet in the middle, where the pose is emerging and awareness is shaping each moment, life and joy are always present.

Infertility is a transition, too. We are moving from our previous childless existence toward parenthood.  It’s easy to reject what has come before and race toward the future. Yet in doing so we deny our own life and existence as valid. This week we challenge you to exist in the transition, the now, of your life. It’s in this moment that you can feel your own strength and beauty, your own courage and the exquisite creation of life.