I live next to the train tracks. When my husband and I first moved here just over a year ago, they each manifested as trains of consciouness: the screech of steel rims spinning over gritty tracks tore my focus away for a short ride.

But I began to adjust to the rhythym, and now the trains are just a blur moving across the periphery of awareness.

My life has changed over the past year, significantly, and by the power of my intention. The challenges and choices have all occured in the present, under the control of my breath’s capacity. You can’t be overwhelmed when you’re just taking in a lungful of life, exhaling out the junk.

I haven’t taken time to assemble my thoughts into a blog post for months, and I don’t intend to encompass everything here. It’s overwhelming, as I realize where my self is now, with respect to these changes.

If I am the benign observer, I’m sitting on a train car, watching the ground with a fixed gaze. At first I was able to distinguish each frame of vision, each thought, individually. How new this is! What evolution from the last frame! But then I relaxed my gaze and stared beyond it. I let my vision blur and I honed on an unmoving place under the surface.

Now the ground is whizzing by, beautiful stokes of colour stream across my sightline. I want to mark this moment, some moment, this one or another. But now I wonder if by launching a nugget of experience off the train like baggage, it would be broken by momentum when it hits the ground.

Tangibly now. I’m incredibly blessed, and deeply thankful of each day. I am now co-owner of a yoga studio, Newport Yoga. It’s just minutes from my door. I have a new community of open hearted people that I relate to every day. The future of the studio is going to be co-authored by my pen. People who come to practice yoga are seekers.

My husband said to me tonight that he can’t remember the last time I was in a “mood”. It’s true, I’m consistently happy. A big step for me.

It’s not really the yoga. I love yoga – but that is only the language of my autobiography. What’s evolving in me (I say tentatively…) is confidence. I’ve struck myself down so many times, even when I’m achieving “goals” I counteract my gains with assault on my body and mind.

But when I walk into the studio, my anxiety ebbs. I work to culivate a group dynamic and personal experience for the participants in my classes. It’s outside of me. I think, at least lately, I’ve been beating my fear.

I had so many personal doubts when I decided to make yoga and the studio my focus. But I chose to ignore them. Something beneath the chiding words of my ego rose above them, and I listened too it. I’m still calling it “It”. When I’ve resolved that “it” is “me” then we’ll celebrate

Love yourself.

Karen