The Winds of Your Homecoming

Oh, not to be separated, shut off from the starry dimension
By so thin a wall.

What is within us
If not intensified sky
Traversed with birds
 
And deep
With the winds of homecoming?

-Rainer Maria Rilke, Uncollected poems, translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows
 
It always amazes me how just thinking about yoga as a practice of homecoming softens some of the hard edges that I didn’t even realize were holding me separate and small.

Isn’t it true that life, in all its fullness and complexity, tends to narrow and constrict how we experience ourselves and closes us off from an expansive sense of being?

How wonderful, then, to consider how yoga brings us back to that starry dimension of who we are, and the freedom, serenity, and possibility that lives there.

We can view our awareness and the flow of our breath as the winds of homecoming that awaken our inner being. 

The abiding presence that we find there feels like coming home to the most empowered version of ourselves, where we remember that we are so much more than just what our minds tells us. 

Our practices open us to the recognition of our deep and fundamental belonging as part of a much larger story beyond our individual identity. Indeed, they help us to remember that we carry the universe inside ourselves.