Tumbleweeding

Nature is spitting out lessons every second. When I'm able to check out of my own head and look around--at this beautiful earth I get to live on--I can literally hear the plants talking to me. They are screaming at society, with love of course: yearning to show us what they know. Ever notice how people have cancer but trees don't? They adapt.

This past weekend I took my trainees to Wild Willow Farm to learn yoga. Our task was to collect the countless, gnarly, pintchy, tumbleweeds, collect them and burn them--one by one. This took some time but together--as a group--we did it fairly quickly (the power of using the masses for good!)

You see tumbleweeds are annoyance to farmers: they are dead but tend to strangle anything living it can get close to. If you look at the picture, you can see how these tumbleweeds were strangling a field of chrysanthemums (a flower with the spiritual property of the sun, inviting joy and optimism into our life).

This project was moving meditation with a deep lesson for life: the tumbleweeds actually looked like a strangled mess of a brain. They once were green, healthy and alive serving a purpose on this earth: then they dried and caused havic.

This is a deep symbolic message of what we do to our brain: at one point of our life certain things, thoughts, patterns and people are "green" thriving and alive feeding our thoughts: then life moves on, we get healthier and old patterns die. When they hang around they suffocate our light---holding us back from being the brightest person we can be.

When we lit the tumbleweeds on fire, they burnt fast and made the sound of a firecracker---just like the Fourth of July! The sound represented freedom ---we burnt them carefully aware of what we were letting go of : this brought us liberation. At the end of the day, the farmers were happy and more of the earth was free to live.

I gave each one of my students a chrysanthemum "rescued" from the tumbleweed. This flower is bringing such a happy presence in my house and when my mind starts "tumble weeding" she's reminding me to be and see the light.

This is my hope for the world: liberation and freedom through honoring our brightness and burning the weeds

#yoga #healing #yogawithshawna #sandiego #farm #tumbleweeds #peaceofmind #peace #calm #mediation #breathe #love #flowers #nature