Moonday Coffee •//• David

It’s easy for the day-to-day to slip from ritual to routine. You lose sight of the bigger picture, forget to zoom in and out, gross to subtle. At the core, yoga, and service work, are a practice of love. It takes hard work to surrender to the vulnerability of this truth. Practice, teaching, devotion to hospitality – they all work the energy body. The Gita says, śraddhā – faith – “is where one places one’s heart.”

I had started to write this as I was planning to return to India this February, for the first time in about five years. Going back to charge up at the source. (India is an origin country for coffee too.) I’ve had to fight for it, cracking open space, plowing through fear and resistance, deep grooves of attachment and aversion. Sometimes you have to climb a thousand dusty steps and elbow your way through the crowds to receive the blessings.

As anyone who does hospitality work thoughtfully knows, this work is mind-control, holding space a continual refinement of infinitely subtle awareness, an unraveling of layers and patterns of conditioning. If it is to be sustainable, it needs support. Tools need sharpening.

I went last week back to where it began for me, to convene with teachers, as students, bright eyes and open hearts. Guruji, our teacher – our teachers’ teacher – came from India to gather us around him. He died, suddenly, a bolt of lightning to the heart, in our midst, in the mountains, on a beautiful fall day, blue sky and crisp forest air.

The normally subtle conduits that flow between our hearts were torn wide open this past week. We held each other in a bounded, sacred space of healing and true collective self-practice that was almost too powerful for my heart to hold. Yoga only exists in relationship. Community is there. I’m so, so grateful, and I have so much love for you all.

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