Namaste!  I have heard this at every single yoga class I have ever taken but do I really take in its meaning fully?  No!  It means the divine within me honors the divine within you.  The important takeaway is that we all have this divinity or light within us.  “We are spirits in the material world” as the band The Police so accurately put it.  I think that high creativity and spirituality is the same which led to the song.  Most of the time, we are asleep and it take hard, heavy knocks to wake us up.  It doesn’t need to be this way.  You only need to pay attention and really look at yourself and life.  Yes, it is work and it requires vigilance but there really is no greater journey.

Sometimes it might feel that we are surrounded by so much darkness.  I grew up in an extremely dysfunctional family as an only child.  How I survived that is still beyond me but despite people constantly telling me how horrible I was – I still persisted.  I would like to believe that it was the divinity in me that knew this wasn’t true.  I have done an enormous amount of work on myself hoping to come to the day where my childhood doesn’t affect me anymore.  Maybe that day will come but regardless I feel that this is my life’s work. 

In nature, we can see the light in cycles.  February starts heading us towards spring with winter slowly leaving us in the distance.  The days start to get longer as the Spring Equinox approaches.  Night is always followed by daylight.  The sun illuminates the whole planet and different times and places and we too can illuminate our own little pocket of the universe.   Remember everyone is going through something.  One day a person popped up in my head from high school.  Not sure why as we weren’t friends though I thought she was nice.  I decided to look her up on social media.  There she was smiling in her cover photo on a beach somewhere holding a drink.  I thought to myself life is good for her and then I was able to read some of her posts since her profile was not private. Someone had posted that this woman had just committed suicide and not to contact the family at this time.  Now this is an extreme example but it really shows that things are not always as they seem.  So, I am not the first person to say practice kindness or to say that the kindness must be first extended to yourself but I think it’s ok that I say it again.

Ritual for honoring the light. Take a candle – preferably a short burn one – light it for yourself.  I honor myself and the light within.