I was thinking about how much the lifestyle of an Arizona local makes for a sort-of hibernation season during the long summer, when the heavy blanket of intense heat lays over us.
Any outdoor relationship you’ve created and began to cherish throughout the gorgeous winter months either, completely evaporates or has to get pretty creative in its installments to stay part of your routine. For me, I go outside early in the morning just before the sun starts to pierce through the horizon's line of night’s transitioning twilight and the new day’s bright beginning.
It’s getting hotter and hotter each morning with the sweet monsoon breaks sprinkled in to to cool us, giving us clouds of shade and a whole change of experience from the glaring bright and oven baking heat. It’s like an intense yoga journey or practice. The intensity blasting you until finally a blissful break, a child's pose or savasana. A time for integration and processing the fiery experience of the practice.
I feel like our summers offer a well aligned excuse to sync with the local nature of inward moving energy, work with it and explore who you are in there? Under the hustle and bustle of busy, everyday life. Below the surface of the things you do, what is the voice, the curiosity, the truths? This time of year is an opportunity to work with the heat of Tapas’ burning and find clearlity.
Some of my favorite ways to explore Tapas is of course; though Spanish appetizers (YUM! Ha!) but delicious cultural side dishes .. aside. The yoga word Tapas invites us to use our practice and create an evolving energy, a focused exploration, often talked about as heat. Tapas is to practice in a way that you willingly work with the fiery discipline of your own will. To burn away what I like to think of as distractions but some people use the word impurities. With the purpose of seeing what is there, underneath, glittering up at you. Breathing exercises, meditation, physical heat building yoga practices, journaling, diving into what you usually avoid or find challenging. Maybe creating a goal and a promise to practice towards the goal with permission to re-evaluate as you go.
Basically, if your realities or your true Self is there with you but maybe a little covered with guacamole and cilantro, to use our metaphor, we can't always tell what the main part of our dish is. Are we beans buried in there or is that grilled zucchini under all the toppings? Stay with me here I know it’s tempting to go to lunch after all this food talk but what is really going on at the root of you that needs these distractions or alluring flavors? Notice that I’m not saying ditch the guacamole and cilantro! They are important parts (and delicious). The invitation is to look beyond them and maybe spend some time with what you find underneath. Learn its flavor, behavior, habits and truths. Observe and witness from that place and that’s the practice of yoga after all. Observe and witness so that you can yoke or unite.
I mean who knows! Maybe you’ll learn something that changes you and you’ll add lemon without cilantro for awhile because through deep listening you’ve learned it’s what would serve you best right now, in this moment.
A Tapas practice can help you follow the trail of “you” deeper and deeper into your own flavor, taste and texture. Helping you become the master chef at the restaurant of Self. Ultimately helping us all learn to open to everything, not to renounce, reject or shame it off our plates but to be with it and start the play of taking in, digesting or embracing it, working with compassion and love to be at peace with all our funky wildly fascinating neuroses or fabulous flavorings and realize after a little chewing it’s all really just ONE anyway! Happy heating! And eating ;)
