Yoga Mind, Week 32: Our Final Yoga Mind Tool

The one that ends our program is actually where everything begins.

Photo by Robin Schreiner on Unsplash

I had come not to a fork in the road but to a wide-open space with no discernible path. I’d begun to see my career as a series of chairs at various interchangeable desks…knowing all the while that things would come to an end. I realized that for me there was no feeling of permanence because at heart I needed to walk my own path. The jobs were fine and I was grateful for them, but they were not the endgame, the hard-won “result,” and climbing the corporate ladder meant nothing to me. That was all I could gather. Behind those questioning thoughts, waiting patiently, was a sense that I should be doing something else. But what?

I wrote those words in Yoga Mind six years ago, and I’d felt them before that, and I feel them now. At various times in our lives, we come to the end of one road and, hopefully, the start of a new one. Sometimes there’s that wide-open space I wrote about with no discernible path, and we can choose our new direction. Other times we see nothing but a dead end. There, we really have some work to do, hacking out our own path.

I’ve done it. You’ve done it at some point in your life. Maybe more than once. Maybe many times. Maybe it was your choice, or it might have been someone else’s choice, and you found yourself in a new land. Maybe it was circumstance. Maybe it was just time. So…what then? And what now?

When we find ourselves at the end of one road and the start of another—or not—there is one tool that helps us take the next step forward. It’s the tool that comes at the end of this journey we’ve been on together for the past ten months. It’s the tool that’s been with us all along, the tool that’s the hardest to find and yet the most reliable and available for us.