The Forrest Yoga tribe uses the principle ‘Walk in Beauty.’ I think Walking in Beauty is essential to living a fulfilling spiritual life. This is how you can use this principle to align with Wanderlust’s intent of finding your ‘True North’.
I first heard about Walking in Beauty from the Dine (Navajo) Native Americans. It comes from a ceremony called ‘Beautyway’, which helps ‘the patient’ to re-establish the balance in their life when they are ill, depleted, sad etc. It was through Native American ceremonies like this one that I was able to find my own lost Spirit.
To Walk in Beauty means to walk in harmony with all things (people, objects, animals…with life!). This includes how we walk, feeling physically and emotionally, and in exploring our own inner wilderness.
Thinking and acting in a Beauty Way completely shifts your perception of life. You move from victim mode — everything bad happens to me — or judging mode — this is great, this sucks — to curiosity and a desire to discern the truth. That is Walking in Beauty. Living more authentically, in a way that your Spirit dictates.
In my Forrest Yoga work I pass on the tools that I’ve learned and honed so that others can navigate the winds of change and tend to their own inner wilderness. That way they can begin to live in a Beauty Way — a way that is exhilarating, fulfilling and fascinating.
One of our tools is a new kind of communication, called a Beauty Report. A Beauty Report is when we see or experience something that dances in our heart and we speak it. It’s a quick and wonderful way to recalibrate yourself into truth speaking what is precious and meaningful to you.
My own example: I was in Hong Kong teaching a workshop, while struggling with food poisoning that I contracted in Singapore. Griffin (my partner) and I were on break between classes. I was dragging myself down the hall of our hotel, praying to the Sacred Ones: “You’ve got to help me, I can’t do this.” When I got to my room, I opened the door and saw the answer to my prayers: sitting in the window 22 floors up in the middle of the city was a magnificent, huge bird, that I call the Hong Kong Eagle (they call it a Kite). She was balancing on a light fixture looking right in the window — beak against the window. I got right up against the window and we were a glass pane apart. In the 7 minutes that she sat with me, she began my first lessons in ‘eagle speak’. For the time that we sat together, I was completely well. She came every day at break for three days in a row and sat in the window and sang…
I’m telling you this story because Sweet Medicine can show up anywhere. (Sweet Medicine is the interaction between the animal world and the human one, which teaches us about love, heart-connection and relationship — all aspects of Walking in Beauty). Those of you that have been blessed with an animal loving you, know just what I mean. In the midst of food poisoning, there was valuable teaching and Beauty.
Ana’s book Fierce Medicine is filled with ways to Walk in Beauty. It’s also now available as an audio book read by Ana. Visit audible.com and amazon.com
For more information about Forrest Yoga visit: www.forrestyoga.com