Renewal of Mind, Body, and Spirit

This opening quotation in a friend’s daily thought really spoke to me. June 16, 2018, I celebrated the birthday of my dear friend and yoga teacher in a small class that meets on Saturday mornings at my office. The five of us are close, not just friends, but more like sisters.

Left to right: Norleen, Debra, our teacher Kathy, Nancy, and Claudia.

Let’s just say we are all women of a certain age.

As women, we share a lot more than yoga, but yoga is something we love. We each have come to yoga for different reasons, at different times, and in different places, but we treasure being together in yoga now because yoga is about renewal of Mind, Body, and Spirit.

The five of us are beautiful women, inside and out. We have spent well over a hundred years meditating, practicing yoga, and being intentional about our being.

After an hour of yoga practice, we brewed peppermint tea grown in Kathy’s garden, sweetened with an old fashioned peppermint stick. We ate my nearly world-famous vegan bran muffins, and we were nourished by love and respect and commonality.

We were infinitely grateful to honor Kathy, who honors us by bringing yoga to our life. Yoga is not just about what happens on the mat.

We each drew a card from the Wisdom of The Crone deck. Kathy drew “Passages.”

Nancy recently gifted me a copy of Frank J. Cunningham’s Vesper Time: The Spiritual Practice of Growing Older. This book may seem a bit too religious for some, too early for others, and irrelevant to many, but at any stage and especially at our age the wisdom and inspiration is worth integrating because, as Cunningham writes, “… we are in a phase of life that we will not look back on as we do on childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. We do not grow out of this phase.”