Lost and Found

Yesterday, after returning from a two week vacation to South Carolina, I taught my first ever class inspired by the loss of my luggage. When the airline (Frontier) makes you pay for all your luggage, checked and carry on, one expects that it will not be lost. Three days later, my bag was still not in my hands. I kept remembering all the things that I was missing. I kept milling all the new and old items that I might not see again. It sucked!

In the light of the most recent shootings, losing these things is small. But from the outer banks of loss, I was still able to learn something about the reason and process of its being. We can not control everything. We cannot make anyone think, work, or be on our behalf. That is our internal work and how we show up for ourselves. It does however get tricky when we rely on people to provide a
service. When the service does not work for you, it is maddening, frustrating, and definitely in the case of the shootings, it is life altering.

Practicing yoga regularly, I feel a sense of calm that rides with me in these moments when I am challenged by my need to make everything work in my favor. What we practice will come through in the ways that we live. Just like the food that we eat, an apple for instance, provides us nutrients. We eat it (practice). We gather the nutrients (life). The apple will at some point be "lost," but it has provided us a share in its life force through our ability to eat and gather.

My son asked me today what I thought about bad luck. He'd been on a recently losing streak too. YIKES! In the last three days, he's lost his camera on the plane, $50 on the bus, and dropped his iphone on the ground in the store by our home, shattering the screen to pieces. "I don't believe in it," I told him. I believe in a God that takes care of the whole of existence. I believe that my practice will assist me in challenging times. I believe in good!  I believe that in losing, we gain. I believe that in dying, we are found.

We are all at some point lost and found, our things and our lives. This is the process of life. And we do not escape life without death, or more accurately, transition.  Unfortunately, it does not always feel good. It definitely does not always look good. The loss of things, lives and the loss of freedom to my son is some bad luck. To me, even as loss sits in my face on the empty conveyor belt, or bloody on Youtube Live, I see that certain things have to happen so that real change can occur. I don't like it, but I see some of the reason and process: we have to find the truth that is/was lost before we can do anything about it.

So now is the time to create space for growth. We see where we are, what's been found, and what has been lost. Though we might not know exactly what to do, we can begin within our practice to ask, seek and listen for Divine intervention, for the life of something bigger that will come from the loss. The apple does not look the same after it has been digested, but that does not mean it is worthlessly eaten. There is life in the apple that we can digest and use.

May we learn well. All of our lives depend on it.