Rebel Queen

by Michelle Moran

And grief, for anyone who has ever experienced it, is exactly like a predator. It steals first your happiness, and then—if you allow it—everything else.

“Watch your thoughts; they become words. Watch your words; they become actions. Watch your actions; they become habit. Watch your habits; they become character. Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.”

The reason a person practices every day is to disconnect from their deep connection to suffering.

The goal of yoga is to change all of this; to remind the human who has become like an ox that their yoke and harness can be taken off, even if it’s only for a few minutes a day, and that through silencing the mind, we can silence greed, and hunger, and desire as well.

There was a time I used to read these words over and over, as if reliving my trauma could change it somehow. Shri Rama was the one who instructed me to put my diaries away. I was becoming a tree rooted in the soil of tragedy, he said, and with every fresh reading I was watering the roots, sinking deeper, allowing my pain to grow stronger. “Plant your roots in fresh soil,” he told me.

we can help pave the roads of those around us, but we can’t choose their direction. Even trying is against the laws of samsara.