Day Four: We’ve won the lottery, my friends.

Something that confuses people who know us, but makes total sense to me, is that our family occasionally attends the nearby Unitarian Universalist Fellowship. (There’s a long, complicated explanation for this that I ended up writing an entire book about.)

The short of it is that we attend a few times a month during the fall, leading up to the holidays. We go long enough to acquire official nametags, make some friends, consider more of a commitment, and then stop going around ski season, not to return again until the next October, when those familiar faces greet us warmly and reissue new name tags for us.

We’ve done this for four years.

Sunday of my October yoga teaching training weekend, the UU held its annual Día de los Muertos service. I’d never been to this service and really wanted to experience it, especially considering how I’ve been feeling lately. The end time of the service was the start time of teacher training with a 30 minute drive in between, but I decided to go anyway and be late to training.

I’m so glad I did. It was a beautiful service, with a candlelit alter dedicated to the momentos we brought of loved ones who have died. A woman read Ghost Wings , which brought many of us to tears. The choir surrounded us with music and a guest speaker who grew up in Mexico City told us more about the history of the holiday and how she celebrated personally.

It was incredibly cathartic and a nice balance of time spent in reflection to counter what turned out to be a physically intense training weekend. The previous weekend, we’d gone through several guided mediations and a few lectures on the Upanishads.

This second weekend (for me….the third for my classmates), was mostly physical. We did two 90-minute practices to begin and end the day and in between we practiced teaching Surya A, Dancing Warrior, and a Solar Wave sequence with a partner, which meant another 2-3 three hours of flows.

I was so physically exhausted. More so than I was the previous training weekend. As we prepared for the last 90-minute class of the weekend, which was going to be a vigorous one, I sincerely wondered how I would make it through.

I did what I knew to do: drank a ton of water and focused on ujjayi breath. The teacher came in, we got started with a brief pause in the warm-up for reflection, and he said something that will stick with me:

“What a privilege it is for us to be here.”

“How lucky we are that we have the ability and means and resources to be in this space together for yoga teacher training. Look around us: everything we need is here.”

“We’ve won the lottery, my friends.”

Something in me shifted, as it should have.

So, I was tired. I was so lucky to be tired from practicing yoga all weekend!

So, I’ve had a rough go recently. I was so lucky to have people around me to support me as I go through it!

So, I get overwhelmed when I think of how much I have going on. I am so lucky to have things going on!

My day had been spent immersed in grief and beauty and reflection and movement and I was exhausted from it. But focusing for a split second on gratitude gave me everything I needed to complete the practice with sweat, breath, and grace.