May The Road Rise

Namaste

Eighteen years ago I didn’t know most of you. Some of you I’ve known for a few months or years, some ten or even 15 years,  some longer — long enough to have watched your bodies change, your lives change, long enough that this practice has outlasted jobs, moves, losses, and the ordinary churn of being alive. We built something here that doesn’t have an easy name. Not friendship exactly, though it’s that too. Something closer to witness. You let me watch you breathe through hard poses and hard times, and I got to be the one steady thing in the room while everything else kept moving.

That steadiness was never the point, though. The point was always the breath itself — in, and then out. Every inhale we’ve shared in this room has ended. Every one. And that’s not a small thing to practice ten thousand times over a decade or two: the willingness to let a full breath go so the next one has room to arrive. We’ve been rehearsing this all along, without even realizing it.

So today isn’t really an ending, even though it feels like one. It’s the exhale at the end of a long, good inhale. What we built here — the trust, the steadiness, the years of showing up for each other on the mat — doesn’t disappear because the room changes. It moves into whatever comes next, the way one breath moves into the next, the way a held pose moves into whatever follows it.

Thank you for whatever time you and I have spent together. Thank you for trusting me with your bodies and, somewhere along the way, with more than that. Thank you for showing up here FOR ME. You’ve all propped me up and kept me going through my ups and downs, whether you realized it or not. Whatever is next for each of us — let’s meet it the way we’ve met everything else in this room: together, breathing, and unafraid to let go of what was so we can be fully awake for what’s next.

May the road rise to meet you,

May the wind be always at your back.

May the sun shine warm upon your face,

The rains fall soft upon your fields.

And until we meet again,

May God hold you in the palm of His hands.

~ Traditional Irish Blessing

Colleen Palmateer

Yoga Teacher, E-RYT-500