Patricia Gray

I worked at Hallmark Cards for a decade–in training and marketing–and as Retail Promotion Manager.  I created and launched the frequency program known as the Gold Crown Card.  When I left the quasi comfort of a corporate setting in 1989, I had no idea that this choice would take me down such a different path:  Yoga.  For all it’s popularity today, yoga was just beginning to bud (if that) and would not bloom for many years to come.  Yoga revamped my life in many ways including changing my career direction.  For 20 years I have taught yoga and meditation in the Kansas City area.  Please visit my yoga page for my biography, class schedule, and periodic workshops.

I also write poetry and have just published my second book.  I invite you to peruse my poetry pages in hopes of whetting your appetite with quirky insights that “Louise” (my alter ego who goes by my middle name) and I wish to share.

Open book:  Yoga and poetry are expressions of this openness. I was hardwired from my early years to be a truth seeker, and spent many years studying world religions and philosophy.  Of course it’s a mirage, a phantom, seeking truth as something being “out there.”  It’s a clever distraction.

Here now, buried in the middle of my Ocean Self I find you and everyone else.  It sounds deep and words never capture such an experience.  My journey, jump-started by yoga, tends to sensitize my body to feel the impact of impressions, thoughts and emotions.  Especially strong and painful emotions require my full attention.  If I deny a challenging emotion it gets stuck inside me, playing host to any number of disorders!  But if I experience it fully and allow it expression – with intention not to harm others (ahimsa) – I remember that I am more than that emotion rather than a slave to it.  I can release it along with the molecules of a deep, cleansing breath, or channel it in spiced words within the sanctuary of a poem.  I’ve noticed a kind of miracle happens, as if my release extends to others as a subtle way of passing it forward.  In return, I am gifted with a sense of wonder and mystery at our inextricable connection with each other.  Like the tide rolling in, this process washes some of my old self away each time.  Louise’s Caveat: Troothiness is always a bit fishy paddling in the ocean of words.  But I see you swimming with me.

Slipped Out of the Mold                                               

I’m a florescent lime green gelatin dream
Seeping through the spaces of your ivory gleam
Glistening along the contours of your lips and chin
Gliding breast byways as gravity grins
Forming green, goose bump stained ribs
Through folds of flesh where I settle like a bib
Deep in the belly of your navel’s buoyant bowl
Nuzzling and pooling in your receptive little hole
I’m emerald contentment in a dream where I jiggle
Riding your every yawn, guffaw or giggle

The following is borrowed from wise teacher, Jan Frazier.

Some moment it will dawn on you: you’re free, and always have been. Radically free. You’ll realize you never needed to try so hard — either to spiritually awaken, or to make things happen in your regular life. You’ll realize that all along you had what you wanted. You already were it. A moment will come when you realize there’s not, after all, a problem. You will notice that the impulse to resist has left you. Things just are as they are. Inside it is weirdly peaceful, even though outwardly things are pretty much as they have been right along. It’s just that they no longer seem to be so much about you — even the ones that directly affect your life.
Your sense of who you are and what your life is about has opened, softened. A lot that used to matter is no longer absorbing. You move through things (all things) with a light-hearted ease. You can feel how struggle, the urge to make something happen — a whole life’s worth of effort — has drained right out of you, as if you’ve sprung a leak.
Children know something about this. Then forgetting comes. Grown-ups mostly have forgotten they ever knew something. Some have a little recollection, like a remnant taste of a sweetness from long ago, a fleeting bit of a song they know they’d recognize but can’t quite sing. They wonder about the source of this, how to find their way again to the origin of that inexpressible thing.  They didn’t dream it up. It’s real. It’s the most real thing there is. And it didn’t go away.