One of the big things I've taken away from all this solitude and time to reflect is that it benefits me to stay positive and in almost all cases, negativity and getting upset, angry and worked up, actually make the situation worse and more unbearable. What a simple thing. So common sense.

When we’re children it’s so much easier to conquer certain fears and in general many fears don’t even exist yet because you haven’t become jaded. You still look at the universe as benevolent and good. You haven’t allowed heartache and disappointment to overtake your worldview. You’re blissfully unaware or conversely you’re only aware of the brighter side of life.

For a while I was asking myself, "why does this always happen to me?" It was easy to fall into this victim mentality like everything was happening to me rather than with me. However, when I began looking at it through the lens of what it could teach me, I realized I hadn't recognized what I needed to learn.

Prajnaparadha - incorrect belief, believing in separateness, duality, "other", forgetting our divinity, that we are a soul having a human journey, that we are a human 'being' living on this earth feeling pain, love, happiness, regret, grief and all the other emotions that are part of every human journey.

"Whether you think you or you think you can't, you're probably right." It's my favorite quote and Henry Ford couldn't be more right. I can decide how I feel about something and I can change the way I feel just by changing my outlook.

“Sometimes when you no longer see yourself as the hero of your own drama, you know, expecting victory after victory, and you understand deeply that this is not paradise. Somehow we’re, especially the privileged ones that we are, we somehow embrace the notion that this veil of tears is perfectable that you can get it all straight. I found that things became a lot easier when I no longer expected to win. I tried to put that into the song 1,000 kisses deep, where you understand that you abandon your masterpiece and you sink into the real masterpiece.” - Leonard Cohen

I’ve been cultivating new daily sadhana practices since my return home from Panchakarma. Each morning I awoke before sunrise and meditated. This is something that I’ve been wanting to cultivate into my daily life since even before I began my Ayurvedic journey. It’s taken me some time to make this a daily practice, but a shift has taken place at Panchakarma, as it always does, and I’m starting to feel the roots of change take hold in the soul.