Can you sense the stirring of Spring?? I sure can. The equinox will be on March 19. And we spring ahead an hour for daylight savings on March 8th. There’s an anticipation of Nature coming alive. A buzz. A feeling of readiness and renewal. There’s a yoga concept (from the tradition of Kashmir Shaivism, for you Yoga geeks) called Spanda, the ancient Shaivites called it “a pulsation of the ecstasy of the Divine Consciousness” that is within all matter and life. It literally means tremor or quiver. To understand, think of the quaking of a tiny seed who’s inner plant is ready to break through or a mother’s “quickening” tremors when the baby’s birth is near. This sacred pulsation is within every manifestation of nature and life. It blows my mind thinking about how thousands of years ago, in deep states of meditational bliss, the ancient yogis, basically experienced what quantum physicists call- string theory. Spanda is the pulsation created by the movement of Prana, the vital life force. In Yoga one of our primary aims is to learn to regulate and cultivate our awareness of prana through working with our breath, movement and mind. That enthusiastic feeling we have when we enter the sweet spot of flow, the sensation of blood coursing, our bodies humming, the freedom and joy in mind and also the deep lulling wave as we rest in Savasana is the pulse of spanda. At our essence we are just pure radiant energy. Everything in nature, down to the most infinitesimal particle in our being is in divine ecstatic pulsation. The beat goes on and on and it feels good. Isn’t that why most of us practice? Or what hooked us into yoga in the first place? To experience our innermost pulse and the possibility it brings to experience Sat Chit Ananda, Truth-Consciousness- Bliss, like the ancients? Maybe we don’t know yet, but we keep coming back to yoga, as Bob Dylan once said “because something is happening here but you don’t know what it is”. We don’t need to have the answers. We just need to be aware that we are so much more and lean into it. So as we enter into Spring with its abundance of Spanda, lets attune ourselves to the vibratory call and RISE with it. Time to bust out. Renew. Celebrate your aliveness. Get into the groove. Raise your vibration.