Personal Connection Versus Public Consumption
/(Adapted from Yoga Expression Spirit: Tools for Authentic Living, by Elizabeth Cabalka)
“When the turbulence of our mental busyness subsides and our mind becomes still, a deep happiness naturally arises within.” - Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, Introduction to Buddhism
The evening was perfect. I put on my hiking shoes, and the dog danced eagerly as I fastened her collar. We headed out for our evening walk to enjoy what promised to be a glorious sunset. It was seventy-eight degrees, and the breeze was warm and gentle. The only sounds were the evening settling chatter of the birds and the crunch of my shoes on the trail. Our closest neighbor was more than one mile away. What a heavenly evening in the Sonoran Desert.
The first impulse to grab my phone arrived two minutes into our walk. I paused with my hand on my back pocket.
“No need to capture. Just enjoy,” my inner wisdom whispered.
We walked on. Shortly I found myself reaching for my phone again as I remembered I had neglected to return a friend’s call a few hours earlier.
“Nope, it can wait,” I assured myself and wrestled my hand away from my back pocket. We climbed the last few steps to the crest of a small mesa that afforded a spectacular 360-degree view of three mountain ranges, the setting sun, and the 21,000-acre park I called home in the winter for several years. I sat down on a rock and took in the vista, breathing deeply and slowly in an effort to calm my heart rate after the rocky climb.
The evening light brushed the mountains with a changing palette — first coral, then pink, then purple, then blue. What a gift, this moment, this view, this life!
And there went my hand again, reaching for my phone, this time to text two friends with whom I studied meditation, certain that it was imperative to share this moment with them. Right then. Had to!
“No, no, no! This is madness,” I gently chastised.
I took a breath and with a slow exhalation whispered, “Be here now, Elizabeth. Be. Here. Now.”
As I really began to look around me, I became acutely aware that this moment was a gift. Its value would not be determined by the number of Facebook ‘Likes’ or the fact that I shared a photo with a friend across the country. This moment needed no outside validation. Nor did I, despite my habitual need to somehow capture it all and offer it up for public consumption.
I took a breath, feeling the breath fill my lungs, the wave reaching for the heart and cresting there. The wave slowly receded and washed in again. With each breath I came back to myself and settled further into the moment.
The minutes that followed will not soon be forgotten, both supremely simple and exquisitely textured. Breath. Light. Body. Color. Breeze. Mountains. Quiet. Creatures. Expansive. Stillness. Contentedness.
I waded deeply into my experience until the last light of day, feeling gently woven into everything with each breath. A far different experience than simply waiting for the best photo angle and plotting a caption.
Elizabeth Bayer is a graduate of Green Lotus’s 200-hour and 300-hour yoga teacher-training programs. She is a noted lecturer, workshop leader, and author of two non-fiction books dealing with self-discovery – her 2003 memoir Wednesdays at the Fluff 'n' Fold and 2016's Yoga Expression Spirit in which she chronicles the three pillars of her life. In 2020, Elizabeth and her husband founded the Annandale Art and Textile Center, the non-profit home of the Heart of the Lakes Weavers, a vocational-weaving program employing individuals with social and developmental disabilities.
