An Ever Unfolding Prayer

by Yael Kievsky

As I write these lines, the sun and the moon come to togetherness, as a New Moon reveals the stars against a backdrop of darkness. As I’ve written before, the New Moon is an opportunity for prayer, intention, attention, and faith-feeding. We make new (gentle or bold) mini contracts with ourselves and with spirit, about the weeks to come, pertaining to a particular theme. The theme in question is brought up by the sign in which the Sun and the Moon conjunct. This week, the moon will be new in Virgo, and the “window of opportunity” — let’s call it window of invitation — lasts for a few days.

I look forward each year to the Virgo new moon and the empowering teachings and healing it can offer. The Virgo moment brings a longing for accomplishment, growth, efficiency, maturity, and most importantly, the potential for personal healing through service to others (this last bit being the real underlying Virgoan theme). It is no wonder that back to school in our culture happens always on or around the Virgo moon cycle.

An interest in the learning process is what Virgo is all about. Developing discernment, processing information, and honing an offering that can be matured into real service. School, in an ideal world, promotes these qualities in all of us. Virgo is a complex archetype in the zodiac because it also represents a point of crisis: our sense of worth is questioned, the inner self is measured against the demands of creating an outward offering. Crisis, as we know, is a fissure where opportunity is born. Virgo carries the seed for bright blossoming, under the right circumstances. Unfortunately, in this world, and in these times, most schools are hardly the place where a daring and genuine inner journey of inquiry is fostered.

This is how I fell in love with Yoga School at Laughing Lotus, six years ago, after a particularly desperate Virgo moon prayer. I had prayed for inspiration and for an inner uplifting that I could follow through towards an outward offering. I prayed to find my voice, heart, and hands all working together in a loving and unique way. I had been stuck for too long in a cold city on the East Coast that did not have my heart, a career in music that constantly made me feel less than apt, and an underlying feeling that my true worth was dormant, elsewhere. Powerful, magical, life-changing, and very much elsewhere. But where?

I did not know how to change my life around, but I sure knew how to pray. If you can breathe, if your heart beats, if you can dream at night, you can pray. In late August 2008, I prayed to step into true studentship, true empowered leadership, and into my real life. I prayed to learn about my own self.

I prayed for days. After a few days of this ‘last resource’ emotional behavior, I literally heard a voice inside me break and say: “I’m moving to San Francisco.” I had never been to the West coast before, nor did I have any friends or connections. However, I had an instinct as large as the whole state, and I followed the magical inner clues of this little voice until I realized what it was trying to point to. I boldly made a phone call to a personal cell phone number that I don’t remember how I even tracked down. “Hello. Is this Jasmine….?”

And so my prayer, in the right tone at the right time, led me to the right place. San Francisco? Sure. But most importantly, a teacher and a path that led me to myself.

School doesn’t necessarily focus on fostering our inner journey, but when it does, we have come into the realm of real learning. After understanding what the little voice was trying to say, and following it all the way to Laughing Lotus San Francisco Yoga School, I was able to meet, scrutinize, and befriend the very internal inflection point that the Virgo Moon was pointing at. I experienced four months of profound transformation that aimed to groom within me a new powerful sense of self. Throughout the ensuing weeks of Yoga School, and under the compassionate guidance of my teachers and mentors, my language changed, my physical relationship to myself changed, my relationship to the planet, and most dearly, an ability to feel like a useful and precious part of the whole was born inside of me.

All through this process, I was challenged, guided, and celebrated. I had arrived wanting to deepen my understanding of myself, and I graduated four months later with a deeper sense of reverence for life itself, and an unstoppable inspiration to share its treasures, through song, movement, and prayer.

Becoming a yoga teacher was, in my case, an inevitable consequence of this process. Many aspects of my prayer were being answered at once: a journey of self-worth, and most importantly, a concrete way of serving, helping, and healing others. The tools I gathered in those four months were more than I could count at the time and today. I deepened my relationship to yoga, and I developed a trusted personal practice. I found friendships and camaraderie, and I learned theory, philosophy, anatomy, psychology, and sanskrit. Yes, I gained a voice and a purpose. Yes, I became healthy and turned my whole life around. Above all else, Yoga School became proof that my prayers were being heard, were tended to with care, and would always be answered.

Yoga School is in itself a prayer. It is like stepping into a prism of one’s many selves and potentialities and many layers of relationships with the concrete as well as with the divine. It is a maze of inner kingdoms. It is still, to this day, unfolding. I move its rippling magic through me each time I teach a class.

Yoga School starts on Sept 12, and if you were waiting for a sign to sign up…. well, just look up at the sky, and the moon just might be winking down at you.

Yael teaches Level 1 on Tuesday from 10:45-11:45AM, All Levels from 12:00-1:00PM on Wednesday, and Level 2/3 from 8:30-9:45AM on Saturday. Yael works as an Astrologer, enjoys art and prayer, building altars deep in the woods, and baking goodies for everybody all the time. She seeks to inspire a sense of awe and inquiry in her friends and students, and a shared reverence for all Life. Namaste!