There was a season of my life that I will always hold as one of my most profound yoga laboratories.

For six years, under one roof, three generations of women lived together — my mother, myself, and my daughter. Three women. Three seasons of life. One kitchen, one garden, and more lessons in love than I could ever count.

My mother got to witness me being a mother.

My daughter got to witness me being a daughter.

And I stood somewhere beautifully in between, learning from both of them every single day.

What that season taught me is this: a mother’s love is not a role. It is a frequency.
It is unconditional, un-programmed, and unpretentious.
It is the ultimate yoga practice.

My mother has since passed and with her passing, I have come to understand something even more deeply:

She did not leave. She expanded.

She is in the way light moves through the leaves in the early morning. In the smell of a garden after rain. In the quiet that comes just before a deep exhale.

This leads me to a story I have shared every Mother’s Day for years and every year, it finds me in a new place.

In a mother’s womb were two babies. One asked the other:

“Do you believe in life after delivery?”

The other replied, “Why, of course. There has to be something after delivery. Maybe we are here to prepare ourselves for what we will be later.”

“Nonsense,” said the first. “There is no life after delivery. What kind of life would that be?”

The second said, “I don’t know, but there will be more light than here. Maybe we will walk with our legs and eat from our mouths. Maybe we will have other senses that we can’t understand yet.”

The first replied, “That is absurd. Walking is impossible. And eating with our mouths? The umbilical cord supplies everything we need. Life after delivery is to be logically excluded.”

The second said quietly, “Well, I don’t know, but certainly we will meet Mother and she will take care of us.”

The first replied, “Mother? You actually believe in Mother? If Mother exists then where is She now?”

To which the second replied:
“She is all around us. We are surrounded by her. We are of Her. It is in Her that we live. Without Her, this world would not and could not exist.”

Said the first: “Well I don’t see Her, so it is only logical that She doesn’t exist.”

To which the second replied,
“Sometimes, when you’re in silence and you focus and you really listen — you can perceive Her presence, and you can hear Her loving voice, calling down from above.”

— Útmutató a Léleknek