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Mehtap Yıldız, Turkey

Mehtap Yıldız, Turkey
Yoga instructor at Cihangir Yoga Istanbul  

My heart… my heart calls to me. My heart beats calmly. My heart is the closest to me, bigger and livelier than ever. My heart is warm. Kaifi starts to speak. We, humans, feel something missing. You coming here, participating in these sessions shows that you’re in search of something. You feel something missing.

 

You know the wholeness, that’s why you feel something missing. If you know the wholeness, you feel the incompleteness. What a beautiful expression this is!

He calls the wholeness, the source. You feel fear if you wander away from the wholeness. Fear leads to anger. Anger rumbles, explodes, burns, destroys and leads to sadness.

 

But, we don’t know how to feel the sadness. We know fear and anger. They have taught us fear and anger well. We make decisions out of fear, we move out of fear. We fear something, so we hold on to that. We fear that, and hold on to anything else. In this endless cycle, we hold on to unhappiness, and in the dark recesses of our mind we search for the source of the energy of life which slowly leaves us. We look for joy and pleasure. Just when we hold on to momentary pleasures and say that’s it, we wake up disappointed just like after eating a food with mismatched taste and smell. You can’t appease your hunger just by smelling. We know fear well. We know anger well.

 

He said: “Fear leads to anger and anger leads to sadness. We don’t know how to feel the sadness. So we just take a small part of sorrow. But sadness is a slow feeling, a meditative feeling. Only if you go through sadness thoroughly, you reach the source, the wholeness. If you do not let yourself feel it, it will lead to fear, then to anger, then to the beginning…

 

If you’ve read my previous writings, I think you see what the confirmation I’ve found is. That was what I felt in this cycle: confirmation. “Face Your Feelings”, that’s what I call the method I’ve been practicing for a while, and it does me good. If every feeling is a guest, I welcome every guest, just like Rumi. All those that burn and destroy and all those that caress and make you feel good, I welcome all.

 

The Master asked me: “Why are you here?”. I said: “I want to go deep into myself.”

 

How can I go deep in the relation with myself? I said 2018 would be the year of relationships. I’ve thought about relations, how raw, unplanned and direct they are. You build up the courage to reach the other. Your inner self reaches your outer self and they become one. When I took the responsibility of what I feel and found the courage to face myself, that was when I started to go deep into myself. And now I learn that this is knowledge. Someone has followed this and arranged it around a circle. Now, across from me, he talks to me about it.

 

He said: “Think of the heart as a muscle. Your heart will get warm, come to life and grow if you work with it. Take a breath into your heart.”

I know the feeling of wholeness he talks about, I know the place that he calls the source. We all do. We know it’s a quite, calm place. We are all visited by this feeling, that everything is whole. When we do what we love, in the nature. When we are looking at a nice painting. When we are listening to a nice song. As I take the responsibility of my feelings, I feel this wholeness more. Now, I’m face to face with its diagram.

 

I want to go deep into my heart. Where is the heart? Is it where I feel? I don’t know. I just know that feeling. I want to connect more deeply with that feeling, with that source. I feel as if its door is in my heart. He said: “You walk through this door alone. Aloneness is unity.”

 

The whole weekend we tried to find a faster way to the source using various methods. The enlightened one reaches the source faster. We want to feel whole. We were whole before. We just want to remember it.

 

Heart is a muscle. You just need to work with it.

 

How can I reach the source faster?

Now, sit upright and focus on your heart. Feel its beating at the center of your chest. Focus on this point and breathe in as if your nose is at the center of your heart and you breathe in from your heart. Connect with your heart. Be the heart.

 

Do you know what I feel after practicing all these techniques the whole weekend? I feel like I’m all heart. I beat calmly.

I sought to go deep into myself and I found just what I intended to find.

 

This year I’m searching for my spiritual family. A family just like me. A family that I can easily love. A family that I can join easily like cutting through butter. I was an ugly duckling and now I am looking for swans.

 

This weekend, with Kaifi, following my heart, I journeyed from separation to unity with the swans and with those who know what our hearts tell and know that life is more than what it seems, with those who look inside, not outer self.

 

It’s a blessing to find confirmation, to know that you’re not alone, to be able to hold someone tight and to be held in return by those who hold you like they hold themselves.

 

You should know that you are not on your own. Yes you are alone but you are not on your own. Believe in the voice beating in your heart, telling you, although sometimes very quietly, that life is more than this, you can live another life, you are more than what you are now. Yes, it is true. I was, we were, in the world of separation. But sometimes lights come on and we suddenly understand that we are in the middle of the wholeness. Then the lights go out and we forget. There are ways to turn these lights on once more, to meet with you and with me, to go deeper into yourself and me. There are ways to build relationships and to love yourself and me.

 

I intend to be more transparent, more open, to live more from my heart, to love you more, to live and to be lively, fragile, curious and pure. If your intentions rise from your heart, the whole world comes together and your intentions find you. Just like I plunged into this weekend, out of the blue. Just like I plunged into this weekend and found myself embraced by my intentions. Bless us all!

 

I thank Kaifi from my heart, his warm, lovely assistants, Cihangir Yoga and every soul who accompanied us. We reached unity as a whole. We were alone and whole. Thank you Life.

 

If you are curious about this practice you can find information at https://www.fromseparationtounity.com/

 

This weekend I went deeper into myself at many other aspects. Perhaps I would share these experiences at another time.

 

With love,

Mehtap Yildiz

“From Separation To Unity”

@ Cihangir Yoga,  Istanbul, February