Giving ourselves the gift of vulnerability is a key element of gathering in a women's sacred circle.

I recently found this account I wrote of my yoga teacher training in early 2012 in Guatemala and decided to share it. It was a time of big changes in every little part of life I knew - relationship, travel, family, work - so it's an account of a woman who held big questions in her heart and had just set out on a journey into her unknown, the same journey that later led me to begin these retreats, to carve a path without path. I share it with you in the spirit of vulnerability. Much love, Aimee

​What Yoga Teacher Training Really Felt Like. I arrive to the Guatemalan shores of Lago Atitlan at the hour when volcanoes swallow up the sun. I come carrying a backpack, a yoga mat and the delusion that this training is about yoga postures.

With students and teachers counted, we are thirteen and sacred in number. We will pass through the shamanic cycles of the serpent, jaguar, hummingbird and eagle. By night we open the training and invite the opening, cleanse ourselves with the smoke of lit embers to form a sacred circle. We turn to the spirits of all four winds, raise hands to Father Sky and bow to Mother Earth.

We dance very close to flames.

I inhale, close my eyes and choose an angel card: Compassion.

We wake before the sun has peeked out from volcano tops and meditate wrapped in wool blankets on wooden dock, the dawn silence broken by the murmur of fisherman greeting each other in rowboats, by birds calling out from tall grasses, by the shuffle of bodies that refuse to rest. I pile pillows beneath my flesh...

​

To read on, please see the article on elephant journal: What Yoga Teacher Training Really Felt Like.