Ah, routine once more!

Life has settled much more into a routine, which feels wonderful. My mother's hair is growing back, we're working together most of the time, and everything feels stable for the time being. It feels a little like when you come home after a long and adventurous trip. Everything at home feels at once renewed and comfortable.
I know that new chapters are coming ahead that will be full of all sorts of unforeseen challenges/blessings, but at this very moment I'm enjoying the comfort of home. I'm working out some of the things I neglected during crisis mode. I'm sorting out my basic needs, like getting myself some health insurance. I sent in all the paperwork and I'm just waiting for everything to go through the mill smoothly. I also went to the eye doctor, who does eye exercises with me because I have a convergence deficiency, whom I hadn't seen in two years!
This weekend is the last weekend of my yoga teacher training, which has been an amazing part of my life for the past six months. I've made friends and had a sense of community that I never quite had before in this metropolis of glimpsed faces. I hope that we will all stay in contact with each other and continue to provide that sense of community. I've been working on a quite extensive take-home test and three essays to wrap up my course.
Needless to say, I've only just begun my studies. I'm debating what the next step will be. There's a Kundalini Solstice gathering in New Mexico which I would really like to go to if it weren't so far away. These days I've been wanting to stay close to home and really get to know what's in my own back garden, so to speak. Travelling feels like a drug to me, in a way. It's this intense experience that's disconnected from the rest of my life, my own homeostasis, and it has its own side effects, jet lag being an obvious one. In the same way that I see the value of hallucinogenic or "mind-expanding" drugs when used in the proper context and with care, I see the value of certain types of travel, certainly. But I also feel like it's something I personally have overused for stimulation. Just like when you eat simply, you can appreciate subtleties of taste, I'm finding that as I stay in one place, I begin to appreciate the subtleties around me and feel more connected to the experience of my environment. I'm wanting to explore the climate that I find myself in, the Northeast, not because it's superior to any other, but simply because it's where I am. I'm wanting to see if there is something going on right here, on my own turf. In a way it's harder because it's so much simpler. I bet there are lots of things going on around the corner but because they are around the corner I'm tempted to just stay home. It's easier in a way when I have to search it out and plan and get on a plane, just like it's easier to pop a substance in my mouth, even if the substance is hard to come by, than it is to have the same sort of expanded consciousness through the tools that exist within my own body-mind. They're right there in my own mind, in the same way that the City and it's environs contain enough stimulation for many lifetimes.
Another way of understanding this concept is looking at the way that ascetic yogis or monks cloister themselves from everyday stimulation in order to be able to achieve a different state of consciousness or awareness. It is the way the brain works, it can only take in so many stimuli at one. We do not see everything that goes on, we would not be able to handle that much stimulation. So as we limit one particular stimulus, we make room for consciousness of another.
A similar thing has happened to me in my own physical practice. Since I was about sixteen, I've been going to the gym and using weight and cardio machines. I also did different forms of hatha yoga, but I always relied on other types of physical training. In the last two months or so, I've not wanted to go to the gym and instead I've been doing two to three hours of yoga in the morning, including mediation and breathwork. I'm finding that I'm much more aware of the suble strenght of my own body and it's beginning to really feel like one connected piece, rather than some parts being more developed and 'separated' from others. I imagine this is because I'm never working with anything in conscious isolation. Isolation is an illusion, of course, because everything in our body is connected to everything else or else we would not function as a body. When I used weights, I mentally separated one movement from another, even though intellectually I understood that this was an impossibility. It's one thing to understand something and another entirely to actually feel it. Now I can feel my body beginning to flow. I can feel how my toes touching the ground affect my neck and my skull and even the contents of my skull. Amazingly, although I'm not doing strength training per se, my muscle tone actually feels better and more integrated and although I'm not really doing heavy cardiovascular activity like I was before, I'm never short of breath. The other day I noticed it for the first time as I was walking up five flights of stairs. I felt not even the least bit winded and I wouldn't have even noticed it except that there were some physically fit looking guys in their early twenties behind me and they were huffing and puffing. I was shocked.
I've been going back to really simple poses and getting deep into them. Instead of always challenging myself on the gross level, I've been moving into subtler levels and uncovering layers and layers of tension around the muscle attachments that I never got into before because it takes time. I'm flexible on a superficial level, but the tension stored in the deeper layers, which take time to access, is intense. I feel like the complex postures are a little bit like drugs, again. Sometimes just as much can be gained by just standing in tadasana for an hour and becoming aware of every part of the body, the breath and the mind as could be gained from a class with vinyasa, meditation, pranayama, and all sorts of complex postures and kriyas. I would have thought that as I learned more I would want to have more complexity, but I'm finding myself sticking to basics. I feel like there will be a time when the complex will seem incredibly simple, but that may be many years down the road.