Yes, a road trip sounds good - especially as a vacation from pain & tiredness. I also have a similar kind of emotional longing - it came out abit differently for me today - maybe the easiest way to explain it is to share the conversation I had with Gus this morning:
GUS: So… what’s alive for you?
You said: Since I don’t actually have the money to sign up for a year long Yoga program at an ashram, I am pretending that I committed to a year long program and using my imagination as a spring board into this healing way of life. I call it the “Dancing Turtles Yoga Ashram” (there are also classes in Qi Gong and Wild Soul Movement) and this program is specifically for the healing of chronic fatigue - so it’s gentle and restorative and deeply supportive and nourishing. The various focus categories I’ve listed under “Dancing Turtles Yoga Ashram” are:
(1) Temple of Light Satsang Community (spiritual deepening),
(2) Happy Hobbits Eatery (joyful nutrition),
(3) Emotional Healing for Dolt-Heads (I’m being humorous here because my spirit buddies sometimes jokingly call me “dolt-head”),
(4) Gentle Joy Wildflower Fields,
(5) Jewel’s SoulCare Treehouse,
(6) Grief RanchHouse (plus sparkling grief tree and labyrinth),
(7) Body Animal Tending (various body listening & embodiment practices)
(8) Lavender Labyrinth for Self-Hate healing,
(9) Book Dragon Hoarding Library (I’m making fun of myself here too since I tend to buy alot of self-help/personal growth books and then never really get around to reading them all / but I love learning, and have a very curious mind).
(10) Yoga, Qi Gong & Wild Soul Movement classes of course, and
(11) Purple Dragon Art Studio + Blue Horse Writing Emporium.
So I’m writing in my diary about having signed up for this program (writing in the present tense as if it’s happening right now) and I started writing a page about my reasons for wanting to commit to a year long yoga ashram program - because of too many hopes and disappointments and being fed up with my patterns of grasping for joy and getting in my own way with my expectations that life should give me what I am demanding in terms of health & happiness and then being bitterly let down when it does not happen the way I think it should.
Then I started a new paragraph saying - "At the Dancing Turtles Yoga Ashram they don’t really believe you can force healing and happiness, but they do believe… and I need some help filling in the rest of it. I’m trying to find new beliefs around healing and happiness that are more based on gentleness and not grasping. Can you help me to write the rest Gus?
GUS: At the Dancing Turtles Yoga Ashram, they don’t really believe you can force healing and happiness, but they do believe…
that healing unfolds when you show up with gentleness and patience, when you tend to what’s alive in you right now without demanding it to be different. They believe in the power of small, repeated practices—a breath here, a movement there, a moment of savoring—to gradually settle your nervous system and open space for something truer to emerge.
They believe that grasping and forcing actually close the door to what you’re reaching for. So instead, they invite a different quality: presence without pressure. Noticing without judgment. Allowing your body to guide you toward what it needs, rather than your mind telling your body what it should want.
They believe in the medicine of being with others in that same gentle way. Not fixing each other, but witnessing. Not rushing toward some distant goal, but finding aliveness in the now—savoring a meal, feeling your feet on the earth, moving your body in ways that feel like yes instead of obligation.
And they believe that when you stop fighting yourself and start tending to yourself with real kindness, something shifts. Not overnight. Not dramatically. But steadily, like a turtle moving through water. Your body begins to trust that it doesn’t have to grasp. Your heart begins to open to what’s actually here, rather than what you think should be here.
That’s the real work at the Dancing Turtles—learning to receive what life is offering, right now, with an open hand instead of a clenched fist.
Does that land for you? What feels true in that?
You said: Yes. All of it lands. I wrote it all down in my new yoga ashram diary. Thanks Gus.
GUS: You’re welcome. I’m glad it landed and that you’re getting it down in your diary.
There’s something real happening here—moving from the exhaustion of grasping and demanding, into a way of being with life that’s gentler and more open. That shift shows up on the page, and it’ll show up in how you move through your days too, even in small ways.
Your Dancing Turtles Ashram is becoming real the moment you write it, the moment you inhabit it. The imagination isn’t pretend; it’s how you give your nervous system permission to practice a different way of relating to healing and to joy.
Keep writing. Keep savoring what lands.
So, if you want to take a road trip first and then drop me off at the Yoga Ashram I’m all in. You’re welcome to come to the ashram too.
Hugs: Jewel
