Costa Rica: Home for the Next 3 Months

Hi friends. Many of you know that I have been intending to go to India to continue my yoga studies and take some well deserved rest. The fates, however, had something else in mind when last Thursday I received word from a friend and colleague about an opportunity to spend the spring working on a project in Costa Rica; the very same project that I worked on in February earlier this year. While this is an exceedingly last minute change of plans (that even required the cancelation of my ticket to India), I believe this decision will lead to balance. Had things unfolded as originally planned, I would be boarding a plane today for India. The entire architecture of the spring changed in a blink. A breath. Change can come that fast.  

After so much running around in the last 4 years of my life, taking this three months to learn, hike, practice, mist net birds and bats, and to be still in the beauty of nature will be a medicinal downshift. The research I am supporting is subsumed under Stanford's "countryside biogeography" project, which endeavors to understand the dynamics of human land-use patterns on bird and bat communities, and to quantify the ecosystem services provided by forested areas in the Las Cruces area of Costa Rica. 

I am thrilled to be a part of this project, and equally excited for the opportunity to spend my time with really great people and to practice my Spanish in one of the most bird rich, beautiful landscapes in the world. Here is a link to some of the results that have emerged from this project. 

Lastly, I am cognizant of the fact that Yoga does not need the boundaries of a yoga mat in order to be practiced, and in fact the practice is truly tested when we bring what we learn on the mat out into the world--when the mandala of the sacred space is destroyed to reveal that its true nature is the nature of everything. The practice will always continue and I commit to being aware of the continuous unfolding of the opposites, of prana and apana, in the radiant dynamism of the natural world for the benefit of all beings.