Why Me? Talk 9th of March 2025 - Katherine Johnstone

My story is a story of the body
A body that was exhausted in the world,
a body that never took a rest
In a life of constant work and distraction
driven by fear
Driven by a belief that all my busy-ness made me good,
made me worthy, I thought trying to please, and over work
made me safe for I was constantly afraid and anxious.

Hitting a limit in body with ill health and burn out… Some inner wisdom led me to yoga.

In the ritual of daily yoga practice, I finally gave myself permission to allocate time for the body. Time for attention on the breath, Time to move my body through the ordered series of poses. Following the types of movement and breath for the times of day, Relearning to respect, live and mirror with my body the rhythms of the day and the seasons. I ate differently, with more presence and awareness. Through daily pranayama or breathwork I became aware, I’d been breathing so shallowly as I typed and talked on the phone in the office, that I had barely been breathing, which increases anxiety and reduces emotional resilience…

I quite literally breathed new life back into my body. Feeling again Joy and delight at moving the body, as though I was a child again, yoga became my play. In Eastern spiritual practices, the body is the sacred vessel for spirit; yoga poses, pranayama, chanting, and meditation are all practices and disciplines, to help usher in greater consciousness of the Divine

So it was through the body I was touched by what yogis call enlightenment… but really it was more a falling away of human concerns and conflicts, a diminishment of my anxieties, fears, grudges and hungers…
to mere illusion, Dwarfed by a reality of truth. This truth arrived through the body…
 
I was in yoga teacher training, in Spain, in a warm, yoga loft space;  rain coming down on the roof just above our heads and a soft breeze coming in the windows, My fellow yoginis and I were settling after a vigorous 90 minute Ashtana practice, our bodies now comfortably melting into bolsters and pillows carefully arranging us In a heart opening pose. Listening to our teacher, Esther, walk us through a nidra meditation, of relaxing each part of our body.

Then it happened, I was aware of gasping and dropping my head back…my mouth falling open I was dissolving into an overwhelming powerful love, I felt a sense of being held by this love  and such a  holding which radiated ultimate safety and security, I felt so safe…  that the concept of fear became a tiny, forgotten,
misunderstanding of the minds creation. as I slipped into this. Total ecstasy of a love I’d never known I was transported to a memory… to the morning after my birth, which incidentally was Easter morning, as I was born the night before… That same night my mother had had a near death experience, Where she found herself in a tunnel of light drifting away from her body in painless peace… She says breathing life back into her body to return to me was such an huge effort of will, to make the choice to come back…I am sure my life long anxieties had some root in this… mother and child being joined psychically

It is interesting to me that my awakening of the heart took me back to this day  when her spiritual life began, for once she knew the peace of death, she was no longer afraid…

I could go on in detail, but what took a few seconds seemed an eternity and takes many words to really explain the journey I went on but that is why I started a podcast, Gnosis of the Body, where I speak at length about my experiences and explorations around them with other yogis and teachers. What is felt is best known through feeling… so let me show you  i Invite you briefly

To close your eyes…
Feel your feet on the floor
You may place a hand on your heart,
Take a deep breath in through your nose,
sigh it out,
Imagine you are sitting inside your own chest
as if you could see your own heart
go inside yourself
 sit there
Feel your breath move your body…
Silently say inwardly to yourself
“I belong and I am loved for just being, there is no worthiness nor unworthiness
I am loved…. Just as i am ….with all my imperfections and perfections, just for being. “

May you see the love around you, may you feel and hear the love around you…

I knew with this experience in my yoga teacher training,  I had walked through a door in consciousness that changed everything, and there was no going back to blindness. I spoke to my teachers in my ecstatic state after class….who recognized where I was and what had happened, They shared their own stories of coming to awareness of the energy of love around us constantly… we spoke of how every tree, every blade of grass was radiating with love, but they also reminded me how once I left this sacred place, where we were being, as I joked “yoga nuns” … …allowing this inner light to come through, with our rituals, and practices removed from the mundane world that when I left this space …. living in the world, it would be different. For it is hard to walk in love and hold the light, in world lost in illusion of ego, fear, anger, need, and competition.

For me the truth of spirit, can not be understood with the mind, for me the one true reality is only felt in the body with the cosmic heart.

You might wonder, being a yogi, why I am in church. After that first experience in yoga teacher training, more followed, thankfully held by the discipline of practices of meditation and guidance of my teachers, With each experience I gained more felt wisdom and insight, always via feeling of direct experience in the body. For me awakening, had to come from an Eastern practice, as the body was what was missing for me in the traditions of my roots…

I had been adverse to Christianity for many years, biased by a childhood exposure to American Born Again Christians, with ministers shouting down the dominating dynamic of power over using fear,
manipulating with words like shame, sin and hellfire.  I had also turned away by the misuse of Christianity in US politics.

My embodied, rather mystical experiences increased with regularity for several years, in meditation, in chant, in channelling very high pitch music, using my undergraduate training as a coloratura soprano…

Until on two separate, profoundly powerful moments,
Against my ego and pride,  just as ibefore…. the peace and love that passes all understanding came into my body… so I became from head to toe, across my shoulders the Cross and with that feeling of  it came a Gnosis….a knowing of its meaning. One that can only be felt and not explained with words. After those moments, Christianity was no longer a case of doubt and belief, for I knew its symbol in my bones. And so here I am…..

I was daunted by the task of explaining my journey… for it is ineffable…one not easily given to words… as I was writing versions of this A few nights ago… while in my group for House of Mary Magdalene, over seen my theologian Meg Watterson… I heard a reading from Corinthians that guided me to speak from my spirit to your spirit to explain my journey to you…

“And we speak of these gifts, not language taught by human philosophy but in language taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual things in spiritual words.

The merely intellectual person rejects The teaching of the spirit of God; for them it is mere folly; they cannot grasp it, because it is to be understood only by spiritual insight. But the person with spiritual insight is able to understand everything, although she herself is understood by no one. “

My journey is one of learning that the body has a central place in spiritual seeking,
because it is where the soul comes in to be heard,
just you come into this church to hear what has to be said about God.