The Quest Began on a Coffee Shop Place Mat...

“(A)s we would come to understand much later, our crises each contained the seed of a magnificent gift. We were both forced, by pain, to look under the surface of things. To investigate deeper into the nature of our human-beingness — its impermanence, its lack of continuity, its disappointment…”

“Paula and I sat one evening after class in the coffee shop beneath the yoga studio, discussing our lives. We discovered we both secretly felt our breakdowns were a kind of spiritual crisis. … As we identified, together, the aspects of this search that we shared, I scribbled them down on the paper place mat in front of me with a big red crayon:

“ — A search for ‘the quiet’ in which the small inner voice could be heard.

“ — A longing for the authentic and the real.

“ — A visceral need for self-expression.

“ — A sense of rebellion against the ‘captivity’ of our old lives.

“ — An inchoate sense of something unimaginable about to be born out of the disorganization of our lives.”

—  Stephen Cope, Yoga and the Quest for the True Self