Above all else, this is ours to remember…

 Enamored by the glory and honor of being a soldier, naive 16 year old Abe lied about his age and headed off to war. After killing over 200 men as a sniper, being patched together by inebriated doctors and thrown back out on front lines, he returned home as a hero…and a traumatized man.

 Years later, when his wife of 35+ years died, he began to lose his own battle, with the bottle. One day his son got the call. His father, a brave and kind war vet, had succumbed to the disease of alcoholism. The soldier’s son? My beloved husband Blair.

 As a young man, Blair inherently knew he had a susceptibility to addiction, but he also had an early curiosity for the mind. As a 5 year old, Blair would put a makeshift microphone to his lips and ask his drunk father, “Why do you need to drink, Daddy?”

 While Blair acknowledges his own addictive tendencies (mainly to food, which I benefit from in his cooking) he made the choice in early adulthood to explore the inner dimensions of addiction.

 In yoga, the term Bhrama describes the state of sleep walking through life, destined to repeat the same mistakes over and over, reliving the same pain of our ancestors.

 Through the strength and might of our yoga practice however, we learn to break the harmful cycle of karma by leading inquiries, similar to the interviews Blair conducted as a child.

 With the higher knowledge gained from our practice, known as jnana, we discover the truth of who we are, which is whole, free and divine. This, above all else, is ours to remember throughout our lives.

 No matter what our genetic disposition is, our path in life is not determined by the plight of our fore fathers, but is blazed by own choices and higher knowledge.

 I’ll leave you with Blair’s favorite quote “Let the past be a springboard, not a hammock.”

 Jenny