Out on a bike ride, I caught myself wondering how many miles I had gone and for how many hours I had biked. The underlying message being that there was some external measurement that would let me know if I had done well or poorly. If my efforts were something I could be proud of, or were reason for feeling less than because I had not done enough.

Only…as the fates would have it, I was right in the middle of “the pink forest;” one of my favorite stretches along the road. That’s not its official name. It’s the nickname I have for it because in this particular stretch of small and medium pines, when the light comes through just so, it seems to glow pink. And it was the pink that caught me and pulled me back in. It was the pink that said “This is it, this is the reason you are out here today.”

To back up a bit, I had gone out riding with an intention: I wanted to go further than I could running or walking and I wanted to travel somewhere I had never been before. This was my attempt to use the movement of my body, along with exploration, to create a new pattern in my body/mind. I had woken that morning with the realization that an old pattern of mind and body was getting in the way of how I actually want to be living. And there is nothing so powerful as a clear intention for change coupled with moving the body.

Everything that we have ever thought, and everything that we have ever experienced is housed in the body. Think about it. The body has been there for everything you have ever gone through; real or imagined. Ancient yogis identified the body as being a potential doorway to the realization of who we really are. Move the body into different positions and patterns emerge. As those patterns are worked with, energies become available to us. And that energy, known as the life force, is what animates us and propels us to our greatest potentials.

So you can see that based on what my intention for riding was, distance and time had nothing to do with my reason for being out there. As a matter of fact, an orientation around worrying about the wrong thing and using cruel external standards was exactly what had gotten me into my current pattern. So often we are so caught up in imagining how we are doing based on some external measurement, real or imagined, that we forget to be who we are. We forget to remember what it is we are going for. We forget to live a life that makes sense to us. So I ask you, “Do you remember to notice the pink forest? Do you have a pink forest?”