This fall and winter, I’m taking a sabbatical. I’ll be spending September in New Mexico and then 3 months in India at my house in Vaidyagrama, the community where my Ayurveda teachers live and work. Construction on the house was completed last year, and aside from a few weeks’ visit last November, this will be the first time I get to stay in the house for an extended period.

The term “sabbatical” has always intrigued me. Originally conceived as a break for a professor from her usual teaching obligations, these days it is often used outside of academia and can refer to a period of rest away from work, or a period of devoted exploration outside of one’s usual responsibilities. 

The obvious reference to the “sabbath” in this secular term seems to invite a spiritual exploration. “Sabbath” in many traditions refers to a regularly scheduled day of rest as a routine part of a balanced life meant to make room for a relationship with the divine.

By claiming a sabbatical and taking intentional time away from my typical working life, I am consciously inviting an exploration of spiritual calling. I am attempting to let the busyness (or indeed, the business) of life recede from center stage, and to make space for something fresh to emerge from within as a calling.  I hear the prompting and the promise in the Tao Te Ching’s query, “Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles and the water is clear?”

By taking a break from teaching, it will be the first time in many years that I won’t facilitate a group Autumn Digestive Reset. I’m also taking a hiatus from leading my year-long women’s Ayurveda program, the Inner Wisdom Circle.

I know first-hand the tendency of the mind to fill any empty space with plans and projects, or some external measure of accomplishment. Constant stimulation and performance expectation is so persistent in our social and cultural spaces these days, I find myself tempted to create a long list of things to “check off” during sabbatical. It has been very hard to keep the proverbial slate blank, to restrain my excitement over new books and courses I could study, programs I could design, or webpages I could overhaul. 

This is where the practice of sankalpa or setting intention becomes so critically, creatively important. It would be easy to fritter away the hours, which so quickly become days and months, and allow my energy to disperse over the surface of many activities. But as taught in the Yoga Sutras, to dig a well to reach any deep nourishment, one must dig in the same spot for an extended period.

I certainly won’t be stepping away from Ayurveda during this time. One central focus for me this fall is to support a few clients during their intensive healing treatment, or panchakarma. In November, a small handful of clients will be meeting me in India to receive this 3-week detoxification and rejuvenation protocol. (Incidentally, we still have one available room in case you might feel called to immerse in your own healing sabbatical – this is an amazing opportunity! You can read more details here.)

My other focus during this sabbatical will be on PRACTICE, not product – on Being rather than Doing. This year I have been participating in a Veda Chanting teacher training with my teacher Shantala Sriramaiah. I am eager to drop even deeper into this profound and mystical practice, and by extension, the practices of prānāyāma or breath expansion. Both of these practices hold the magnetic sense of “calling” for me.

Although these practices are an end in themselves, I have also been feeling the hints of a deeper opening to meditation arise through both chanting and prānāyāma. This potential feels like it may be the elusive promise of a true sabbatical for me. 

So I am holding a firm intent to cultivate the needed space, patience, and devotion for these practices to take deeper root. My mission is to keep open and receptive, to resist the material and technological distractions of my usual life, and to see what arises spontaneously in a carefully protected blank space. The regenerative darkness and quiet of meditation beckon.

May the water become clear.