This past month has given me two profound reminders of why I love this path.
A few weeks ago, I was on retreat with my own teacher at Kripalu. While I was there, I took a yoga class from a woman who had been practicing for nearly fifty years. She carried a kind of joyful kindness I had never encountered before.
I’ve met plenty of cheerful people. Plenty of people who seem blissed out or in love with everything. And honestly, sometimes it doesn’t quite land for me. It can feel untethered, almost like a spiritual persona.
This was different.
Her joy was utterly grounded.
It wasn’t separate from her humanity. It had grown through it.
It bubbled out of her in the smallest interactions—in the way she welcomed people, the way she moved through the room, the generosity of her presence.
She didn’t teach me about joy.
She embodied it.
I left that class thinking, This is what decades of sincere practice can do.
Then this week, I was given another precious gift.
I had the opportunity to attend retreat with Mingyur Rinpoche and reconnect with a community that shaped me deeply in my twenties, when I was living in Asia. Those years were filled with long retreats—often a month at a time—days of silence, hours of meditation, and profound teachings that changed the direction of my life.
Returning after all these years felt like reconnecting with a part of myself that has never really left.
One of the greatest gifts was seeing someone I had practiced alongside twenty-two years ago. As I looked around the room, I found myself surrounded by people who had simply kept practicing.
Not people who had become perfect.
People who had continued to return.
Over decades.
There was a sincerity to them. A humility. A kindness that didn’t feel performative or self-conscious. It had simply become who they were. You could feel the fruit of a life spent training the mind and opening the heart.
As I watched them, I found myself thinking of these words from W.B. Yeats:
“We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us, that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.”
That was the feeling in the room.
No one was trying to be impressive or inspiring.
Their years of sincere practice had quietly become visible in the way they listened, smiled, and met each moment. Their presence itself had become a teaching.
It moved me more than I can say.
These teachings are such a precious gift.
Not because it gives us a new identity or promises a life free from pain, but because it continually reminds us of what has never left us. It teaches us how to meet our minds instead of believing every story they tell. How to let emotions move through awareness without becoming imprisoned by them. How to remember wisdom and compassion even when life feels overwhelming.
Mingyur Rinpoche often reminds us:
“All that we are looking for in life—all the happiness, contentment, and peace of mind—is right here in the present moment. Our very own awareness is itself fundamentally pure and good. The only problem is that we get so caught up in the ups and downs of life that we don’t take the time to pause and notice what we already have.”
Every time I return to these teachings, I feel the truth of them a little more deeply. Practice isn’t about becoming someone else. It is about remembering what has been here all along.
As I sat with a teacher I first met more than two decades ago, I was struck by something unexpected.
I could see how much I had changed.
Not only because of the profound moments that changed the course of my life, but because of the thousands of ordinary moments of practice that slowly wove those insights into who I was becoming.
Thousands of small moments of remembering.
Thousands of moments of returning.
Thousands of opportunities to soften instead of harden, to stay instead of leave myself, to begin again.
The practice had been quietly shaping me all along.
It brought tears to my eyes.
We don’t practice so that life becomes free from the beautiful challenges of being human.
We practice so that when those challenges inevitably come, we know how to meet them.
We practice so that we don’t abandon ourselves when fear arises, when grief arrives, when uncertainty knocks at the door. We practice so that our hearts can remain open in a world that constantly invites them to close. We practice so that we can respond with greater wisdom instead of simply reacting from habit.
Our humanity doesn’t disappear.
Our capacity to meet it grows.
I love retreat.
Truly love it.
A part of me would have been perfectly happy living the monastic life.
Instead, this life has invited me into something beautifully ordinary: raising children, tending a partnership, building a business, paying a mortgage, answering emails, folding laundry, navigating the beautiful complexity of being human.
And this, too, is the path.
The world doesn’t stop giving us opportunities to practice.
Every conversation.
Every disappointment.
Every moment of joy.
Every time we notice the distracted mind and gently return.
Every time we let our hearts break open instead of close down.
Every time we choose presence over habit.
We are planting seeds.
Seeds of greater freedom.
Greater kindness.
Greater wisdom.
There is something profoundly encouraging about practicing in community. About sitting beside people who have quietly walked this path for years and seeing what sincere practice actually looks like. Not perfection, but authenticity. Not certainty, but humility. Not spiritual performance, but hearts that have been softened by years of returning.
We become reminders for one another of what is possible.
The greatest teachers I’ve met haven’t inspired me simply through what they knew.
They’ve inspired me through who they became.
And that gives me so much hope.
It reminds me that these teachings and practices really do work.
Not overnight.
But over a lifetime.
Share Seeds of Light Elizabeth Astor
That is what I hope to offer at our upcoming daylong retreat.
A day to step out of the speed of modern life.
A day to settle the nervous system, quiet the mind, open the heart, and remember what matters most.
Not to become someone new.
Simply to become more intimate with who you have always been.
I would love to practice with you.
Here are some upcoming opportunities to gather and practice together:
Daylong Retreat
Rooted in the Rush: Sustaining presence, restoring wholeness, returning to yourself.
Sunday, August 16, 2026 | 9:30am- 5:30pm MT
In the middle of a spinning world, there is ground. This daylong retreat offers practices for protecting your nervous system, tending your inner life, and awakening.
Location: The Mother’s Center, 271 Sky Trail Road, Boulder, CO 80304. A beautiful, quiet refuge in the mountains just 10 minutes outside Boulder. Also on Zoom.
Email essentialwellbeingboulder@gmail.com to register
*Available in-person and on Zoom
$215 in person / $145 on Zoom | Sliding scale available
4 Night Retreat
The Living Current — Discovering the Nourishing Refuge of Presence and the Open Heart
December 3–7, 2026 | Crestone, Colorado
You were never meant to carry this life alone. Beneath the surface of everything, there is a current — a living intelligence that can move through you and illuminate your life.
What would it feel like to be genuinely fed from the inside? Not sustained by effort or willpower, but nourished by your body’s quiet wisdom, the warmth of an open heart, and the steady refuge of presence.
This retreat explores what it means to let the Divine move through your full humanity — grounded in the body, open in the heart, moved by something greater than yourself.
Come rest in what cannot be shaken. Come let it move through you.
Location: Vajra Vidya Retreat Center, 3203 Camino Baca Grande, Crestone, CO, USA
*Available in-person and on Zoom
$895-$935 4-Night Stay / $715 Commuter / $225 on Zoom
Monthly Group
Riding the Waves of Life
3rd Tuesday of Each Month | 2pm MT on Zoom
This monthly group is a space where we practice the skills of staying present in the world, with a strong spine and open heart, and working with the waves of life’s challenges and opportunities with presence and skill. We gather for an hour on zoom the 3rd Tuesday of each month, 2pm MT.
About Seeds of Light
Seeds of Light is the blog of Elizabeth Astor, LAc, MSOM, CHom.
Elizabeth works as a Medical Intuitive, Meditation Teacher, Mind-Body-Spirit Specialist, Acupuncturist, Herbalist and Homeopath in Boulder, CO. She offers private sessions, which include a blend of her medical, soul evolution, and energy healing skill sets. Elizabeth has been asked to teach meditation and the spiritual awakening path by her teacher Sharon Landrith, and has been confirmed as a teacher in the lineage of Adyashanti. Elizabeth teaches the heart opening path of meditation and aligning ourselves to the light within, as well as intuition practices for individuals and health care providers, in local groups, retreats and internationally online.
Visit www.elizabethastor.com to learn more about Elizabeth, and her upcoming events, guided meditations, and teachings.
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