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I’ve always found it interesting how the things you need tend to find you — often when you’re busy chasing what you want instead.

About a month ago I was visiting friends in Scotland. On my last night there, I stayed closer to the train station for an early-morning flight, as well as my friends’ even earlier flight. I’ve been to Edinburgh a couple dozen times, so was just wandering around looking for something I didn’t know. I stumbled upon the Museum of Magic, Fortune-Telling & Witchcraft in a small close off the High Street and was immediately drawn to it. After some time in the museum, I had a Tarot card reading – a unique one connected to the chakras through crystals. 

The crystal I chose connected to my sacral chakra — the chakra associated with water, flow, self-care, and emotional health. 

The reading was pleasant and enjoyable, and the reader left the session reinforcing to me how I needed to fill my life with sacral healing stones and actions.

I started researching sacral stones and practices and soon learned that crystals like sunstones, carnelian, Tiger’s eye, amber, and orange tourmaline supported sacral healing.

I immediately recalled an experience in Costa Rica just months earlier. I’d been volunteering in San Jose for a week on my annual international volunteer trip. On my last night in the country, I wandered into a lovely wine-focused restaurant for a final meal and tipple.

This restaurant had a charming store with crystals and mystical wares. And, by chance, this evening, there was a woman conducting crystal readings. With a beaming glow, I handed over some small bills for my special reading.

She held her homing crystal over a table filled with stones, letting it rotate until it stopped.

It stopped on two crystals: the sunstone and tourmaline.

As I was perusing the restaurant’s shelves looking at the sunstone options, the woman grabbed the sunstone on the orange threads and the orange tourmaline bracelet for me. 

I bought them with an excited smile.

As I kept researching about sacral healing from the Scottish woman’s wise words, I found that the color orange was deeply connected to the sacral chakra. Of course! I chastised myself. I learned that in my Yoga Teacher Training. 

And then there was the moment that, at the time, meant nothing at all.

It was a meaningless event, just weekly grocery shopping. While waiting in line, I made small talk with the woman in front of me. She paid, gathered her items, and prepared to leave. But not before turning back to me and stating, “get some orange candles. Burn some orange candles. You need orange in your life.”

I smiled and thanked her. I didn’t think much of this at the time. But I did buy an orange, pumpkin-smelling candle since it was late September. 

All these events came full circle to my present moment.

After completing my Yoga Teacher Training and returning to my home, I reached out to several yoga studios in my neighborhood. My favorite one was very focused on providing free classes to certain neighborhood groups. They conducted outreach throughout the community. It fulfilled the concepts of a yogic life.

While I expressed interest in a few teaching organizations, I was most hoping for my application to volunteer as an intern to clean and check-in students would work out.

A couple weeks later, I was offered a position to be a volunteer intern on Saturday afternoons for a Restorative Yoga class. Restorative = just lying there in super-relaxing positions for an hour. It was the exact opposite of what I sought out in my own practice.

I value movement. I cherish aggressive motion. I need to constantly be moving. To lie there for an hour in restorative positions felt numbing.

After a few months, I was offered another position, but to teach chair yoga at a community library. It attracted a diverse range of community members, each with varying and unique mobility skills. I was challenged to continue slowing down and be reflective. 

Soon after, that library added a mat class after chair yoga. While it was a mat class, the range of students the community library attracted were immensely diverse. I needed to keep my classes supportive and accessible for the students who ranged more than five decades in age.

A few months later, I was offered a regular paid class – a 75-minute meditative yoga class. A class focused on a longer savasana, slower flows, more grounding, and guided meditation. Certainly, a class I would never choose to sign up for.

I began to realize that something beyond my own preferences was insisting on sacral focus, attention, and healing. Only in hindsight could I see the pattern – not coincidence, but redirection.

I had always chosen fire — intensity, motion, effort. But again and again, life placed me in situations that required the opposite: slowness, receptivity, care.

What I resisted most was what I needed to learn to teach, to hold, and to live.