Your Mythic Yoga Journey™ - Stories of Faith, Healing and Transformation

Sydney Solis among the plum blossoms at
Osaka Castle Park, Osaka, Japan

I have noticed that many of the myths and folktales I tell are about faith, healing and transformation. They are about a journey that a character is on, and questions the suffering inflicted upon her. 

The Sufi story of Fatima the Spinner and the Tent tells the story of a young woman who three times is frustrated by life, but in the end she sees that everything brings her to the happiness she has found.

In the Chinese story I call Maybe, Maybe Not, a farmer is distraught over problems that arise, such a his son breaking his leg. But because the son broke his leg, an invading army does not impress him into their army and he is spared.

A story in the Song of Solomon, a King is given a ring with the inscription This Too Shall Pass, to aid him in his suffering over material conditions that are either good or bad in his life.

In the end, all of these stories are stories I have collected for my storytelling performances of Mythic Yoga called Stories of Faith Healing and Transformation. They are about material conditions, whether good or bad, and how they are transient.  This has been the story of my life, and I call it Mythic Yoga. They are healing stories and yoga. We use myths, stories and symbols to guide us in uniting us with our true self. It is our Mythic Yoga Journey™ to continue on the path, despite all that appears as obstacles.

For you cannot judge what happens to you. All is as it should be, or it's how things hang together. The good or the bad is just a value judgment. Things just ARE. It is only our lens of mind that brings judgment and suffering. We try to cast out demons, but demons, as Mythologist Joseph Campbell says, are just doing their part in duality. We need story, and somebody has to play each part!

Cherry blossoms, Sakura, at the Himuro Jinja Shrine,
Nara, Japan Cherry blossoms symbolize the
fleeting of life. Cherish each moment! 

My life has been that way. So many traumas - childhood trauma in my childhood home of Boulder, Colorado, the trauma of my husband's suicide, a hasty second marriage three years after that ended in divorce and losing all my money, dealing with foreclosure, intense stress, losing my youngest sister to suicide, being abandoned on a Caribbean island, traveling, being brutalized by police in Florida. 

But all along I had an inner guide - yoga and meditation, and of course stories and dreams. It was my Mythic Yoga Journey, that entailed me leaving Boulder in 2010 and living in Argentina, St. Croix in the US. Virgin Islands and arriving back on the mainland in Florida. 

It has brought me incredible faith, healing and transformation. And now after all that, I find myself in the incredible moment of my life with all I could possibly ever imagine. At 50, I am married to my soul mate. We are perfect match for each other in every way. And remarkably, as life has it, I find myself moving to Japan!

I hope you follow your bliss. It takes risk. I did, and I'm happy to be your guide. Since 2003 I have been writing and conducting Mythic Yoga and Storytime Yoga® workshops online and more. I had my two children to raise on my own, and I really valued the home arts and motherhood as they needed me and the business world is way too stressful to do both well. I sacrificed with bliss for them, and now, as fate has it, I am back on my Mythic Yoga Journey™ to Japan.

For the calm abiding to see clearly is with me from meditation and yoga. I have listened to my story in the body, reclaimed my intuitive, sensing and feeling self by occupying the body and feeling safe in the moment. I have peeled away the curtains of the theatre of my mind, and gained enormous joy and peace in the process. And all my dreams have come true.

That's the goal of yoga - the sage, unaffected by loss or gain. I'm not perfect, but everything is practice. I know more lay ahead. But I am ever rooted in the transcendent as I participate in duality. 

You, too, can take a personal Mythic Yoga Journey™. Read my ebook, Mythic Yoga: Ancient Hindu Myth and Personal Story, which I first performed at the Winter Festival of Stories at the Boulder Public Library in 2005. Nobody could understand Mythic Yoga back then. They looked at me and said, "Mythic?" I know now, all has a purpose! All is as it should be!!

Join me! Subscribe to my YouTube Channel for my Mythic Yoga Journey™ to Japan videos of haiku poetry and more. Follow me on Instagram for my photography and haiku and tankas and more! Follow my blog on my new website, an umbrella for Mythic Yoga and Storytime Yoga, my poetry and art, SydneySolis.com.

We found an amazing apartment in Osaka, and once I get settled I will return to teaching. It's a journey! Join me! Have faith! Healing and transformation await!

OM SHANTI

Osaka, Japan

Mythic Yoga: The Story in the Body

Mythic Yoga: The Story in the Body at Lighthouse Writer's
Workshop Literature Fest Denver 2015

It was my Mythic Return, leaving Colorado for 5 years on a personal Mythic Journey to heal and putting my Mythic Yoga and Storytime Yoga business on hold so that as a widow I could focus on being a homemaker and raising my two kids after the great trauma of my husband's death. Read my E-book, Mythic Yoga: Vishnu's Dream, Ancient Hindu Myth and Personal Story, which I first performed at the Boulder Public Library in 2004 and used myths to tell my story.

Rose Mandala 2000 Mixed Media Collage by Sydney Solis
Part of the Mythic Yoga Personal Mythology Series

Into my depths I went, practicing restorative yoga, meditation, eating locally, cooking from scratch, learning to knit and yoga homeschooling my kids in Buenos Aires, Argentina and for a bit in St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands where we ended up and spent 2 1/2 years.

It took me two years to adjust back to the U.S. mainland and its hyper-consumerist society before starting Studio Solis. I won't even get into the commodification of yoga in the U.S. now. But the deep, real work continues, as my kids are now teens and I can venture a bit back into the world with my work. which has taken a big yoga therapy turn, as the healing powers of yoga and storytelling, myth and the body are deep.

Contemplating myth while moving the body brings insight via
mythic imagery

I taught my original Mythic Yoga: The Story in the Body at Lighthouse Writers Workshop Literature Fest in Denver this June. The first time in 5 years since I left Colorado. Conference are always so head and intellect heavy. The body thinks! Jung's four functions of the psyche let us know we don't even tough the intuitive function, all in favor of the intellect.

So via the body we can listen deeply for inspiration in our creative writing endeavors for svadyaya, self-knowledge. And by listening deeply and contemplating ancient myths, knowledge bubbles up with the symbolic mind we have long forgotten with great secrets, insights and information we never realized before with just our thinking minds. Through our art, memoirs, poetry, we create memorials and testimonies of our lives. We become living yoga and through our art transcend death.

Images bubble up from the soul with the realm of the imagination, the heart, within the body, the organs, our dreams. We return to our depths and unconscious via the body, and movement with symbols and imagery suspend intellectual thinking and activate the symbolic mind. We think in more ways than one! By listening to the story in the body, via chakras, body parts, yoga nidra, imagery, we can then articulate emotions, ideas, feelings and stories better via creative writing prompts.

Listening to mythology activates energies within us to
enable us to listen to ourselves and link via yoga. It's more
than yoga asana, it's Raja Yoga. Direct via the mythic imagination

Register for the Next Mythic Yoga The Yoga of Story training. Denmark June 2016. 

I still am a home-body, content living a simple, sustainable life with my kids rather than running around too much teaching. I will be adding more dates soon. Visit the calendar for one-day Mythic Yoga: The Story in the Body trainings.

Mythic Yoga: The Story in the Body Retreats were held each June from 2008-2010 in Boulder, Colorado and Rollinsville, Colorado in conjunction with Artist Wendy Rochman as required for master training in the Storytime Yoga for Kids Yoga Teacher Training and Certification.