The (re)awakening.

I started blogging here on sarongskirts 10 years ago, during my younger days when I really loved wearing sarong skirts. I kept the blog all the way until mid-2012, when I decided to restart on a new slate on Tumblr. At that time, I was seven months into my renewed yoga journey after a long hiatus, and I felt trapped by the identity I had created on the seven-year-old sarongskirts platform. Unknown to me then, I was experiencing all these subtle yoga-illuminated shifts inside, so I was finding it increasingly difficult to relate to the written world I'd created over the years – a world where luxury travel and trending eats were of utmost importance. Sarong skirts had made way for chic dresses and heels in my wardrobe, and online, sarongskirts no longer seemed like the right home either for my new brainwaves on yoga and its grand philosophies.

For two and a half years, I experimented with various domains and platforms, and at one time invested much effort in setting up sproutblog, a website that I believed encapsulated the mindful life. It was certainly the right home for all my thoughts on wellness and yoga, but the tipping point came very quickly when I realised that writing for sproutblog made me feel like I was back in magazine publishing. I didn't quite care for that, so for most of last year, I stopped blogging completely. Teaching yoga full time and sharing all those yoga-related thoughts in class had taken all the big words out of me – I was left with non-related musings, but I couldn't find a home for them on sprout.

Writing is like coming home – an intangible emotion akin to each time I step onto my mat. While 2014 was the year that I truly felt like I was beginning to live my dharma, the writer inside me was constantly unfulfilled. I thought of starting over, creating a new platform, and I spent a long time pondering over which new blog name would fit. Should it be about karma, or dharma, or santosha, or maybe something cute like Buddha belly? I played around with countless word combinations in my head, but nothing felt right. I kept coming back to sarongskirts, but a part of me resisted it, simply because there was too much history.

Yesterday, I taught a workshop on Manifesting Your Life, one about wiping the slate clean. After the session, an ex-classmate who attended it came up to me to share a memory of us from 15 years back, a memory from a time that now seems so distant and almost unreal. Listening to her, I realised that I was silly for wanting to lock away my past, silly for constantly looking for new writing slates. I can't feel more different now than I was in secondary school, but if not for that now unrelatable past, the two of us might not be standing in the same place here in the present, connected by yoga and its profound impact on our lives.

I found my love for writing here on sarongskirts, and that love has taken me to so many places. While I can no longer quite relate to the things I used to write about, it seems to me that it is only poetic justice to restart the slate on this good, old one. And you know what – it feels right.