Twenty Years of Light

A New Year Reflection by Lisa M. Gunshore
Founder of the Rocky Mauna School of Ayurveda, Yoga & Mysticism

I. The Arc of Time

Twenty years is a long apprenticeship to truth. When I look back, I do not see a line of accomplishments but a spiral of awakenings—each curve revealing that enlightenment was never elsewhere.

Two decades ago, grief cracked me open on a winter trail and a voice whispered, “Go home and get your cards.” That single sentence rearranged my life. It pulled me out of despair and into dialogue with the invisible.

In the beginning I mistook awakening for escape. I thought clarity would rescue me from the weight of my own story. But the universe is mercifully recursive—it brings us the same lesson until the lesson becomes love. Every winter since that first one has returned as both mirror and teacher. The outer cold asks me to honor the inner fire, the quiet demands that I listen for what remains when ambition and fear fall silent.

Awakening, I have learned, is not a destination reached by the exceptional. It is the natural intelligence of life discovering itself through experience. The purpose of a lifetime is not to become perfect but to become transparent—to let light pass through without distortion.

II. The Sword and the Heart

The Tarot calls the suit of air the Swords: intellect, perception, discernment. For years I wielded that sword defensively—cutting, analyzing, judging, striving to separate the sacred from the ordinary. Eventually the sword grew heavy. What began as protection became division: mind against body, teacher against student, self against soul.

To live awake is to reverse the blade. The sword must serve the heart. Discernment without compassion is just another form of violence. When the intellect kneels to love, clarity becomes communion.

Integration arrived when I stopped treating my humanity as a problem to solve. The same mind that dissects also illumines; the same heart that breaks also opens. In truth, the sword and the heart were never enemies—they were the two wings required for flight.

III. The Lineage of Light

Over these twenty years, I have walked through many doorways of wisdom.

Ayurveda taught me that the body is scripture written in earth and water.
Yoga taught me that breath is prayer in motion.
Tibetan Buddhism revealed that compassion is the highest form of intelligence.
Mediumship showed me that love does not end with death.

Each tradition offered a different language for the same radiance. I have sat before saints and skeptics; studied physiology and metaphysics; witnessed miracles and market failures. What endures is the current underneath them all—the direct knowing that consciousness is self-aware through us.

Spiritual maturity is not achieved by collecting initiations but by embodying simplicity. The more systems I mastered, the more I returned to what every lineage agrees upon: kindness, truthfulness, presence. When we practice these, the esoteric becomes ordinary and the ordinary becomes divine.

IV. Integration: The Ordinary Grace

There comes a point when the path itself dissolves. The seeker recognizes that what she was chasing was never separate from what she already is.

For me, that moment was not thunderous. It arrived quietly through the nervous system—through the choice to stay with discomfort rather than transcend it. Cutting Into It was born from that recognition: awakening as integration, not escape. Healing as inclusion, not correction.

Integration means that I no longer divide my life into sacred and mundane. Marriage, teaching, bills, and stillness all belong to the same temple. The divine does not prefer the meditation cushion to the kitchen sink. Presence is the sacrament.

Now, when I speak of light, I do not imagine an ethereal glow but an inner steadiness that persists amid change. The light of consciousness is not a reward for the virtuous—it is the ground of being itself. Our work is simply to stop resisting it.

V. The Invitation

A new year invites inventory—not of resolutions, but of truths. What have we integrated? What illusions have we outgrown? What patterns still claim our loyalty?

The ancients taught that time moves in yugas—vast cycles of creation and dissolution. Individually, we live our own micro-yugas every twenty years or so. We are born, we awaken, we dismantle, we return. To honor that rhythm is to live consciously inside evolution.

So I invite you to stand in the stillness of this season and look backward with compassion. Trace the spiral of your own twenty years. Where did you begin? What have you become? What remains unexpressed that longs to live through you?

Let this winter be an initiation—not into something new, but into what has always been here. Integration is the final initiation—the realization that nothing was ever missing, only unrecognized.

May your discernment be gentle and your courage vast.
May you hold the sword with compassion and let it become light.
And may this year, and every year after, reveal what was never separate from you—the steady brilliance of your own awareness.

© 2026 Lisa M. Gunshore
Rocky Mauna School of Ayurveda, Yoga & Mysticism