the story of Second Star

“second star to the right and straight on till morning…”

I’ve always wanted to be Peter Pan; grinning and free; sweeping up lost children and flying them off to a place where they create their own perfect world. Neverland. What a beautiful concept.

Years ago I was working at a spa in Atlanta and while consulting a client about what she was hoping to get out of her hour long massage she replied, “I want to go to Neverland.” I smiled and in my head I thought, “second star to the right…” and that was the moment I knew how I could be Peter Pan, sort of. If I could create a space where for one hour people leave there lives and just be…just be…then for one hour maybe they will find themselves in Neverland. So almost 10 years later I am opening Second Star Studio, my life’s dream, a place to walk into and leave the world outside.

I visited the town I now live in for the first time 4 summers ago. As I drove out of the city 45 minutes to the west and watched the scenery melt into rolling hills and farm land speckled with the odd village or township I could feel myself ease, like my entire body was taking a long sigh. By the time I pulled into my tiny town I was grinning. By the very next morning I knew I had found home. It took 3 more years of returning in the summers before I managed to move here year round but I knew the timing was right. I bought a house and settled into my role as town yoga teacher. I thought “ok I’ll do this for a while, maybe a year or two, and then start looking for a place to open a studio.” A month later I had rented a store front.

The old video store in town had been closed for 4 years and had become a graveyard of TV and computer monitors, various scraps of drywall, ceiling tiles and carpets, and layers upon layers of dirt and dust ground into the blue linoleum floor. I had found a building but it was going to need some serious sweat equity. So I dove in. I was lucky enough when I bought the house that it was in amazing shape and even more amazing was the group of friends that showed up to help me paint and move in. So being not wiped out from the move I had plenty of time to scrub the studio. But I had no idea what a huge task that would be. For 3 weeks pushed around debris, scrubbed the floor, painted, scrubbed the floors again, shampooed the carpet and scrubbed the floors even more. When I say that there is not an inch of that studio I haven’t touch with my two hands I mean that in the most literal sense! But even in those late hours into the evening when I was tired and sore a student or co-worker would pass by and come inside to see the transformation taking place. And before I knew it I was grinning again, walking them through my plans for the design of the studio. Covered in dirt and Simple Green I was still happy because I was building my very own Neverland; place for yoga, massage, art and anything that helps people find their bliss. And on Monday the doors will open and I will teach my very first yoga class in my own studio and as most yogis would agree Savasana is pretty darn near Neverland.

It took a long time to get to my Second Star and it wasn’t easy once I did but I’m here now and I can’t wait to share it with everyone. Through all the journeying and under all the dirt there was something special waiting; a hidden potential. As yoga teach that’s what I’m always looking for in my students, the ability to do something that they may not think possible and then to guide them along the way. Just like Peter Pan scooping up the lost boys and guiding them to Neverland. So I officially call out to you, if you are looking for an escape from life for a while I’d be happy to help you find it, we’ll start at Second Star

bread for hunger, food for thought

What a terrible day to make bread, but I am. In fact at this moment I have 2 loaves of bread trying their darnedest to rise on this dreary and cold day. I would like them to turn out nice and fluffy as I am taking them to a picnic tomorrow to share with friends but like in my yoga classes I have to let go of the outcome and be content with the effort. But that’s not the lesson that was made clear to me today as I baked or kneaded rather. What became clear was that more often the harder we work the less pleasing our outcome is.

Lately I’ve been looking for ways to explain the idea of yoga as a process and respecting each step along that process. Yes we all want to be able to throw our feet over our heads into a perfect handstand or float gracefully in balancing poses. So much so that we skip the preparatory work that builds the proper strength and alignment in our bodies that make those asana available to us. I see many students struggle because they think their bodies “should” be able to do something. I try to explain that there is no one perfect asana, that every step along the way is that asana, but really, no one wants to hear that when they want to be standing on their heads. This is where I find I real distance from my students. I’ve been practicing yoga for long enough that I know my body’s limits; I know where the edge is that I can go to safely to deepen without injury. Or do I?

Today while I was kneading out my dough I remembered the words of a friend, a much better baker than I, to be gentle with the dough. My thought was the more these ingredients are mixed together the better the muffins, to which her response was, “yeah if you want hockey pucks.” Point taken my friend. In fact as I’ve started baking more over the past year or so often recipes remind us not to over work the dough or your bread will be hard as…well a hockey puck. I caught myself mixing flour, salt, eggs rapidly into the yeast mix when I remembered all that advice and I slowed it down, when it came time to turn the dough out onto the counter I very gently sprinkled with flour and pushed, rolled and turned my dough oh so tenderly. Reminding myself that even though I felt like I “should” be kneading harder that by over working the dough the bread will become stiff and hard and then I thought “just like muscles.” Ah ha! There it is the lesson I’ve been looking for for over 3 weeks.

See 3 weeks ago I decided to improve my physical practice. I have pretty limited flexibility for a yoga teach and I honestly felt I was doing my students a disservice by not being able to illustrate asanas to their full extent. So I’ve been working very hard; I’ve been running to increase stamina, extra core work to better my arm balances, lots of shoulder work etc… and you know what? I’m in pain. I’ve been over kneading my muscles and they are turning into hard achy loaves of bread. And what’s worse I’ve not being practicing what I teach; patience, acceptance, compassion. Boy did I fall of the philosophical wagon! In the amount of time it took to knead a dough ball (8 minutes roughly) I had relearned what took me years to grasp fully. Who knew baking could provide not only for our physical hungry but for our spiritual hunger as well. Actually the lesson came to me about 3 minutes into the kneading so I spent the other 5 minutes thinking about how to change my practice and to better respect my body AND my body’s limit. I would like to go into further detail about that but my timer is about to go off.

An Hour a Day

How hard is it to find an hour a day? Pretty hard. At this point in my life I’m only partially employed; teaching yoga and freelancing on the side. I don’t have the typical 40 hour work week that many I know do, nor do I have other obligations such as a spouse or children that I make time for. All in all I have a pretty easy schedule. My day starts like this: wake up, walk the dog, simple meditation, coffee and while I have my dark roasted decaf I look at the day ahead and that’s where I get into trouble. I can over program a schedule by the time I’m down to the last drop. Being a new home owner I have plenty of projects around the house and yard and then there’s the new studio which needs lots of TLC. There are many things to get distracted by and if I don’t plan out my day then I will get distracted or worse forget I had things I wanted to accomplish and do virtually nothing. And even though I am embarrassed to admit it yoga is one of the things that gets forgotten. If I don’t put yoga somewhere on my to do list I will most likely not do it. I am a bad yogi. Or am I?

I would love to say I’m one of those amazing and grounded people who get up every day at 4 and do yoga and meditate for 3 hours, but when it comes right down to it I simply not. I live in the constructs of a modern world so getting up at 4 doesn’t fit into that lifestyle. But what I can do is live within these constructs without losing the integrity of my practice. When I sit down to look at my day not matter how quickly it fills I know to “schedule” and hour for my yoga practice. I may not even get that whole hour I may settle for 20 minutes between jobs or appointments but knowing that I have set aside that time, made room for it in my life, assures me it will happen. Every self help book and guru will tell you take time for you, take time for you; even if it’s just five minutes to have a cup of tea in silence or a walk around the block without your iPod. But I think that for me it goes deeper than that. I don’t do yoga for me; I do yoga for everyone else in my life. Yogic philosophy teaches us to have compassion and respect for everyone and really the heart of it is recognizing the divinity within every person as well as in ourselves. So for me putting yoga on my to do list has less to do with taking time for me or keeping limber but it’s an act of respect. I respect all of the things yoga has to teach me by carving out even 20 minutes to let those lessons have a chance to sink in. If you’ve ever taken a yoga class hopefully you’ve been lucky enough to come up from Savasana feeling so at peace with yourself and the world that you can’t even imagine that horrible mood you were in just yesterday. For me it’s like waking up being madly in love with everything. And no, we don’t get that feeling every yoga class but how amazing would it be to start having more often. What kinds of beautiful things could manifest if we had a little more peace and joy in our lives? I think that’s something worth putting on our to do lists.