Wild Yoga Love

The kettle whispers on the stove, I don’t put the whistle down because I like to keep the water hot for pouring over my stovetop espresso to make Americanos in the morning. It’s the easiest way to keep hot water around when one does not have a standard drip coffee maker. That whisper makes me think of yoga, the gentle seeping of yoga into my life, subtly reminding me to head to the mat before my days begins, Except that right now, I do not need gentle reminder, I need a sharp piercing whistle to send me running from the shower or closet to snatch the screaming kettle off the stove and hurl me onto my mat. I need a steamy, reckless love affair with yoga. I need to be swept off on a weeklong rendezvous with a sweaty pulsing vinyasa get away. 

I spent the last year in an amazing Teacher Train course at Tejas Yoga in Chicago’s bustling South Loop. It was an amazing year; steeped in the teachings of Hatha yoga under two of the most inspiring teachers I have meet, James Tennant and Jim Bennitt. Trust me, if you find yourself in Chicago take the time to go visit their studio! The thing I love most about my teachers is how subtly they integrate yoga into your life. You never once feel like you are being told how to do or feel about yoga; “My intention is not to make you feel the way I do about yoga. My intention is to be a support system for you to discover what yoga means to you” James Tennant says.  But his enthusiasms is infectious and even without meaning to simple things like making coffee and washing your face in the morning seem to take on a yogic style. So the past year has been just that for me, feeling, accepting, and noticing yoga in everything I do. Marveling at the subtleties and smiling as I engage mulabandha while push my lawn mower up an incline. It’s a gift you can’t really describe and I am grateful for the experience but now I need something different.

I need a Shiva Rea, a yogi who practically burst with joy and love when she teaches vinyasa flow. Like Shiva Rea I need to sway my hips over the mat, let my arms dance wide expanding my heart, I need to feel my heart beat along with beats dropped my MC Yogi and DJ Drez. I need to dance in my yoga out on the grass under the summer sun and sweat out all linger winter introspection. In my head I hear the words of poets like Rumi and Rilke who dove so deep into the love of God and Nature that words tumble out of them soaked in awe. I need to whirl like a dervish inside and let my limbs move through asanas like wind just before a summer storm. And the best part of this longing for wild love type yoga? It’s out there! Yoga is there to fit into any size need you have. It’s out here to envelope you in whatever kind of shape you are in. and it is out there to shimmy up beside you and dance like no one is watching!

Venus

Venus is out tonight, well Venus is out every night, but from my desk in the cabin I can see her perfectly as I work at the computer. When I was little I had this same view out my bedroom window. Had my alter under that window but I don’t really know it was an alter then, just like I didn’t know that when I was staring up at Venus and asking questions and sending out my wishes that I was praying. So often when I look back on my childhood and growing up I did a lot of things that were sacred before I knew they were sacred. I think maybe I’ve always had a natural pull towards the…well maybe you could call it the divine, but before I had a language for it I just knew it was bigger. Bigger than me and bigger than the religion they taught me about in Catholic School. 

If I was my younger self staring out of my old bedroom window right now what would I be praying to Venus for? Probably the things a young girl does; love, understanding, confidence. Not to dissimilar than how I am feeling now. I pray for my love, my sad little heart, that it will heal and be able to love again and to acknowledge and appreciate all the love I have surrounding me. I pray for understanding because we all want to be understood but we can’t walk around with a running commentary we just have to have faith that our actions speak to our good nature and know that the people that really matter will understand us and that those that do not, well, it’s not that they don’t matter it that we can’t hold people in the wrong for their interpretation of events. And I’d pray for confidence but really it think this is just me praying for love again. If I love myself for who I am with all my attributes than I will have confidence. A deep peaceful assurance that I am living the best version of me I can. 

My mind right now is not much different than a swirling atmosphere. Like a nebulous just waiting to burst and form stars. It’s really just chaos and in that chaos you can get distracted by all the flying matter and you can also step away, light years away, and see the pattern, see the beauty of stars being born, maybe even a universe, maybe a planet. Maybe that’s how Venus was born.

Yoga of Heartbreak

It said that yoga begins the moment you want to leave the posture that is also true of relationships. If you love someone but there is struggle and even pain it’s just like being in a difficult yoga pose, you have 2 choices: you can get out of there, back to the safety and comfort of child’s pose, or a friends couch or a bottle of wine. Or you can stay and work, you can listen to your body and learn how to adjust your self so that the strain eases some but you also keep going deeper into the asana or deeper into the love between you and your partner.

I’ve been doing yoga for a few years now and there are still many asana I haven’t mastered, in fact full pigeon I think is something I will only experience in my dreams (yes I dream about yoga poses). But I still work towards opening my body because I know that it’s not getting into that picture perfect magazine cover expression of the pose, it’s about all the work that I do on the way there. It’s accepting my practice each day for what it is. And each day brings its own challenges. Just like a relationship. To love someone so fully that you accept exactly where you are each day for what it is, celebrating the moments that where so precious and looking forward to the moments not yet created. So there you are on your mat all warmed up and energized as you begin to move into that asana when you hit the edge, you are questioning whether or not to go further. Should you draw back and do a few more preparatory poses, did you exert all your effort already and can’t push any more or do you push too far and fall out of the practice all together. The metaphor should be self explanatory. This is where your yoga begins, the working it out part, the stick to, the good faith effort because you know deep down that this yoga stuff is good for you just like you know this relationship is good for you. But then sometimes it’s not.

What if a relationship or an asana just isn’t for you? What if you’ve been working for something but it remains unavailable to you. This is also where yoga begins. Yoga is also acceptance. Sometimes there are things our bodies just can’t obtain, so this time yoga isn’t moving deeper it’s being where you are, learning your lesson and moving on. Sometimes in class I tell my students when they come to a difficult asana to ‘wrap it up in love’ and try it again. And that’s what I’ve been doing in my yoga off the mat, when the difficulties arose I would wrap my whole relationship up in love and try again. I wanted to love my relationship into working just like I want to love my thoracic spine into a beautiful back bend.  But it’s not time for back bending and it’s not time for pushing anymore. There will always be love around my former relationship, there will always be quite a lot of love in fact but it’s time to step away and accept that this practice is now the practice of letting go. This yoga of heartbreak is about observing and healing and eventually growing. Maybe one day pigeon will be less elusive and maybe one day my thoracic spine will open enough so that this heart of mine can find some more love. But for now it’s me, my dog, and the mat; Om Y’all.

a yogi looks at 30

While I was away from my blog this past month I celebrated a long awaited rite of passage, I turned 30, finally! I’ve been waiting to be 30 since I was about 16, but that’s not what I want to write about. What I want to write about is my birthday meditation; every year on my birthday I sit down and make a collage of the things I want to manifest in the next year of my life. I’ve done this every birthday since I was 19 with the exception of 2 years. The first I had just been dumped (oh yes, 3 days before my birthday), and actually I made the collage but it was so full of heartbreak and wishing for my partner back that I tore it up. The second was this year, because of some life stuff and because my mother and baby sister and nephew were visiting I didn't have the time or the energy to make one. In fact after my family left I still felt too mired down to really think about what I wanted/needed this year. But when I told a good friend in confidence that I wasn't making one this year he told me to be patient and compassionate with myself, it didn't matter that I missed the actually day and that if I started my yearly practice that I’d probably find little of that peace I’m looking for. And my friend was right, of course.

I’m a very lucky woman; I have an amazing family and though they are all far away I have another great "village" (as in it takes a village...) family here in my tiny town, I have my best friend in the world who is 11 years old and still kicking it- my dog, and a loving partner. But what I’m most lucky for is my yoga and my studio. Currently I’m tearing the drop ceiling out of the studio and getting ready to tackle 2 big projects, the ceiling and the floor! So I’ve been putting a lot of my time and energy in the studio lately, so much so that when I thought about doing my birthday collage I felt really drawn to being in the studio. So I packed up my supplies and my dog and walked up there. It was beautiful outside to I propped the door open, put on a groovy playlist and dove it. I spent the afternoon soaking up a little of the good mojo I’d been putting into my physical sacred space and filling up my inner sacred space. I was able to turn that overly analytical part of my mind off for a few hours and let my deep emotions come up. What I found was that I quit hearing about the “stuff” I need from the outside world and what I already have inside me but maybe got lost while I was too busy in that outside world. And what was inside…

A strong home base of love, columns of strength from my yoga, school and studio, all the colors of the rainbow and my desire to express them, an inside that is pure, strong and listens and an outside that is playful and full of joy and inspiration. For as topsy-turvy as life can be and all the expectation I had of turning 30 that didn’t  pan out, I’m pretty darn happy with this one.

a love letter

I was walking through the woods today taking in the sights and smells of autumn so I guess it was the brilliance of change that fall brings that got me to thinking about my yoga students and how far they have come since I began teaching in earnest this year. I went through each student and as though they were walking and talking with me I said in my head to them, “I challenge your self practice to be…” fill in whatever (I felt) an appropriate lesson for that person to focus on. And then I thought “what would I challenge myself to practice?” and the answer came not so softly as “I CHALLENGE YOU TO DO IT BECAUSE YOU LOVE YOURSELF!” I mean really! Really, how often do I do things for people because I love them and they appreciate it and are grateful that’s not the lesson. The lesson is why don’t I do things to help myself because I love ME? There I was sitting down at the bottom of a pit of depression with all the tools I needed to get better and I just couldn’t do it. I know how to meditate I know how to do yoga and what’s more I know how important they are to maintaining sanity and, to be simple, joy. But I couldn’t muster up the love to do it for myself or for my health and wellbeing. I came to the studio everyday and taught lessons to students whom I love greatly but I also felt like a fraud. What right did I have to lead them in yoga for an hour each day when I couldn’t bare to be on the mat for 15 minutes at home? And who did I think I was imploring them to have compassion for themselves and their practice when I was out right disgusted with my state of being. But I did, I kept up the pretense that I was fine because I love my fellow yogis and I did not want to abandon them on their path. So I guess it was only natural that the key to unlocking my own love was born from love of them. I had to put myself in the role of student and teach myself how to love me. The road back to life from depression is long and I am just beginning but everyday I feel a little better, in fact everyday I feel like I’m falling back in love with life. Everyday that I get on my mat and do yoga my body remembers why I started this in the first place. There are days I don’t want to practice but I remind myself that yoga is how I take care of me, it is how I love me, even if it’s only a few sun salutes in the kitchen its an exercise in compassion. So please, please dear yogis know that now when I talk to you about love and compassion and how I understand what struggle it is you can be sure I’m speaking genuinely because I am living those lessons right now. And it is the love that I have for my students that brought me back to loving myself again and for that I thank you.

Hallelujah

Apparently if you want to get people’s attention just quote Leonard Cohen. I have a facebook account, I use it mainly for yoga promotion but I do keep up with friends and play a lot of Scrabble as well but the main thing is the yoga. So a while back I promised myself that I would post nothing negative in my status updates, only uplifting, yoga related or positive one liners to the virtual world. So yesterday was a hard day, in fact it been a hard few days but it was a struggle I need to go through because I learned some pretty amazing lessons. And yesterday I was wading through a sea of emotions after a serious heart to heart I found myself staring at my facebook page. There was so much inside of me that I wanted to express but I could find a way to say that didn’t seem like self pity or a desperate cry for attention and then Hallelujah came on. And after weeping my way through the entire song I thought about the line “love is not a victory march, it’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah…” and that was it, that was exactly what I felt like. I think love is amazing, I think loving someone as a lover or friend or family is a wonderful way to feel love but that’s not the kind of love I had to express yesterday. The kind of love of I had to express was the kind for love you find while searching blindly at the end of a dark tunnel and looking for the light. It’s the kind of love I found way down at the bottom of myself when all the other pieces felt broken. It’s the kind of love you find when you ask for forgiveness and compassion. When the whole world feels like its falling in on you but you can sit among the rubble love that rubble because it is all the pieces of you. The cold and broken Hallelujah to me it the tattered rope that I use to pull myself up with, it is hope. Like a lotus flower growing from the muck it is like reaching out into all that is broken and touching the divine.