Weed and Feed

I have been spending my "down" time in the yard lately. With the nicer weather, I can't help but to be drawn outside the walls of my house. Down time for me is when Willis and Elsie are napping and there are house chores I don't want to do, or work I am avoiding. When you are a stay at home mom, wife, contract worker and part time (even if very) yoga teacher, I don't think down time really exists, but I have learned to create it nonetheless. Back to the yard...when we first moved in to this house, it came with a clean slate in the front yard. A large bed around the perimeter with weed barrier and bark and absolutely nothing planted in it. I remember going to town that summer, I planted something like 40 plants between the front and back yards. I would go out there after Ruby went to bed and work until it was too dark. I remember my body being physically exhausted when I would come in at night, hands and feet dirty and loving that feeling. It was much more satisfying than sitting in front of the television. Those garden beds 4 summers later are pretty low maintenance, except for the crazy weed grass that makes its way up through the weed barrier.
As I pulled up the weed grass, slowly making my way around the yard yesterday I was struck by the symbolism in pulling weeds. It's really like life. You can put up any kind of protective barrier you like in life, but inevitably, weeds find their way in. Weeds are really just these negative patterns we get in to, they happen in all aspects of our life, relationships, parenting, yoga, driving, our work lives, etc...and we have to diligently wage battle against them to keep ourselves from letting them take over.
This week I was reminded of one of my weeds with yoga teaching. I taught class on Monday. I have several regulars that are committed to their yoga practice, come to class faithfully and are not what I would call beginners. And then, I had an 81 year old woman, the mother of a regular, that had never done yoga before, and had difficulty getting up and down on her mat. I began to question what I was doing teaching, feeling extremely ill equipped to be teaching between the two extremes in one class. My ego was getting the best of me. I slowed class way down and got through it and when it was over, self doubt continued to weed its way into my mind. Wondering if I should just give up teaching for awhile, if I should really go through teacher training again, or what? This isn't an unfamiliar pattern, I periodically roll through these seasons of doubting myself as a teacher and wondering who I think I am to be calling myself a yoga teacher...I know it is all just my ego.
And then Thursday rolled around and we had a teacher meeting. By this point I was kind of over my Monday shake up, but as I sit with the other 3 teachers and listened to everyone's various struggles and challenges in life it dawned on me. What happens with this whole ego thing is that I compare myself to someone else. I take classes from the other teachers and rather than celebrating the unique gifts they bring to my practice, I begin to self doubt, thinking I don't have those gift and therefore I must not be a good teacher. Silly, I know.
So, as I drove home from the meeting Thursday night, I sat with this and realized, I know who I am as a teacher and the self doubt only comes in when I start trying to teach like someone else does, or try to change who I am. I can't really. I am who I am. What I love about yoga is that it brings me into my body, I love the movement, I love the clarity it brings in my mind. I really am not so concerned about alignment, I just want to create an environment where people feel like they can dance their way through my class and feel a little more liberated, a little more free to be who they are when they walk back out the door.
So, I am committing to myself, as I continue this yard work to apply this same principal to myself...weed out the bad stuff with consistency, the negative habits, all that takes me away from feeling like my Self and feed the Self, nourish myself in all the ways I know how....weed and feed. It's my new mantra.

Compassion and Expectations

I started out on edge today, not sure why, but the morning, getting out of the house with 3 kids, going two different places, was not smooth. My 5 year old said she didn't feel good, didn't want to go to school. I sent her anyways. She was resistant through each step of the process getting ready, I had to tell her to get dressed 14 times (okay maybe 3 really) before she actually did it. My almost 3 year old changed his clothes 12 times (or maybe 1) and I felt like I was going crazy as the volume of my voice escalated with each minute. We finally made it out to the car and by that time everyone was happy.
I was headed off to yoga class, as a student, not a teacher, which is such a treat these days. I paused for a few minutes when I dropped the little two off at grandma and grandpas, taking a breather, gathering myself into a more centered space before heading to the studio.
The teacher today gave a talk on a yoga sutra (I.33) and our meditation was to breathe in compassion and breathe out expectations. Today when I arrived and settled down on my mat, I could feel in my spirit I have been off. I have been feeling on edge all week really and haven't taken the time or wasn't ready to delve into what this is about. I had an aha in the midst of inhaling compassion.
I have been beating myself up all week over an interaction I had this weekend with my brother in law. I was not my best self in it. I think sometimes when we seek to point out someone else's "faults" or what we perceive as shortcomings...its really just a reflection of ourselves. It's really just putting a mirror up and reflecting something back to ourselves that we might be struggling with or perhaps they embody a quality we wish we had and haven't done a good job of cultivating in ourselves. It dawned on me as I reclined in savasana at the end of class, my yoga today is about forgiving myself....showing myself a little bit of compassion when i don't live up to my own expectations and letting this one go.

Sutra I.33
In daily life we see people around who are happier than we are, people who are less happy. Some may be doing praiseworthy things and others causing problems. Whatever may be our usual attitude toward such people and their actions, if we can be pleased with others who are happier than ourselves, compassionate toward those who are unhappy, joyful with those doing praiseworthy things, and remain undisturbed by the errors of others, our mind will be very tranquil.

Easier said then done, eh?

my slice of the pie

i might be making a habit out of this...i hope so.
I love being a stay at home mom. I love having 3 kids, am enjoying the baby stage and am also thankful for the work outside the home I get to do - a little bit of yoga and a little bit of "real work". (Yoga doesn't feel like work, because I would probably be doing it whether or not I got paid to.) Lately, I have had this sense though that something is missing in all this. I find myself checking email way too often throughout the day, cybersnooping (just wanted to use this fun new term I learned last week), texting people...in essense, I think I just want to feel connected to something. To feel like I am something other than a MOM. During the day when I am busy, kids are awake, trying to get house work done, etc...I am not so aware of it, but when I sit in the quiet of the day, chores done, kids asleep, I am often at a loss as to what to do with myself. Maybe it is just this time in life?
My husband and I regularly watch the show Parenthood. It always seems to strike a cord with us in terms of parenting, family dynamics, or as a couple. In last week's episode, Adam's wife (I don't remember her name), a mother of 2 children, one autistic, and one in high school, considered leaving her full time job as a mom and going back to a job similar to what she did before kids. I could so relate, watching her get so excited about the possibility and then as the reality of what that would mean for their family set in, she said "no way, what was I thinking." I feel like that sometimes. The effort to get my needs met, at times, seems like more effort than its worth. I know in the end, it probably is not, BUT its hard to remember when you spend your days tending to someone else's needs. Some weeks I am better than others at carving out a little slice of the pie for myself. And sometimes, you just have to take what you can get...you can't always get what you want, but you get what you need....ah yeah.

Dharma and Grace

get it? it's a play on dharma and greg..maybe not that funny and I didn't watch the show..anyways...all two of you readers don't faint that I am writing again so soon.

Being the yogi that I am, I have heard this word dharma thrown around a lot. Over the years I have been studying yoga, I have never really understood what dharma means, at least not in a way that I could explain it to anyone else. I believe it is a Buddhist term or teaching and the other day in an on-line yoga magazine there was an article about dharma. I thought to myself, here we go again, I wish I could "get" this but as I read it to my surprise I got it. Your dharma is your life path.
For me, yoga draws me closer toward my dharma, it helps me be centered, in tune with myself and more aware of what is happening right now. It helps me begin to quiet my mind or at least begin to create enough separation that I can listen to what is circling through my mind as opposed to just being the thoughts, or letting them run wild. Some might argue that our life path is whatever path we are on, but you know when you are on your life path and when you are not. It's that little voice inside your head that reminds you, after you said something not nice about someone or did something deceptive, etc...that you should have made a different choice. So, in my great epiphany of what dharma is I had this aha moment of knowing what at least a piece of my dharma is...listening to people's stories. It may sound simple enough, but I think sometimes its hard, to sit with someone in a time when they are struggling and just listen, without judgement, without expectations, without needing to fix it...just listening. I find I am often times a magnet for this (which sort of drives my husband crazy). But, I don't mind (the being the magnet part that is). I feel like I embody the most grace when I can carve out the space in my life to give someone else just what they need and for me, I feel like it's something beyond me. I get to feel connected to something greater than myself, and I think that is really what dharma is all about...staying on our life path because it helps us to be our best self.
Which brings me back around to my last post about facebook, I sort of think there is a correlation here...I think people want to feel connected to something bigger than themselves, isn't that why we are here? And so, facebook, in our busy lives, moving so quickly in so many different directions at the same time, gives us the opportunity to feel connected to someone or something else, even if its in a quick, sometimes superficial, kind of way.

Journal Through Time

For much of my adult life, I've had the idea that I want to write a book. It's a thought and sometimes becomes action, I type paragraphs into this document titled "the book" on my computer, little snip-its of stories, ideas, musings. I began journaling today with the thought of what is missing from my life? I realized as I wrote, that it is this creative expression, the way we express our divine Self. We come from a creator, how ever you define that, and we must continue to express that creator through ourselves, to recreate to stay connected to this source of great energy. We do it in little and small ways. I've had this "thing" for lack of a better word, brewing in me, waiting to be unleashed, and I realized as I journaled that what stops me from taking on this journey of a the book, is fear. Fear it won't be well received, fear no one will want to publish it, fear I'll be laughed at for thinking that I was capable of writing a book. You know the tape recording that play in our minds when we choose to live out of fear not love? Everything could go wrong, or everything could go right. I have stacks and stacks of journals that I have kept over the years. I am fascinated by what I read when I sift through them, poetry, words of wisdom, the tales of painful struggles, broken heartedness, immense joy and discovery of my Self. And so, I realize, I need to commit to myself to write, to find time, regularly (and I'm not entirely sure what that means yet) to work on this, to birth this thing inside of me. It's been calling me to for years. I have to trust that the process of writing it is what I need, not the fame or fortune I might dream will come out of it. I have visions of an Oprah appearance, a national book tour. You never know, BUT, I realize, wholeheartedly, I have to do it for what I will uncover, discover and recover of myself. It's all about the journey...

I'll follow you into the dark

We all know that I have this deep need, longing to feel connected to people, to get down to the depths of the soul, what makes a person tick, to understand what they are afraid of, what motivates them, what they believe in, what they hold true, what makes them cry, what makes them laugh, what brings joy and what breaks their heart. It's not so much to ask is it? It seems like isn't that exactly what we are here for? And what stops us from allowing ourselves to be just that raw with one another. I have this theory about why with some people that openness comes with so much ease. I think we all come from the same source, some massive Divine energy, that I can't begin to define. I think some of us come into being and when we meet someone that was somewhere close to us back at the source, shared the same space of energy perhaps, there is a knowing, a gentle lightness of being in the presence of one of these souls that knows, they get you in a way that others might not. They might even speak truths that you have thought but have not yet been able to put in to words.
One of those people from my past contacted me the other day. I am sorry to say that our last interaction some 12 or 13 or 15 years ago, who is counting, really, was a negative one. We ended on a sour note. I didn't realize I still held some negative energy in my heart until I got the email. The odd part about it was that in feeling what I did, I realized that the reason we hurt others is out of an effort to protect ourselves and all that does in turn is create this self fulfilling prophecy, preventing us from healing from the very thing we fear. Isn't that odd? And in reading the email, I realized they are still wrestling with this same fear from however many years ago and it gave me permission to let go, knowing it never had anything to do with me.

There is Enough for Everyone

I'm coming up on my 35th birthday here any day now. I am excited about turning 35, the 30s have really been good years for me thus far. I'm feeling as good as ever, strong, sexy, sensitive, simpler, sillier, sassier, surer (not sure if surer is a word or not, but I'm going with it, it starts with an s...and what that has to do with anything, I'm not sure, or surer.)
Anyways, I had one of those great moments today driving to work...which by the way, I don't have to do everyday. I have had to go to "work" the last 2 days, from 8:30 to 4, which has felt good for me, hasn't been a drag or anything, it's just made me really grateful that I don't have to do this everyday, or 5 days a week, or even 1 day every week. I realize how much free time I have, how much slower my life has become since having Willis and quitting my job at the lung association. It's a slow pace we travel at, our life is full, there is nothing dull about it, we just have the freedom to take our time when we need to (which is good, when you are the mother of a dawdler or gawker). I've just been struck by the contrast of what else it could be like and reminded to be presently aware of how good it really is right now, even if we don't have as much money as we would if I was doing this every single day. My time is worth more than money, I know that is true for me, without a doubt. But, back to my drive...I had just dropped Willis off at my dad's and was cruising down the road, when that loud voice of the Divine spoke to me...THERE IS ENOUGH FOR EVERYONE, EVEN YOU! I laughed out loud, I've spent the better part of my 35 years looking at life with the lens of not having enough, not being good enough, not feeling loved enough, understood enough...basically just feeling like I didn't have enough. Today, I was finally enlightened...I get it. You can't always get what you want...but you get what you need....ah...feels good.