THANKFUL FRIDAY

Eka pada rajakapotasana Franklin does yoga

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Wednesday morning, I woke up with a sore throat and congestion and that hot/cold clammy feeling you get when you are sick. I crawled back under the covers and said “no thank you.” I woke up later in the morning and moved from my bed to the couch where I spent the rest of the day watching Hanna on Amazon and the latest episode of Call the Midwives (you guys, when that woman had the triplets, ugly crying) and Riverdale. Riverdale is a guilty pleasure and feels like reading all those books written by V.C. Andrews. I can’t help but get the feeling that Betty really doesn’t have a sister Polly who lives in a group home after a psychotic breakdown. I suspect that Betty is Polly and she’s just been brainwashed into forgetting the horrible thing that happened to her to cause her breakdown. The doctors wiped out ‘Polly’ and replaced her with Betty. Riverdale also feels very much like a dark version of Dawson’s Creek. Jughead is Pacey. Archie is Dawson. Veronica is Jen. Betty is Joey.

Michael came home later that evening with a sickly Cabbage in tow. It was decided that she would stay the night with us and Michael would stay home with her on Thursday. The Cabbage spent the rest of the evening throwing up, laying on the bathroom floor and then laying in her bed, repeating the throwing up part a few more times before settling into a slumber. I knew that no matter how bad I felt when I woke up on Thursday, that I was going to work because I wanted nothing to do with a stomach bug added to a sinus infection. There’s been lots of disinfecting going on around the house in the last two days. When I woke up Thursday, I felt a bit better, but every thing took me twice as long to do because living life is exhausting. I got to work and opened an email from a coworker saying that he’d be out today because their 8 year old was up all night throwing up. Then my boss said the same was true for his wife. Looks like we are all on the Oregon Trail together.

What’s disappointing was how this week started out promising. It started with good intensions. The newish morning yoga routine was happening. We voted. I exercised. We tried a new recipe with zucchini and asparagus and we did not like it, but ate it any way. I repurposed those leftovers into a Mexican inspired pasta dish with mini tortellinis and soyrizo. We loved this. Except by Wednesday, it looked as though we had just spent Monday and Tuesday paving our path to Hell. And today I am thinking about how often I enter into things with a some preconceived notion of how I expect life to be or how very disappointed I am with myself for not sticking to those good intentions.

abhāva-pratyaya-ālambanā tamo-vr̥ttir-nidra: Dreamless sleep is the void of all thought patterns. - 1/10 Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

In the discussion for this Sutra, it talks about how our actions are directed by our intentions and are carved out from a life of reactions. It is our fight or flight response that so often dictates our reactions and as a result, our intentions are not made by our own choices. “Yoga is a means of taking ownership of those intentions by actually making choices.” What choice am I making for myself here, when I set the intention to practice yoga in the mornings? I have noticed that when I do my early morning practice, my body is not so stiff and achy. I have more pep in my morning steps and there’s a little less chatter inside my brain. By setting the intention to do my yoga practice at all, I am making a choice to care for this body. The true intention I should be making is to care for this body. More powerful than saying that I will do something is the action of doing it. This week I made choices to care for this body. Some times that choice looks like getting on my mat and flowing through poses, while other times it looked like laying on the couch with hot tea, a blanket and both of the animals tucked in around me while I watch crappy TV.

Both choices are yoga.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

Baby leaves

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Early on in our relationship, Michael and I were walking through our neighborhood. I think we had walked up to our local library or maybe up to get a sandwich from Planet Sub. I don’t remember, but on our way back to the house, I stopped to take a picture of the sidewalk. Michael stood there, watching me as I crouched down real close to this one particular square of sidewalk and then he said “I don’t get it. What are you taking a picture of?” I looked up at him and then pointed at a spot in the concrete and said “there’s a heart!” There was a place where the concrete had been chipped or gouged out and it was shaped like a heart. To be fair, it was a small heart and it wasn’t painted a color to make it stand out. You had to be really paying attention to see it, but it was there. The most important and valuable thing that I have gained from taking pictures is how it has changed the way I look at my surroundings. Or maybe I should use the past tense ‘looked’. Sometimes things become so routine in your daily life that you don’t even notice you’re doing those things any more. I’ve grown sloppy in the way I look around me and maybe do not pay as close attention as I once did.

śabda-jñāna-anupātī vastu-śūnyo vikalpaḥ: imagination is a word, a sound, or expression where there is no such object or reality to it. - 1/9 Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

The discussion for this sutra said that we should treat our imaginations like a garden, constantly tending to it. It went on to say “Express yourself so feverishly that you can observe what is growing in your garden.” There is something about the discussion of this sutra that made flash bulbs go off in my head. “Express yourself so feverishly…” It is not enough to just nurture your craft, photography, writing, painting or whatever it might be, but you must also see your craft, enjoy the beauty of it or look for places of improvement. Occasionally we pick the flowers from our gardens and display them in a lovely vase on the kitchen table. Occasionally we eat the vegetables we have been cultivating and caring for. I’ve let my imagination garden get weedy and over grown. I have straight up neglected it. I don’t even know what is growing in that garden any more. It’s time to clean it up and take stock of what’s growing and what needs to be replanted.

Sometimes you come across a string of words that you needed to hear or read right at the exact moment you needed to hear or read them. I am grateful for those words.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

Ardha Chandrasana

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When yoga is accomplished, you will have insight of our true nature.

I am re-reading The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali and taking notes on the things that stand out in the notebook my mother gave me for my birthday. It is a lovely notebook, with fake leather cover and a spiral binding. The cover has three decorative hand drawn cactuses at the top and under them it reads “you’re looking sharp today.” I am not sure if this is meant to inspire me to write or dress better, but the lines are a perfect spacing. Because of this, I have been hesitant to put words on the paper. I have a hard time with these kinds of things. I could stare at a new box of crayons for years before pulling one free from the box to use. The Cabbage had a tupperware box full of crayons and they were all broken or missing the paper wrapper around the outside. I would grimace as I held one of those grimy waxy broken crayons between my fingers to color something, but I would rather put up with the discomfort of the broken crayon than wreck a brand new crayon. So this notebook has been sitting on my desk since January.

The version of the sutras that I am reading is an app I downloaded to my iPad. The format makes it more intuitive for study in the way it breaks down the sanskrit and the definition of the sanskrit, but then there is a separate section of discussion. I thought I could just use my Apple pencil to highlight things that jumped out at me, but the Apple pencil does not work in this app. I was two days into my readings before I gave in and grabbed that new notebook. Research has found that handwriting notes versus typing them allows for more efficient learning and retention. I have come across certain phrases in the discussions of the sutras that I want my brain to hold onto for longer than a minute. It turns out that I don’t want to read the Yoga Sutras so much as I want to study them. I want to dig in deep and take my time with them. I read them way back when I did my teacher training because it was required reading, but I didn’t really study the book the way I did my science and anatomy books. I didn’t treat my yoga teacher training as schooling. I treated it as a training and taking it in with that mentality taught me the foundation of the poses and the benefits and disadvantages of each pose. I ignored the spiritual benefits to the practice. This is fine because I don’t want to teach the spiritual side of yoga. As I get deeper and deeper into my own personal practice though, I find that I am becoming curious about that side of things.

Stay curious.

Being a curious child is what lead me to my scientific career. I take my curiosity for granted, not really noticing it as being curious as much as I am just doing my job. I am solving puzzles every day and seeing what happens if I do this or that. It has become so routine that I forget that I am actually curious to know what the answers are going to be at the end of it all. I do really want to know the answers! Staying curious keeps me moving forward and digging deeper to find answers to gather all of knowledge my brain will allow. I forget to acknowledge my curiosity and the impact it has on my daily life or how my curiosity is part of what makes me who I am. Usually I am encouraging my students to take their practice off their mats and out into their everyday life. Today, I am reminded that sometimes I need to take my daily life into my yoga practice.

Curiosity may have killed the cat, but satisfaction (or learning the answer) brought him back. Curiosity might just be part of my true nature.