A HOUSE ON A LAKE

Last week, I sat down and made of list of things I wanted/needed to do. It is time to make some updates to the blog, maybe put in a page for Yoga in a Tiny Space and freshen up some images. I finally decided to renew my Yoga Alliance membership and I am looking into teacher insurance with the idea that I might be doing more teaching. Don’t hold your breath on that one. I love teaching, but I’ve gotten very comfortable in my home practice. Teaching changes how I practice and I’m not ready for that kind of change. I am ready to get my name on some sub lists and have plans to bring back my online class sometime near the end of August. I made the list and have even crossed things off of the list because I did the thing. Then we spent the weekend at a lake house with friends and if I’d made the list on actual paper, I would be setting it on fire right now because nothing on the list matters anymore.

All I want to do now is live on a lake and eat tomatoes with mozzarella.

I have written many versions of various entries over the past few weeks. One was devoted to the amount of sleeping I did during the month of June. I miss June. I fell asleep during a massage while sitting in one of those weird face down massage chairs. I fell asleep in the middle of a side stretch during a yoga class. I took at least three long naps during our camping trip in the West. I did so much sleeping that I thought it was post worthy. Then I let that post sit in the unpublished list and after a week or so of not ever hitting 'save & publish’, I hit ‘delete’ instead. According to the Astrology report in my latest Yoga Journal, we entered July with plantes across from one another and the energy bodies of those planets are at odds.

This opposition will fuel a drive to pursue your heart’s desires, while also calling for discipline and restraint. Strive to stay present during this challenging period.

It might be the discipline and restraint part that I am having trouble focusing on and this is a fairly normal feature(?) of my mental state during the summer. I used to blame my malaise on the heat, but it hasn’t even really been all that hot this year. It’s Wednesday and so far this week has been the most focused, task accomplishing week I have had in over a month. I have peeled my body out of bed every morning at 5:15 AM for X-tend Barre or rowing and walking the dog. I have made it onto my yoga mat and I am drinking water. Now if I could just stretch this discipline into some other areas of my life, I might write some stuff that I feel worth publishing. I mean…I’m probably going to publish this one, but only because I went to the trouble of quoting an article.

If astrology is your thing, it’s looking like August is going to be more suited for wrangling scattered thoughts. For now I’m going to just strive for staying present with these scattered thoughts.

MY SPIRITUAL SELF

View from a swing

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I used to have a fairly regular meditation practice. I would even attend a Buddhist meditation service once a week. This was way back when we still lived with Chris’s mom, before I flipped our lives into moving chaos. The meditation practice came to a screeching halt when Chris got sick and it never recovered. Sitting still with my thoughts is very very difficult. There was a long time when I couldn’t even be in savasana. As long as I kept moving in my yoga practice, everything was A-okay. Stopping for a final relaxation moment was torture. I got over that. Kind of. I will admit that more often than not, I end up dozing off in savasana. If I was one of my students, we would be having a discussion about sleep management and bedtimes. I’d have to explain to myself that I have a very reasonable bedtime. I just don’t always stay asleep.

There have been attempts to regain my meditation practice, but it just never sticks. I’ve made excuses and declared that mindfully chopping vegetables for dinner is my meditation act of the day. So I decided that if I was going to resolve to do anything in 2020, it would be to re-establish my meditation practice. Chris will be gone seven years in February. It’s time I learned to sit still with those thoughts and other thoughts not necessarily related to Chris. So I set my alarm clock for 5 AM (my usual wake up time is 5:50) and placed the new journal my Mom bought me for Christmas on the nightstand. Monday morning, when that alarm went off, I rolled over and hit the snooze button on the alarm. Fifteen minutes later, when the alarm sounded again, I moved to hit the snooze button again, but just turned the alarm off instead. I laid there for a minute deciding what to do next. Going back to sleep was a bad idea because it would just make getting up on time more difficult. So I propped up my pillows and sat up in my bed and set my meditation timer for twenty minutes.

Here’s what went down in those twenty minutes:

Should I rearrange my bedroom? What if I moved my bed over to that wall? Would it even fit there? If I moved the bed there would I still be able to open my closet door? If I move the bed to that wall, then I would have to move the giant elephant brass band poster to that wall over there. How many holes would I have to patch in the wall? Can I move this furniture on my own? I should probably measure the bed and space before I try to move it. Is this room square or rectangular? It looks rectangular, but that could be an optical illusion from the way I’m sitting. I really need a tape measure. If I move my bed, I have to come up with a new night stand option. Would moving the furniture around in this way give me more floor space or would it pretty much just be the same? I’d like to get new curtains. If I get new curtains, I might as well repaint the room. I like the color of this room, but I could go with a darker shade of blue. Oh wait…I’m supposed to be focusing on my breath right now. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. I’m going to peek at the timer. Okay, one minute left.

Then I wrote about all of this in my journal. I have my Mamaw’s bible and in the notes section she wrote down the dates for when she moved the living room rug and the refrigerator. So writing about moving furniture runs in the family. Also, I had zero expectations about this. I knew that I would not just be able to sit down into meditation and find peace and enlightenment after so many years away from this practice. Creating a habit like this happens in steps. The first step is getting my body used to getting up at this time in the morning. It is making the conscious effort to sit and be present in the early morning hours. The next morning, I got up when the alarm went off. I wrapped myself in my robe and created a comfortable space to sit. Then I chose one of the guided meditations in my meditation timer. It was the kind of guided meditation that made my cynical brain roll it’s eyes, but I listened to it any way. Just when I thought I had had enough, the speaker said “Energy flows into the thing you are focusing on.”

Alright. Those are words I could use.

Where do I want to be sending my energy? More importantly, where am I wasting my energy?

Those are some really good questions to ponder as I get this meditation practice re-established.

Now excuse me. I need to go find the tape measure.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

Orange

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Yesterday, as I was driving home from work, I found myself behind a Ford Fusion with a personalized tag that read ‘FOCUS’. And I had questions. First of all, did the driver think they had purchased a Ford Focus? Or maybe they had previously owned a Ford Focus and just moved the tag over to this one? Maybe the driver was an optometrist? Though, I feel like maybe an optometrist would drive something more expensive than a Fusion? Except, now that I really think about it, if they are an optometrist then they’re probably still paying back student loans. Optometry school is EXPENSIVE! Then I thought that maybe the driver was just saying “FOCUS”. Focus on the road ahead of you. Focus on the task you are engaged in. Pay attention. My brain immediately goes for the most complicated answer when it really may be just a simple reminder to pay attention.

I haven’t been doing a great job keeping up with a gratitude practice lately. I skipped an entry for last week entirely. I had written something. Actually I had written, deleted, re-written, deleted, re-written and decided to hit ‘delete’ instead of ‘publish’. The weather combined with the lack of sunlight was making me sound like a total crank pot. I did not sound grateful, but I was also working hard at writing something profound or meaningful. I was working too hard and I was reaching for something more complicated. I was reaching for something to be thankful for.

I should never have to reach.

When ever I find myself reaching for gratitude, I step back and take a breath. I take a moment to say this simple prayer.

I am thankful for the roof over my head. I am thankful for the nourishing food that is sustaining this body. I am thankful for the beautiful people I have in my life who support and love me.

I take a moment to focus.

ATTENTION

Virabhadrasana II

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I have been reading Michelle Obama’s book for three months. I finally finished it this week, but it took me forever. It was not a difficult read or a boring read. I just lacked the attention span for reading anything more than a paragraph. I should say ‘lack’. It took me a whole day to read an article on Split-Sex animals in the science section of the New York Times. Sure, there were times I was actually doing my job, but one article should only take a few minutes to get through. I am distracted easily and unable to focus on just one thing. If I’m staring at the blinking cursor for more than a minute while trying to write anything, I’m off scrolling through the list of “people I might know” on Facebook and saying to myself “How do I know that person?” It is a very inefficient use of my time. I even double booked myself for events on Saturday because I can’t pay attention to dates.

I told Dr. Mary all of this last night and she did that thing that therapists do and asked me “why do you think you think that is?” Except when I was unable to answer that question because I was suddenly distracted by the fact that her orchid that sits on the windowsill is still without blooms, she answered it for me. She said “It seems to me like you’ve entered this year differently than most. You usually have an agenda for the year, like your picture a day or a task of some sorts. But you didn’t make a plan for this year.” So…this is what I look like without a plan or an agenda. My whole life has been about plans and agendas. As a child, I knew what I was doing down to the minute of every day. Piano/music lessons on Mondays. 4-H on Tuesdays. Wednesday was church and youth choir. Dance on Thursdays. Fridays were free days until I started marching band. Most Saturdays were planned out as well with contests and 4-H events. My first year of college, I tried to convince my advisor to let me take sixteen hours of classes. I had a plan. He refused to let me take a class at lunch time. He said “You’ll need to eat lunch.” He had a different plan.

Even after college and graduate school, I mapped out my days on a notepad that would eventually get transferred to a lab notebook. I always had a plan. I have always had some sort of agenda. And it feels really odd to be without either of those things. I read something in Yoga Journal once that said “You should practice your least favorite yoga poses regularly.” I am always encouraging students to take their practice off of their mat and apply it to their daily lives. Except I’m thinking about the physical aspects of the practice. How we stand. How we sit. How we tend to cross our arms in front. I forget to consider the mental side of the practice. Maybe being without a plan is the mental yoga pose that is my least favorite pose and since I have never really practiced it at all, it is the hardest pose and I hate it. I don’t really hate it. I am just not comfortable in this pose of no-plan-asana. Two months into it kind of feels like holding forearm plank for three minutes.

This is what I have noticed. When I do my usual Saturday routine of breakfast and writing in the Fortune Cookie journal, I end up writing so much that I fill up the page and the margins. Most of the time I haven’t even gotten to the point of the story before I have run out of room. These are mornings that I don’t get my phone out of my bag or have a computer in front my face. I am without my usual convenient distractions and I end up spinning a yarn with such focus that my mug of coffee goes cold. What if plans and agendas are also convenient distractions that I am just so accustomed to that I don’t see them as distractions? Maybe I am learning something about convenient distractions. Maybe I am learning to settle into something other than the couch. Holding forearm plank for thirty seconds used to be torture. The same was true for holding it for an added thirty seconds. Building up to two minutes was work, but my body got used to it. That’s what I need to do. I need to get used to being without an agenda or a plan.

Then maybe no-plan-asana will get to be a bit more comfortable.

FOCUS

Tilt shift

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I know it is still early to be thinking about the new year, but next week is Thanksgiving and that means November is practically over. I'll be traveling to San Francisco the first week of December for a conference. Then I'll stay a few extra days to hang out with my friend Heather. I think there's a cabin in the woods thing that's going to happen. I'm sure there's going to be lots of laughing happening. Laughing happening. I like that. Any hoo, I know December will roll through in a blink and I'll be staring 2017 right in the eye. I want to be able to do that staring with a fierce intensity while puffing out my chest and saying 'bring it!'.  Many of us may feel the same way after the shitty shit storm of 2016. 

There are some specific things I would like to focus on in the next year. Not really resolutions, just some self improvement and life improvement things. The usual. I've been wasting a whole lot of time scrolling through facebook lately. I find that any time I'm looking at a blank page or the start of the next sentence, I end up opening facebook instead of just looking at a blank page or figuring out that next sentence. I use it to fill the moments in between moments, maybe because I'm bored, maybe just to use it as a distraction. I don't know, because I'm not really reading anything there as much as I'm just scrolling through looking at ridiculous pictures and shaking my head at all the fake news headlines that I see people posting. I have resisted the urge to say "you people will believe anything." more times than I can count. Yet, there I am just scrolling on through it and it is dumb. I have exceeded the appropriate amount of time one should be wasting in that space. 

So, for the next year, I'd like to focus less with online wastefulness and more time behind my camera lens, more time writing and more time spreading a more positive message. I have been talked into doing a yoga workshop on the use of yoga straps. I'm planning this for February or at least having a class plan by February. This is going to require me to dig out my giant teacher binder and doing some refresher research. I don't even know if I remember how to teach a regular class let alone devote two or three hours to teaching a whole workshop, but we're going to find out. I am not backing out or saying no. I am doing this. In the first few months of the next year, I will focus more on yoga and the art of teaching yoga. Then I want to follow this up with a focus on more yoga for my personal life with an emphasis on being healthy (more greens, less cheese). 

Michael's been nudging me to find a way to sell some of my prints, but the truth is I feel like I'm totally faking this photography hobby of mine. I still rely heavily on my iPhone, though I know there's nothing wrong with that, but I have a really nice camera with two really nice lenses. I want to focus on getting to know that camera better. I'm thinking of doing a beginners photography class and giving myself a weekly assignment that I share here. I would also like to get a few photo editing apps on my iPad so I can edit photos while I am traveling. Travel is going to be another big focus for next year, not just for me but for Michael as well. We are itching to put miles on the truck and to see the country. And I want to photograph all of it. Maybe then I can think about selling prints, like that could be a focus for 2018.

You guys, I am so close to finishing a story. I don't know what the fate of this story is going to be, but it's something I am finishing. I really really really want to focus on that. I want to focus on finishing something I've started. In fact just writing that sentenced made me feel like anything is possible in 2017, in a good way. What does all this focus mean for the blog? I am hoping it means writing more thoughtful entries. This is the space where I can spread a more positive message and I'm going to work hard at doing that. Also, how else are you guys going to keep up with all our travels. I just want to build a nicer space here. I want to build a nicer space inside my own head and inside my own heart. 

I want to build a nicer space.