Good morning –.

 

The other day I woke up spinning furiously.  When will I write?  What if I don’t get the laundry done before my morning class?  When will I get to the store?  Will I get through my list despite having two long meetings this afternoon?  Sometimes I have days like this when I can’t quite catch up before I’ve even begun - days when I always feel a step or two behind.  I’m sure you’ve been here before, too.  (Right??)  When our pile of work seems insurmountable and time seems too short, what do we do?

 

This is going to sound crazy.  I know you’re expecting me to provide some type of answer from the yoga mat, but I found my answer in grocery bags.  That’s right.  I found my answer in the enormous pile of full grocery bags stacked on my kitchen floor desperately needing to be unpacked.  I found my answer in the mountain of food needing to be put away immediately so the fruits of my labors don’t spoil or get eaten by my exuberant and always hungry dog.

 

You see, by the time that pile of grocery bags arrives on my kitchen floor, I’m exhausted and feeling frayed from an hour or so of hard labor in the supermarket.  Even before I left for the store, I’d planned our meals for the week and made my list (maybe even checking it twice, like Santa!).  I’d braved the crazy drivers in the parking lot.  Probably, for the fourth trip in a row, I’d forgotten my old grocery bags to recycle, so now I know I’m going to spend another week staring at that heap of plastic valiantly resisting the urge to just pitch them because of the vivid image of the bags sitting in a landfill for the next 800 years.  Maybe the store had sold out of a key ingredient.  Maybe I had to go through a roller coaster of emotion -- the joy of finding myself in a check-out line with a bagger quickly followed by the pain of seeing my cartons of chicken broth hurled onto my pears.  I could go on and on (in fact, I think I already have), but you get my point – I’m already tired and there is a huge pile of food on my floor where it cannot simply stay.

 

What now?

 

First, as any self-respecting yogi would, I inhale deeply.  Second, I exhale … or sigh, you choose.  Then, I recite my post-grocery-store-mantra:  “Just start.  One bag at a time. One item at a time.  Just start.”  And I do.  It’s not easy.  I can feel my will-power flexing and straining like my upper arms in low-push up.  I pick up the first bag, place it on the counter and remove the food.  If I’m really “on my game,” I may look at the food (the fruit of my labor) and be happy I have it.  If I’m not, I don’t.  I just put it where it goes.  If I’m having a good day, I may celebrate the fact that my cabinets are so organized.  If I’m not, I just shove the mustard in and move on.  Either way, on my game or off, the work is being done.  Either way, good day or bad, I can see a little progress.  And even the littlest progress is something to celebrate on any day!

 

Item by item, bag by bag, I go.  There’s a rhythm to it, a peaceful sort of feeling.  I’m present (so the ice cream doesn’t get stashed in the cupboard and the toothpaste doesn’t get frozen), but my body knows basically what to do and my mind is quiet.  I settle into my task.  After all, it has to be done and I’m the one to do it.  I breathe and I do.  I bend down to get the next bag.  I stretch as I reach up to the top shelf to put the peanut butter away.  I bend down again --- and realize I’m done.  My work is complete.  I’m surprised at how good it feels and I sit down to take a well deserved rest.

 

While I’m sitting, resting, it slowly dawns on me that (albeit in a strange way) I’ve just practiced yoga.  I couldn’t have been farther off my mat, but that’s exactly what I was doing.  If I can practice yoga while unloading groceries, it surely follows that we can practice yoga anywhere and anytime.  With that, I smile and rest a little more deeply.

 

Namaste,

Amy

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Note:  This “Yoga Thoughts” was originally published in November, 2006.  It felt perfectly descriptive of my week this week so I thought I’d share it again.

 

Those of you who have been reading my essays for a while know that I often find lessons in the challenges of yoga.  Perhaps this is because, as a long-legged, not-naturally-so-limber, tall gal,  it took a really long time for my body to open to yoga’s postures.  Perhaps this is because every twist and turn and bump in my long journey toward figuring out this crazy, complicated practice has been filled with so many riches.  Perhaps this is because one of my heartfelt beliefs when teaching yoga is “Heck, if I can figure this out, then you can absolutely figure this out too!”  In a nutshell, I’ve faced many challenges on my yoga mat.  And, I can honestly say that I’ve learned something (eventually) from all of them.

 

But on Sunday afternoon I had the practice of all practices.  I mean, I was a human rubber-band!  My body felt strong and supple.  I sailed through ten Sun Salutations like they were nothing.  My wonderful feelings of strength and flexibility were actually overshadowed by the richness of my breath.  It was deep, smooth and sustaining.  It was synchronized perfectly with the movements of my body.  And it continued like that through the entire 90-minute Ashtanga primary series.  Really!  I can only remember one posture where my breath faltered.  That one lost breath out of hundreds was so noticeable that I pulled back a little physically (even though I felt great) to recalibrate the asana with my breathing and then carried on.

 

So, what did I take away from my really good practice?  Are there lessons to be learned from a yoga practice without challenges?

 

In short, yes.  But I received these gifts differently than I usually do.  As I began to move, I could feel that my energy was a little jagged.  Through the Sun Salutations my limbs alternated between feeling quivery and feeling solid.  But somewhere along the way, as I breathed and moved, things smoothed out.  I fully experienced each stretch as I breathed.  I felt like I could feel every fiber of every muscle.  By the time I sank into savasana, I was deeply settled in my body.  After practicing I felt great.  And when I told my husband how incredible it had been, he said, ”I can tell by looking at you.”  The physical gifts of that practice were actually visible.

 

It wasn’t only my body that benefitted that afternoon.  I went out to my mat fatigued from a long, interrupted night.  I was grouchy.  I hadn’t planned to practice that day, and my sudden desire to do so actually surprised me.  As I stood still in an opening meditation, my mind felt limp.  In order to find some kind of focus, I offered my practice as a moving prayer.  And then I began to move.  Maybe it was due to my semi-sleep-deprived state.  Maybe it was due to my intention to find some communion with God.  Whatever the reason, that day my mind stayed with my body and my breath.  I found mental rest in all the motion and effort of the practice.  I found peace and quiet as I moved and breathed.  I returned to my family a little easier to be with and a lot more eager to be with them.  The mental and emotional gifts of that practice reached beyond me to touch those I love.

 

I didn’t do anything particularly earth-shattering on my mat that day.  Rather, I flowed through a series of postures that I’ve moved through hundreds of times over the years.  But that afternoon things aligned for me on my mat in a way they haven’t in months.  My body, my mind and my breath all showed up ready, willing and able.  None of them needed extra attention.  None of them were reluctant.  None of them needed reining in.  As these three aspects of myself synchronized and flowed, the pathway cleared for me to receive a tremendous dose of yoga’s greatest gift.  I slipped a little closer to my spirit through my practice.  I glimpsed again the peace that is always deep within me.  I felt love wrap itself around me, move within me, and flow through me.

 

So, yeah!  I learned a huge lesson during that amazing practice.  Unlike many of the lessons I learn on my mat, however, I didn’t learn this one with my head.  I learned Sunday’s lesson with my heart and with my body.  It doesn’t diminish any of the intellectual lessons I have learned over the years on my mat.  It just feels like maybe this lesson is the doorway all those other lessons are pointing to.  It’s when our mind, body and spirit work in unison that we are most powerful.  It is then that we find peace within ourselves.  And it is only then that we are able to find lasting peace within the relationships and activities that fill our lives.

 

The challenge from my “practice without challenges” may yet be ahead of me.  Going forward I imagine I may have to work to receive each practice for what it is and for what it brings rather than comparing it to Sunday’s.  That said, the tantalizing thought that one day I could have another practice like that makes me sure that I’m up for it!

 

Namaste,

 

I had a dermatologist appointment early this week.  I go in annually to have my “freckles” checked out, but this year was a little different.  You see, a friend who has seen the same doctor as I have for years went to a new dermatologist.  She goes primarily to have one particular spot looked at, but wasn’t worried because she’d gotten a clean bill of health for several years in row.  However, the new doctor took one look at her spot and said it looked malignant and needed to come off.  (She’s totally fine, now, by the way.)  My friend called me as soon as she got in the car to tell me to make an appointment with this new doctor as soon as possible.  If our old doctor had been wrong about her spot, it followed that he could have been wrong about mine, too.

 

Fast forward to the weeks leading up to my appointment.  I spent a lot of time worrying about my skin.  I fixated on one specific mole.  My mind wandered away into “what ifs” and “worst case scenarios.”  I made mental plans for managing my business while I recuperated from what was sure to involve skin surgery and possibly even chemotherapy.  Basically, I made myself a little crazy.

 

You’d think I would have been looking forward to the appointment, right?  But I spent the morning of the appointment searching for a reason to cancel.  Even as I sat on the table in that paper dress, I toyed with the idea of not pointing out the spot that was worrying me.  Lucky for me, I had to wait a little bit for the doctor to come in.  During that wait, I took some yoga breaths to try to settle down.  Several inhales later, I realized that I’d actually arrived at the moment I’d been waiting for.  That the moment of truth had come.  As I allowed this feeling of calm to wash through me, I knew in my heart that, good news or bad, knowing would be better than all the worrying I was doing.  Whatever the verdict on my mole, I could and would handle it because it would be real and because I could take action.  I could “do” rather than “stew.”

 

Yoga is designed to teach us to stay in the moment.  In the kind of yoga I practice, we open with a fairly long series of Sun Salutations.  I guess you could say they are yoga’s warm-ups.  They require mental and physical endurance.  Physical endurance because – well, because they’re hard!  Mental endurance because they’re repetitive and it takes some conscious effort to keep your mind focused on how you’re moving your body when you’ve done the same series of movements 8 times in a row.  It’s tempting to allow your mind to wander away – to re-work a problem from earlier in the day or to worry an issue you’re going to have to deal with after class.  But, as soon as you allow that to happen, as soon as you embark on a Sun Salutation without the power of your full mental focus, the movements become exponentially harder.  It doesn’t take long on your yoga mat for your body to drag your mind back to the present moment!  To put it simply, your full attention is necessary in order to successfully navigate what you’re doing.

 

This is just not always true off our mats.  There are plenty of moments in life that we can breeze through while slightly distracted or even while fully engaged in a daydream or with a worry.  And when we start to pay attention, it can be truly shocking how much of our time is spent just this way.  Think about the things you do all the time.  Things where you have a mental “autopilot” function.  That’s when we’re at the greatest risk of acting unmindfully.  The effect is the same as when we talk on the phone and check our email at the same time.  (I hate to admit that I’ve been  guilty of this a few times.)  Inevitably, while we’re “um-humming” and “nuh-uhing” in the right places, we’re not really hearing what our friend is saying.  And certainly those emails that were so important that we allowed them to distract us from our conversation are going to go out with multiple spelling and grammatical errors.  While we can do both things at the same time, we can’t do either all that well.

 

And that’s really the whole point.  When we’re not fully focused on what we’re doing (mind and body in the same place, doing the same thing), we’re simply not functioning to our highest capability.  We’re selling ourselves short.  We even run the risk of hurting ourselves or someone else.  Despite all the “stewing” I was doing as my dermatologist appointment approached, I did not stop “doing.”  I’m sure I drove a lot of places, made many meals, and had numerous conversations where I wasn’t paying a lick of attention to what I was doing or even what I was saying.

 

While I didn’t wreck the car or accidentally poison anyone, while no long term injury came from my worry-filled time, I’m not going to get any of those distracted moments back.  Thankfully, my yoga practice is also teaching me not to “stew” on missed opportunities.  Life always provides another chance to try again – hopefully this time fully focused on whatever it is that I’m doing.  (And my chances are even higher because the new dermatologist gave me a clean bill of health!)

 

Namaste,

Amy

 

Well, it’s January 15.  How are you doing with your New Year’s Resolutions?

 

I haven’t even started mine yet.  Why?  Well, at first I couldn’t settle on one.  This has happened before and it hasn’t bothered me to head off into a new year resolution-less.  But this year, I knew I’d like to add something.  I just couldn’t decide what that “something” was.  Mix in a little uncharacteristic procrastination, a shipping delay from Amazon, and here I am, mid-month, with an uninitiated resolution.  Nevertheless, my intention remains to make good on my resolution, so I’m not beating myself up too much.  Despite the delay, I still have plenty of time to reap the rewards of my resolution over the course of the year.

 

But I’m not sure I’m the norm here.  Something about the tradition of setting New Year’s resolutions can send our expectations for ourselves to dizzying heights.  We get grand ideas.  We embark on tough paths with high hopes for tremendous change.  We have a tendency at this time of year more than any other to set pragmatism and reality aside.  “It’s a new year,” we think, “anything is possible!”

 

And, yes, anything is possible.  To stop believing that would be to sell ourselves short.  But despite the fact that it is a new year, it remains true that success is more likely when we take steady, regular, baby steps toward a goal than it is when we dash into whole-sale change.  Successful change is more likely when we allow the time for these changes to take root in our lives.  Successful change is more likely when we allow habits to develop.  Successful change is more likely when we go ahead and allow for the reality that we will most likely take a step back for every two or three steps forward.  Or, if you’re like me, you may even take a couple of steps back before you even get started!

 

Several years ago, a yoga classmate of mine set a whopper of a New Year’s resolution for herself.  It was a “significant” birthday year and she wanted to mark it in a notable way.  She decided that since yoga played such a powerful role in her life, that there was no better way to celebrate this particular birthday than with yoga.  She decided to practice yoga every day that year.  I swear it was about mid-January that she turned to me after class, crushed that she’d already “ruined” it by missing a day.  She was really beating herself up about “failing” so early in the year.

 

How I wish I’d known then what I know now about yoga!  If so, I would have encouraged her to pursue her goal – albeit modified slightly.  If you decide to run a race, you don’t just lace on your sneakers and go run it.  Do that and you’ll find yourself far from home wheezing on the sidewalk.  You have to train, and that training can take a really long time.  Similarly, if your goal is a daily yoga practice, you need to work up to it.  Even if you currently unroll your mat only once a week, simply adding an additional weekly practice every couple of months will have you on your mat six days a week by the end of the year.  And even the most ardent teachers consider a “daily practice” to include a day of rest each week.

 

Though it may buck the New Year’s tradition a bit, I think it’s important that we’re careful and clear about our expectations when we set our resolutions.  I think we need to take step back and get a better handle on what we’re really hoping for.  The reality is that, more often than not, it’s not achieving the goal that winds up being the most powerful part of the process.

 

If our resolution is to run a race, as amazing as it will feel to cross that finish line, that moment will not be our real reward.  Rather it is the self-discipline, the persistence, and the endurance that we receive from our weeks of training that we carry away with us.  If we’ve resolved to read the complete works of a favorite author this year, finishing the last page of the last book will not be our reward.  Rather, it is each moment of enjoyment that we spend reading that are the real gifts.  And the morning that we wake up to realize that we are (finally!) practicing yoga daily is not the point.  Rather, the gifts we receive along the way are what matter most.  Each restorative breath that we take on our mats.  Each little stress that we release through movement.   Each moment of quiet that we sink into.  These are the gifts that will change us, that will change our lives.

 

Even in a brand new year, when anything is possible, it remains the journey, not reaching our destination, that is most rewarding.

 

Namaste,

Amy

 

Have you ever seen the Saturday Night Live skit where Dan Akroyd plays Julia Child?  (http://ramascreen.com/dan-aykroyd-is-julia-child/)  He is standing behind the counter, manhandling a raw chicken while chatting on and on in perfect falsetto imitation of the great chef.  Suddenly, he pauses and says in a somewhat surprised tone, “I’ve cut the dickens out of my finger.”  The blood starts spurting as the audience bursts into laughter.  Well, last week it was me cutting the dickens out of my finger while cooking dinner.  The good news?  One trip to the emergency room and five stitches later, my finger is put back together.  The bad news?  I’m benched from my yoga mat until the stitches come out.

 

My finger hurt enough that I acquiesced to my sentence with surprising ease.  Nevertheless, for me, going ten days without getting on my mat is a really long time.  I wondered what I’d feel like during those ten days.  How would my body react?  Would I be a nightmare to live with?  I began to wonder if there was a way to incorporate not practicing asana into my daily yoga practice?  So, I decided to embark on my healing time as an experiment of sorts.  I decided to try to objectively observe the importance of my physical yoga practice to my greater goal of living my yoga in my daily life.

 

This is actually a topic that is debated with some frequency and passion in yoga circles.  Critics of “Americanized” yoga say that we’re overly focused on the physical side of the practice.  Some argue that we’ve reduced yoga into a yet another fitness fad, bleaching it of the real riches of the practice, which are spiritual in nature.  However, I’ve always felt that it doesn’t matter how or why people first stumble onto a yoga mat.  If they show up to achieve a healthier body, great!  If they show up to chill out or to calm down, great!  If they show up to find God, great!

 

The reality is that why we start practicing yoga quickly becomes irrelevant.  Just for a moment, think of yoga as a highway.  Each limb of yoga (the postures, the breathing, the morals, the concentration) is a separate entrance ramp.  It doesn’t matter which one we use.  All that matters is that we enter someway, somehow and keep going.  All of the limbs flow together.  I just don’t think it’s possible to limit ourselves to only one part of the practice.  Once you’re on the highway, you’re on!  No matter where or why we show up, no matter which entrance ramp we choose, yoga will draw us further along.  In other words, even if we’ve arrived on our mats searching for physical gifts such as weight loss, increased muscle tone, relief from chronic pain or freedom from tight muscles, in time our journey will reveal yoga’s spiritual and mental gifts as well.

 

I wasn’t too surprised to realize the importance of my physical yoga practice as I headed into the second half of my ten day hiatus.  Without asana, my body felt like it was contracting.  I felt fidgety.  Emotionally, I felt pent up; a little jittery; slightly irritable.  Energetically, I felt sluggish and sleepy.  Apparently, not only do I release energy and emotions on my mat, but I also create energy to carry me through my days.  Let’s just say, I much prefer the energy I create on my mat to the energy I release!  When I am able to practice, I walk off my mat feeling centered, balanced and focused.  Without that time spent moving and breathing, I feel more scattered, less clear, and less motivated.  I just don’t feel like me.

 

And that’s not all!  It turns out, the time I spend on my mat also plays a pretty powerful role in maintaining balance in my life.  Maybe some people outgrow the need for a physical practice, but I haven’t yet.  Even after eight years, I learned through these ten days that my physical practice still supports “the rest” of my yoga.  I did not decide to step away from reading Scripture or poetry each morning while I was injured, but I found that I did drift.  I did not decide to set my journal aside while I was healing, but that is exactly what happened.  As I move my body on my mat, I enter into a quiet, receptive state that I just don’t reach any other way.  There is nothing like asana to quiet my thinking, questioning, analytical mind.  There is nothing like savasana (resting pose at the end of a yoga session) to open me to meditation.  There is something about practicing yoga on my mat that helps me maintain the other spiritual and introspective practices that keep my life centered and in balance.

 

So, have we become overly focused on the physical side of yoga?  I don’t know.  Maybe.

 

What I learned in the last ten days is that, for me, the physical side of yoga is still awfully important.  Interestingly, though, I’ve learned that my physical yoga practice isn’t important for physical reasons.  (You know what I mean – for achieving cut upper arms or a perky yoga bottom.)  In my life, the physical practice of yoga is important because it stills my mind so that I can better focus on my daily experiences.  It’s important because it sharpens my yearning for a deeper, richer, more meaningful life.  It’s important because it opens my spirit so I can better discern my path --- and so I can better open my arms to embrace those I encounter while walking it.

 

Happily headed back to my mat,

Amy

 

I ran into a friend of mine late last week.  He’s had an unbelievably bad year.  The kind of year that, if an author described it in a novel, would leave you scoffing at her wild imagination.  As I gave him a hug, he said vehemently, “I cannot WAIT to shake off the dust of 2009!”

 

As I processed his words, I realized that while I will probably never fully know how the events of this year have made him feel, I do fully understand how he feels about the start of a new year.  In fact, I bet we all do.  There is something about the start of a new year that is hopeful and promising – no matter if the preceding year has been a terrible one, a good one, or just another year.   If, like my friend, you’re finishing a really bad year, there is something about the start of a new year that feels like pressing a cosmic “Reset Button.”  And, when you get right down to it, the same is true for those of us who are finishing better years, too.  I imagine it is the intensity of our relief when we hit that metaphorical button that will vary.

 

Yoga teaches us about new beginnings each and every time we unroll our mats.  If we’re really paying attention, our bodies feel completely different from one practice to the next – even if we’re practicing every day.  One day we might feel old and creaky, the next loose and limber.  One day we may find we can’t move into a posture that we sailed into the day before.  One day we may fight our practice tooth and nail, the next we may be fully focused for the whole hour and a half.  One day ten sun salutations in a row may leave us feeling bright and energized, the next we might finish them completely sapped of strength and stamina.

 

On our mats, each day is like pressing a “Reset Button.”  When we practice regularly, we begin to feel confident about pressing that “button.”   We begin to understand that, on our mats, a bad day is not an indicator of more bad days to come.  And neither are the good days.  We begin to see the gift of new beginnings.  We begin to be better able to set aside our anticipation – whether dread of another bad day or excitement for another good one.  We begin to approach each new beginning with curiosity.  And confidence.  We begin to approach each new beginning with confidence that, whatever that new beginning brings, we’ll be fine.

 

It is this confidence that we’ll be fine no matter what happens when we hit that cosmic “Reset Button” that I hope we can all take away from our mats as we move into this New Year.  While the ups and downs we navigate in life are clearly more meaningful than the ups and downs we navigate on our yoga mats, we find that our yoga has helped us master some powerful tools for living.  On our mats, we’ve learned to take one breath at a time.  We now know that when we focus on that breath, we’re less likely to get overwhelmed by the challenge of a posture or by our jubilation at getting into an asana.  On our mats, we’ve learned to deliberately, diligently rein in our minds to keep them from wandering off to the past or the future.  We now know that when we stick with the present, there’s always plenty to keep us fully occupied.  On our mats, we’ve learned that we receive gifts from our “bad” practices and our “good” ones.  We now know that, even when we’re not having as much fun, we’re growing and learning and living.

 

So, whether 2009 was a good, a bad or just another year for you, it is my sincere wish that you relish the start of this New Year with confidence and curiosity.  I hope its beginning feels as auspicious as when you hear that “thwack” of your yoga mat unfurling.  I hope you know that your tool belts are full of powerful tools to help you navigate whatever comes your way this year.

 

Happy New Year!

Amy

 

I just received a Christmas card from a friend that said, “Let’s be kind to our loved ones --- forever and for real.”  What a lovely and true Christmas message, one that gets right to the very heart of the season.  It echoes the seasonal message I’ve always found to be so powerful - “goodwill to all men.”  Something about the Christmas season inspires us to reach out with gestures of love and kindness, of goodwill, in other words.

 

One of the overarching intentions of yoga is to inspire in us a higher level of love and kindness for the people around us.  Interestingly, if folks are going to criticize the practice, they often do so by suggesting that yoga is self-indulgent, that it is narcissistic, or that it is overly focused on oneself.  And I suppose, to those unfamiliar with the practice, that it can seem like this.  After all, we do practice yoga alone on our mats.  It is about learning to care for our bodies.  It is about learning to care for ourselves.

 

In teaching us to practice “goodwill,” yoga has us start with ourselves.  On our mats we learn that even the smallest gestures of love and kindness make a tremendous difference.  We find that the simple act of devoting time to ourselves to spend on our mats has hugely positive effects.  We feel better – inside and out.  As we dedicate ourselves to practicing yoga, we learn to take responsibility for caring for ourselves.  We find that a little compassion for ourselves is a powerful thing as we give ourselves a break when we’re having a rough day and opt for a gentle practice rather than the vigorous one to which we’ve become accustomed.  We find that acceptance is a tremendously liberating gift to receive when we allow ourselves to appreciate our bodies rather than to criticize them.

 

As we get more and more comfortable offering these gifts – love, kindness, devotion, compassion, acceptance – to ourselves on our yoga mats, giving them becomes second nature.  Giving them becomes part of the way we naturally live and love.  We begin to be freer with these gifts to those closest to us.  We may even notice a desire to reach out beyond our circle of family and friends to “share the love” we’ve found on our mats.  The bottom line is that we work so hard on our yoga mats to take care of ourselves so that we are better able go out into the world and give back the gifts we receive from our practice.  We learn to be kind to ourselves – “forever and for real” – so that it is second nature to be kind to the world around us – “forever and for real.”

 

And this time of year seems to bring that urge front and center.  Certainly, we reach out to our far-flung friends and family with greeting cards and gifts.  That’s an integral part of Christmas, after all.  As my yoga practice has evolved, so has a wonderful family tradition.  Over the years, my family has begun to consciously reach out beyond ourselves.  Each year we do this in different ways.  My husband and I have found it powerful to let our kids determine how we will reach out each holiday season.  Some years we opt to fill a Christmas basket for our church’s outreach program.  For several years in a row we selected gifts from an angel tree at my husband’s office.  One year, we contributed to a care package for our troops serving overseas.  And last year, we made a donation to a global charity the kids had heard about.

 

No matter how we’ve chosen to give, the act of extending ourselves in some small way beyond our immediate circle of loved ones has become a keystone to our family Christmas celebration.  While I am the only one in our family who regularly practices yoga, I like to think that this family tradition is a direct result of the deepening of my yoga practice.  Yoga has touched my life to such an extent that it has leaked out to touch my children and my husband, too.  And, through the gifts we give each Christmas, I suppose it’s not a great stretch to think that my practice is making a difference in the lives of people I’ll never meet or know.

 

In part, what we’re doing when we reach out beyond ourselves is accepting responsibility for taking care of the world around us.  We’re acknowledging that we are all connected simply because we’re sharing life on this planet.  We’re accepting that, no matter how small we feel in the scheme of things, we can make a tremendous difference in the lives of others.  I believe that it is when we extend ourselves to embrace others – those we know and those we may never know – that we’re actually living as the kind of people God hopes we will be.  We are taking a step closer to growing into the people we hope to be.  What greater gift than that can we give ourselves?

 

Ideally, we’ll maintain our awareness of the generous part we can play in the world around us throughout the year.  However, even if we just wake up to our role during the Christmas season our gestures of goodwill will create ripples of love and kindness “forever and for real.”

 

Wishing you the merriest of Christmases,

Amy

 

Over the weekend, as I stood shoulder to shoulder with my son in the Nerf aisle at Toys R Us, I cringed as I worried that what I thought was a very grown-up phenomenon had trickled down to my child.  You see, he is the Secret Santa for one of his classmates for the next week.  The boy he was assigned to is someone JB looks up to a bit.  He is someone JB thinks is “cool” and, thus, hopes will think he is cool too.  So my son seemed to feel a little added pressure to choose exactly the right gift as we stood there staring at the vast selection of squishy, foamy toys.  It looked to me that he had fallen prey to a notion that is rampant in our society during this crazy gift-filled month – the idea that “you are what you give.”

 

At first glance, this misapprehension can seem healthier than its sister - “you are what you have.”  But, upon reflection, I think it can actually be more damaging if only for its sneakiness.  After all, it’s pretty easy to recognize when we’re trying to make ourselves feel better after a rough day by going on a spending spree at The Gap.  I think most of us will agree that having trendy clothes just does not automatically translate into being happy, contented people.  That shopping spree simply provides a giddy moment of acquisition that temporarily distracts us from our problem.  It doesn’t take too much enlightenment to realize that the new clothes we simply had to have are but a Band-aid and that real healing can only come from addressing the actual issue – whatever that is.

 

We practice this awareness on our mats all the time when we’re chasing a posture we can’t quite get into.  It doesn’t take long to have the epiphany that just because we can get into a complicated or challenging asana doesn’t mean that our practices are “advanced” or that we’ve reached the end of our yoga journey.  A look around any yoga class will reveal that the students we most want to emulate are the ones who move into a posture – even the simplest ones - gracefully and hold it with seeming ease.  It is evident as we watch them that they are practicing for gifts way beyond the physical.  They exude an inner-peacefulness that we want for ourselves.  On our yoga mats, what our practice “has” (i.e. tough, tricky postures) is not a basis at all for what our practice “is.”

 

As we witness these yogis practicing for the sake of the practice, we can see our yearning for more advanced postures for what it is.  A yearning for “more.”  A yearning for a slightly different giddy moment of acquisition than the one we experienced on our shopping spree, but a moment of acquisition all the same.  This awareness gets a little muddy, however, when the recipient in question is no longer us.  How can it be wrong to want to choose exactly the right gift for someone we care about?  How can it be wrong to want to find a gift so stellar and so perfect that it conveys all that we feel about its recipient?  Isn’t this just generosity?  Isn’t this desire an expression of our giving, loving heart?  How can that be bad?

 

The desire to give to those we love is not the problem.  In fact, that desire is at the very root of love.  Where we can get tripped up especially at this time of year is in thinking that the gift itself is the point.  Rather, the whole point is the gesture of giving.  As any yoga posture can yield many different gifts, any gift, no matter the magnitude, can have a variety of meanings.  It could say, “I was thinking of you and wanted to give this to you.”  Or it could say, “I love you.”  Or, as my son hopes his Secret Santa gift will, it could say, “I like you enough that I’ve paid attention to your interests and have chosen a gift I hope you enjoy.”  Our gifts don’t need to come in distinctive boxes or have hefty price tags.  With the right words and intention, the simplest of gifts can convey exactly what we’re feeling.

 

As JB waffled and worried in the toy aisle, I began to explain that nothing on those shelves of toys would be able to convey all he was feeling -- especially not in the $10 and under range to which he was limited!  But before I could get going, he cut me off to say that his teachers had told him that it was the little gestures and surprises all week long that were the most important part of their activity.  He was only two days into it and was proud that he’d already figured out a way to slip the stone his Secret Santa was looking for onto his desk, and had shared his snack when the boy was hungry.  His teachers had emphasized that the gift at the end of the week was simply a way to reveal the identity of each student’s Secret Santa.  As I stood there, mouth agape, at the wisdom that had just flowed from my son, he turned back to the Nerf toys and pulled a miniature football off the shelf, saying, “I just remembered that he’s really into football, Mommy.”

 

Maybe, just maybe, he’s going to grow up to avoid that nasty notion of “you are what you give” after all!

 

Namaste,

Amy www.yogawithspirit.com

 

With the holiday season in full swing we often find ourselves dashing from one fun thing to the next. This month can be a veritable whirlwind of celebration.  It’s fun!  It’s joyful!  But it can also be exhausting.  It is, after all, possible to have too much of a good thing.  Figuring out when enough is enough can be a real balancing act.

 

I have a good friend who always seems to be doing something fun.  She and her husband are happy, whirling dervishes during December!  My friend fills her cup by surrounding herself with people, by soaking in new experiences, and by giving of herself and her time in many, many ways.  I, on the other hand, require a slower pace.  Like my friend, I love a good party and I think there’s no better way to celebrate the holidays than with good friends.  But I’ve found that quiet nights at home aren’t just nice, they’re a necessary way for me to keep my cup full.  I’ve learned over the years that one night out on the weekend is a good thing.  But, two nights out?  Not so much.  When that happens, I often drag myself into the next week dull and tired rather than shining from all the fun I’ve had.  My friend and I have found very different ways to find balance in our lives.

 

As different people find balance in different ways off their mats, the same is true on.  Students ask me all the time how often they should practice yoga.  Some are concerned about squeezing yoga into already jammed schedules and wonder if once a week is enough to provide them with some of yoga’s gifts.  I often encourage these folks to make the time for one more time on the mat than they are already used to.  I firmly believe that when we are deliberate about making time in our lives for yoga, it shifts our perspective just enough that everything else seems a little more manageable.  For people who regularly feel overwhelmingly busy, adding yoga to their days is a great antidote.  Suddenly, they seem to have enough time in their days to work through their to-do lists and to practice yoga.

 

But some students are swept up by the practice and want more, more, more.  They might come to more and more classes each week.  Perhaps they purchase a video or two and begin developing a home practice.  “If practicing twice a week makes me feel this good,” they think, “imagine how awesome I’ll feel if I practice every day!”  It’s fun!  It feels great!  Until they realize their bodies are a little sore or realize they feel exhausted when they leave their mats.  When these folks come to me with questions about the intensity of their practices, I often encourage them to dial things back a little bit.  As counter-intuitive as it may seem, it is possible to have too much of a good thing on our mats as well.  Figuring out how much yoga is right for us can be a real balancing act.

 

As we have off our mats, my friend and I have found our way to very different balances on them.  My friend has found that practicing yoga a couple of times a week leaves her feeling great.  When she does more yoga, she begins to notice aches and pains that she does not have otherwise.  For me, it’s different.  Over the years, I have found that practicing yoga many times a week leaves me feeling as good as I’ve ever felt inside and out.  When I get on my mat most days, my body stays open and relaxed between practices.  When I stay away from my mat for too many days in a row, I begin to notice aches and pains that I do not have otherwise.  How did we each find the answer to the question, “How many times a week should I practice yoga?”  By practicing.  By noticing how we feel.  And by trusting that what feels right for each of us is truly right for us.

 

In one of my favorite poems, Trees by Mary Oliver, we’re offered a lovely aspiration for a life well lived.  She writes that we “have come into this world … to go easy, to be filled with light and to shine.”  While we can’t control most of what life brings our way, we do control the “extras” – the entertainment, the festivities, and, yes, the practices like yoga -- that we add into the mix.   We want to make sure that what we add into our lives feeds us.  We want to make sure that the “extras” in our lives fill us with light and leave us shining brighter.  And that’s what it’s all about.  Figuring out through trial and error what fills our cups.  Just as we enjoy different rhythms on our mats, my friend and I are enjoying wildly different Decembers by choosing “extras” that leave us shining brightly.  I hope you’ve found your balance too.

 

May you be filled with light and shine brightly,

Amy

 

One of our favorite parts of staying home for Thanksgiving is spending the long weekend decorating our house for Christmas.  This past weekend we got the trees up, lit and decorated.  We unpacked the Santa and snowmen collections and displayed them throughout the house.  We “decked the halls” outdoors, too.  We hung wreaths on all the windows and lit the garland around the door.  We even bought colorful, light-up “kissing balls” to hang in the tree outside the dining room window.  If I do say so myself, it looks magnificent!

 

The real magic of decorating for Christmas is that it instantly gets our family in the holiday spirit.  Once the tree goes up in our living room, our children go into full waiting-for-Christmas mode!  I love it!  I can vividly remember that expectant feeling from my own childhood.  The daily count-down to the 25^th on our Advent calendars only added to the happy tension.  While it seemed to take forever for those 25 days to pass, it was a good kind of waiting.  The wait was filled to brimming with fun activities and special treats.  There were Christmas specials on TV, delicious cookies waiting for us when we got home in the afternoons, assemblies at school, and pageants at church.  There were shopping trips to pick out gifts for my family and friends, and long hours with my sister wrapping packages.  As I got a little older, I realized that waiting for Christmas is actually my favorite part of the season.  The waiting (and all the work and fun that go with it) never fails to outshine the day itself.

 

There are echoes of this happy waiting on our yoga mats.  After all, we each practice yoga for a reason.  Some of us come to yoga to bring our bodies back into balance – opening restricted muscles, strengthening areas of weakness or straightening our posture.  Some of us come to yoga to balance our minds – to relieve chronic anxiety, cool a hot temper or slow down from years of maintaining a manic pace.  Some of us come to yoga to bring our spiritual side into balance with the rest of our lives – to learn to better appreciate the gifts that fill our lives (even those gifts masquerading as challenges).  Whatever our intentions when we unroll our yoga mats, like Christmas Day to a child, the wait until “it” comes can initially seem endless.

 

But as I discovered in my “grown-up” experience of the Christmas season, the wait on our yoga mats is a very good kind of waiting.  Our “waits” in yoga are filled to brimming with blissful hours moving and breathing on our mats; peaceful, restorative hours of healing and changing.  While we’re waiting, we get the opportunity to rise to challenges and therefore to grow stronger, braver and wiser.  While we’re waiting, we receive the obvious gifts of accomplishment and the less obvious gifts of I-need-to-try-that-again.

 

In fact, many times we are so blown away by the gifts we receive from yoga while we’re waiting that we may not even realize when our original intention has come to fruition.  We may simply look in the mirror one morning and see a whole new body.  We may realize in the midst of a stressful exchange at work that we’re naturally taking a long breath (or two) in lieu of losing our temper and saying things we immediately regret.  We may “catch” ourselves pausing to relish with gratitude the littlest things in our life – like the fact that our car passed inspection without needing work.  There is a softness and quietness to the way yoga’s gifts arrive.

 

With yoga there is also no sense of wanting the wait to end.  In fact, the arrival of the thing that we were originally waiting for simply becomes another of yoga’s myriad gifts.  We gratefully receive it and return to our mats.  We find that our practice is actually one long, active, full-to-brimming time of waiting.  This is where yoga and Christmas diverge.  For there is never anything subtle about the arrival of Christmas at my house!  From the stampede of three sets of feet down the stairs on Christmas morning, to the explosion of paper and bows all over the living room, there is absolutely no question that the long wait is over at last.  And there is always that little sense of wistfulness that it is over.  In this way, I suppose, it could be said that yoga is better than Christmas.  For in yoga our excited, expectant and eager waiting is never over.  In fact, it can go on happily for a lifetime!

 

Namaste,

Amy

 

When asked to name the most important part of our lives, I suspect all of us would say it is our relationships.  And we’d be right.  There is nothing more important in life than loving and being loved.  It is in our relationships that we do our greatest, most lasting work.  It is love that gives life meaning.  The giving and receiving that we do with one another is why we are here.  But we spend so much of our time dashing hither and yon, getting “things” done and making sure we haven’t forgotten to do anything else.  In this state of constant action, it’s easy to let our lists and obligations command our attention.  When we’re moving this fast, it’s hard to maintain perspective and priorities.

 

Despite believing in the priority of our relationships (REALLY believing), we don’t always act accordingly.  Despite talking the talk, we don’t always walk the walk.  My childhood best friend’s birthday was two weeks ago.  It’s actually fairly amazing that we’re still as close as we are because Shannan lives in Southern California and I’m here in southeastern Pennsylvania.  I feel incredibly lucky to have such a dear friend who has known me since “when.”  But did I sit down to call her on her birthday?  Nope.  I was busy and the day slipped past.  I know that is crazy!  Even crazier is that, more often than I care to admit, I allow some of my warmest exchanges with friends and loved ones to be rushed or neglected by the cyclones of tasks and stuff that sweep through my life.  I regularly allow opportunities to connect with the people who fill my life with meaning to pass by because I’m too busy getting stuff done.

 

In the past week, I was given the gift of perspective and reaffirmed priorities.  My son has been fighting a chronic illness for several months.  Unfortunately, his symptoms spiraled out of control last week and he was admitted to the hospital for a higher level of care.  Thankfully, we have come to the end of this crisis and are home.  As I catch my breath, I find my eyes newly opened to what gifts the people who fill my life are.  When you’re in a time of need, something as small as a smile from a parking garage attendant can bring tears of gratitude to your eyes.  Grander gestures of love – offers to help with your children, an unexpected visit, a call or a note, a hug - simply melt your heart.  My family and I have wandered through this crazy week literally awash in a sea of kindnesses.  And I realized something awe-inspiring last night.  These friends and these family members didn’t spring forth from nowhere in our time of need.  They were just as much parts of our lives before this crisis hit as they are now.  And they will continue to be in the future.  What’s different right now is my heightened awareness and appreciation of them.

 

This awareness of the life-giving power of relationships has been brought on by our family crisis.  But, thankfully, we don’t need to have a family emergency to come to this understanding.  In fact, a regular yoga practice is designed to serve as a reminder of our intrinsic connectedness to the world around us.  Yoga is a Sanskrit word that means “to yoke or to join.”  On our mats, we deepen our awareness of the connection of body, breath and mind.  We learn that we can experience life more fully when we’re taking the time to breathe.  We learn that we feel better when we’re relying on the wisdom of our bodies and instincts as well as on our intellect and knowledge.  Off our mats, our yoga practice helps us to be more aware of the effects our actions (and inactions) have on the world around us.  As our practices deepen, we come to understand that it is this connectedness to everything that gives life meaning.  Adrift and on our own, we are small and insignificant.  Yoga settles us into the knowledge that, as part of the whole of creation, we have meaning and importance.

 

This Thanksgiving, while I am extraordinarily grateful for our better understanding of our son’s illness and for his healing hospital stay, my sense of gratitude extends way beyond that.  This Thanksgiving, I am grateful to recognize the real treasures in my life.  I give thanks for all the people who touch my life and whose lives I am privileged to touch.  I give thanks for understanding that love is the meaning of life.  And, in an odd way, I give thanks for this most recent life cyclone.  For, instead of clouding my priorities and perspective as most of my life cyclones do, this one managed to blow away the distractions and clutter that often trip me up so that I could see what really matters in the end.

 

A blessed Thanksgiving to you,

Amy

 

It seems like every year brings a new adventure of some sort.  This year, mine is teaching 9^th and 10^th grade Sunday School.  When I agreed to do this, my thought was that it would give me a little insight into what lay ahead for me as a parent (my oldest child is in 7^th grade).  Having been with these kids for several weeks now, I’m really glad I will only be responsible for raising one of them at a time!  The group dynamic at this age – especially in a group like ours which mixes kids from five or six different schools, two different grades and two different genders - is beyond challenging.

 

My co-teacher and I decided what we really needed to get the group to gel was a project.  And that is how we ended up in the kitchen of our church last Sunday with seven teen-agers making enormous quantities of soup.  We expected to run into challenges that morning – avoiding cut fingers or burnt hands were high on our list of concerns.  We did not expect to find that the sinks were broken beyond repair and that we would have to wash the four gigantic pots with a garden hose in the driveway!  In fact, if we’d known ahead of time that this was the case, we might have postponed our project.  Thankfully, we didn’t.

 

The problem of the broken sinks actually provided us with exactly the bonding experience these kids needed.  (Let’s just say that it was certainly an experience my co-teacher and I would never have come up with on our own!)  It seems obvious in hindsight.  I’m sure you can imagine the fun that ensued when we gave a group of 14- and 15-year olds in church clothes free rein with a garden hose and a bottle of dish soap – their only mandate to come back with clean pots.  Which they did.  They also came back with damp shoes, splashed clothes, and ear-to-ear grins on their faces!  Figuring out how to clean those yucky pots with a hose changed them from a group of kids from different schools trying to impress each other into a group of kids just having fun with one another.  And that is exactly what we set out to do that morning.  Though it didn’t happen the way we planned it, we’ll take it!  Success.

 

It’s funny when we look back on life how it can be the problems we run into that yield the greatest rewards.  This is often the way things go on our yoga mats.  It’s not the postures we can do easily that bring us the most satisfaction.  For instance, I’ve always been able to cross my legs into lotus (padmasana).  My external hip rotators are just naturally open.  Though I’ve seen my lotus deepen and change over the years, I didn’t have to exercise patience or will power to achieve the asana.  Nor did I have to spend time working with any modifications to get into postures that require that leg position.  I could just do it.  Which, while nice, is really not that notable in my yoga journey.

 

But there is a seated posture called Marichyasana that my first teacher incorporated into every, single class.  I just could not do it.  In this asana, you lean forward and wrap your arm back around your bent leg.  Eventually, you can get yourself so far forward and wrap so deeply that you can clasp your hands together behind your back.  It seemed like a no-brainer to my fellow students.  And the way my teacher just threw it out there, as if it was possible when it was so clearly impossible ….  Well, suffice it to say that I really, really wanted to be able to do it.  I kept coming to class.  I kept working – to the extent my body would allow me to - in the posture.  I kept breathing because I knew enough to know that if I couldn’t breathe in the stretch, I was pushing my body too far.  And so the months passed.

 

While I can’t remember exactly when it was (I’m pretty sure it was more than a year later), I can vividly remember the day my fingertips first brushed each other in Marichyasana.  I can remember exactly where my mat was in the studio.  Most of all, I can remember my feeling of elation when I touched my fingers to one another.  I also remember that the journey was not over.  For many weeks, sometimes I was able to get my fingertips to brush together and sometimes I wasn’t.  Then the day came that I could actually latch onto my other hand.  Another milestone!  But there were many more days when I couldn’t do that.  And so it went.  Forward and backward.  Over and over again.  While I can now bind my hands behind my back with ease, I do not ever take the asana for granted.  I worked too hard and I waited too long to do that.  I always feel a little surge of grateful happiness when I move into Marichyasana.

 

Rather than being the “problem” I initially thought it was, this posture provided me with one of my most rewarding and visible examples of how yoga transforms us.  While getting into the posture was a success, the real gifts lay in working the problem.  The patience, persistence and perspective that I learned are life gifts that will carry me even further than my newly opened body.  Just as I’m so grateful that we did not decide to skip our soup-making last Sunday when faced with those broken sinks, I’m so happy that I did not give up and bail out whenever my teacher guided us into Marichyasana.  It turns out that incorporating these problems into what I was doing -- making soup with teen-agers or learning a yoga posture-- made both activities a hundred times more meaningful.

 

Now let’s see if I can remember this the next time I’m faced with a problem!

 

Namaste,

Amy

 

Every once in a while, I’m fortunate enough to hear a sermon on Sunday morning that sticks with me throughout the week – making me think, helping me dig through my life for ways to apply my faith, and (because I’m me) provoking a deeper understanding of the spiritual lessons of yoga.  Last Sunday was just such a Sunday.

 

The sermon focused on a story in the New Testament of the Bible about a widow who comes to the temple in Jerusalem to make a donation.  In the story we don’t learn very much about her.  We don’t know if she’s old or young.  We don’t know if she’s a mother or not.  We don’t know if she’s proud or humble, beautiful or plain, well-liked or disdained.   What we do know is that she is poor.  We observe her following several rich men to drop her two copper coins into the treasury.   We’re told that these two coins, which add up to just a penny, are all the money she has.  Jesus teaches his disciples that, while the rich men may have given greater sums of money, the widow’s gift was more meaningful because she chose to give what little money she had despite her terrible poverty.

 

For many of us it is completely counter-intuitive to give away something that we feel is lacking in our lives.  As it is so good at doing, yoga can help us grapple with this powerful concept in a very hands-on, tangible way.  When we’re on our yoga mats practicing asana, you could say that what we have to give is energy.  We know we need energy to make it all the way through our practice.  Therefore, every time we move into a stretch on our mats, we have a choice.  We can choose to pour ourselves into the posture or we can choose to hold back to conserve our energy for stretches yet to come.  To make this choice a little harder, even when we’re not giving our all, yoga feels good.  Even when we’re not 100% invested in our practice, we will receive benefits from coming to our mat.  However, when we pour ourselves completely into a posture – when we stretch a little further than we can easily, when we breathe a little deeper than might feel natural, when we stay in the stretch a little longer than we really want to – the benefits we receive are exponentially greater than when we hold back.

 

We learn on our mats that the more energy we pour into a posture, the more we receive in return.  The gifts we receive vary from person to person.  Some of us receive “progress” in exchange for our gift of energy, as our bodies open and our endurance develops allowing our physical practice to advance.  Some of us receive mental peace and quiet in exchange for our gift of energy, as our minds cease thinking and list-making while we pour ourselves into the hard work of asana practice.  But there is one gift that we all receive from our yoga practice.  We all leave our practices energized.  In other words, we leave our mats with an abundance of the very thing we gave away.  As we roll up our mats, we find ourselves so energized we can’t imagine that we were once worried about having enough energy to make it through our practice.  By giving, we have received.  Not only have we received enough to sustain ourselves, but we have received enough energy to allow us to give more of ourselves to others off our mats.

 

It is in this way that practicing yoga illuminates one of the messages within the story of the widow’s gift.  Giving that which we think we most need, while beneficial to the recipient, is even more powerful for the giver.  We all feel “needy” or lacking in different ways.  For instance, I frequently feel strapped for time and, as a result, can be a little hyper-protective of the few windows of free time that I do find in my schedule.  The widow’s story suggests to me that it is my time that I could consider giving.  And, upon reflection, I realize that when I do choose to volunteer my time to a worthy cause, not only do I manage to find a way to make it work, but my life is always enriched by the time I choose to share.

 

And this is the real lesson in the widow’s story.  When we choose to give from a place of struggle or challenge, we allow ourselves to experience the reciprocal power of giving.  Whether our gift is of our time or our money or of something else entirely, the results are the same.  When we begin to give away a bit of that which we feel is lacking in our lives, little by little, we find that regular, thoughtful giving can actually help start to free us from our feelings of need.  Over time, we may even find that our gift touched us more profoundly than it touched those we chose to give to in the first place.

 

What will you give today?

 

Namaste,

Amy

 

Major league baseball had no impact on me at all until we moved to the Philadelphia area nine years ago.  As we settled into our new home that summer, I noticed that my husband was spending more time than usual in front of the television.  Every night, after we’d tucked the kids into bed, he’d plunk down on the sofa to “check on the Phillies.”  “What’s with all the baseball?” I asked.  “I’ve always been a huge Phillies fan,” he replied.  “You know that.”  Honestly, even though we’d been together twelve years at that time, I had no idea he followed baseball -- let alone had a favorite team.  But I nodded and murmured “Mmmhmm” anyway.

 

As the years passed, we went our separate directions on spring and summer nights.  While I stuck my nose in a book or noodled around on the piano, Jim would cozy up on the couch to watch baseball.  Until this spring, that is.  Maybe it’s because the kids are staying up later and we have less time to be alone together, but I just wasn’t as interested in going my separate way once the kids were in bed.  I wanted to be with my husband.  And during baseball season, that means hanging out in the living room with him and the Phillies.  So I began meeting him where he was -- on the couch.  Before I knew it, I was hooked too.  But I maintained that I was watching for him -- which he believed until the night he “caught me” watching baseball alone in our bedroom.

 

When I’m teaching a class, I say all the time that yoga meets each of us where we are.  If we show up looking for exercise, that’s what yoga provides.  If we show up yearning for mental quiet, that’s what we get.  If we show up searching for a way to connect with our spirit or with God, yoga fulfills this need.  Yoga doesn’t require us to be strong or flexible or focused or spiritual when we unroll our mat.  Yoga can (and will!) work with whatever raw material we bring to our practice.  No matter our physical state when we begin, practicing yoga will create more openness and comfort in our bodies.  No matter how scattered or crazed we feel when we step out of our lives and onto our mats, practicing yoga will calm us down and teach us the benefits of focus.  Even if we’ve never had a single spiritual pang, practicing yoga will stir our souls with the idea that we are an important part of the whole of creation around us.  No matter what we hoped to get from our practice, over time we get the whole shebang.

 

Yoga meets us – with all of its gifts – right where we are.  We change as a result of our yoga practices.  Over time, as we learn to use our bodies more effectively and efficiently, we find we’re ready for more challenging postures.  We may begin trying things we’d never before have dared to try.  Over time, we may be surprised to find ourselves curious about the “rest” of yoga.  We may begin practicing meditation or studying yoga’s moral foundations.  By coming “down” to our level, yoga gets us hooked.  Once we’re hooked, yoga lifts us up to discover the full potential of the practice.  Yoga begins to touch us more deeply and profoundly on and off the mat.

 

As always, there is a lesson from our mats for us to take with us into our lives.  Just as yoga is designed to bend to meet each of us where we are so that we will eventually embrace the practice, if we want to draw someone into a fuller, deeper relationship, one of the most powerful ways to do so is by bending to meet them where they are.  This doesn’t have to a big thing.  One yoga class a week was enough to get me hooked on the practice that, over the years, completely transformed my body and the way I’m living my life.  Similarly, meeting my husband on the couch to watch an occasional baseball game wasn’t a tremendous commitment.  While I certainly can’t say that major league baseball has transformed my life or my marriage, our shared love of Phillies baseball has become a really fun way for my husband and me to connect with each other.  The surprising fact that I actually love watching the game with him is just icing on the cake.

 

PS We’ll get ‘em next season!

 

Namaste,

Amy