Hopelessly Dedicated to You

Whenever I go home to North Carolina I get to attend yoga at Triangle Yoga, a great studio in Chapel Hill. The year I lived at home in between my Telluride epoch and the Maui era, I practiced yoga here but had not yet discovered Anusara, so I just went to a bunch of really fun and challenging flow classes. Now, however, Paul and Sommer Sobin of Thousand Petals Yoga several Anusara classes there and I love it! They do a few classes individually and one together, which is really fun. Check out the gallery of photos on their website, there are some class photos and a few of them individually. I like them, as people, and love their classes because they are always challenging and they teach lots of poses that were not part of our regular repertoire on Maui, and they also have a different approach to teaching poses that I am familiar with. So I always learn something new, whether it is a new asana or a new way to do an old asana.

They just spent a month in India, and returned with that starry-eyed jet lag culture shock that is (I find) deliciously indulgent because you are so opened up to another people and culture and WAY of being and doing, and suddenly you find yourself deposited back into your shockingly small world, feeling out of place and disordered. In a good way. You wait a bit and after the dust settles you go about your life again but slightly differently this time. I guess they had an incredible time, no surprise, and brought that inspiration back to share with us.

The first class I had with Sommer last week coincided with The Election, Tuesday evening, which felt kind of like a holiday, especially here in the swing state of North Carolina (it turns out Obama beat McCain by only 12,000 votes). The theme for class that night was to think about surrender, which they had to fully embrace on their travels, especially in a place like India, where the concept of linear time and predictable events and personal safety, are literally thrown to the winds. So she asked us to think of something that we surrender to and what that feels like. And I thought about my yoga practice and how surrendering to it feels like devotion. How I always come back to my practice, even when I have been away from it for a few days or, rarely (and somewhat disastrously I find) a few weeks. I tend to be cyclical or a bit of a binger, the pessimist might say, but either way I am good at starting and stopping and not so great at maintaining, which a whole 'nother blog post in itself, but suffice it to say that I was contemplating this sense of devotion, how I always come back to yoga. Because it is always there for me, sort of waiting where I left off. Class ended and I wandered off into the night with a self-satsifying smugness about me, reaching around every few minutes and patting myself on my back because I am so deVOTed to my PRACtice. That's how it rang in my little brain.

So that night (no lie) I dreamt Ella was my daughter, not my niece. And I get it now, the mother thing. I literally felt like a part of me was existing external to myself, that cells of mine, emotions of mine, thoughts of mine were a part of someone else, and I was living my life but also breathing and feeling and thinking the life of Ella. And I felt it on a such a deep, primal level, literally felt her experience of life that it was almost like we were one creature, one organism, that had agreed (insanely enough) to be cleaved apart superficially, yet remain conjoined with a depth I had not ever experienced before. And it was love, pure and simple.

I looked up "devoted" in the dictionary:
To give or apply (one's time, attention, or self) entirely to a particular activity, pursuit, cause, or person.
And the word entirely was what stood out to me. That is what I felt in my dream. Every part of me was given to Ella. And that's not what I feel towards my yoga practice. Dedicated? Absolutely. Committed? Yep. But devotion is unwavering, there is no leaving and coming back when I am ready or when I feel like it or when it is convenient. Will I ever be that devoted to my yoga practice? Not sure. But that's what I am trying to figure out with this time off and this money well spent. So, thanks, subconscious, for keeping me honest. Thanks, dreamtime, for reaching in and taking my hand off my back. Now I'm off to Hollywood, Florida for the weekend to study with one of my favorite instructors, Desiree Rumbaugh. I've got some work to do!

It Ain't Easy Being Pink

Halloween with a five-year old is hilarious, but I must confess that the neighborhood roamings fall far short of my memories of this holiday.

There's Ella, dressed as Shanti, and Indian, and I put together a last-minute $7.50 Miss Piggy Costume. It turns out I was the ONLY adult in the groups that escorted the kids to actually dress up! What the hell? And then I rifled through my parents' old photo albums and look what I found from 1973:

Who knew I had such a fondness for pink tutus? This year my sister and her best friend decided to celebrate 10 years of being best friends by flying to New Orleans to see Widespread Panic play a concert that started by a roadie coming on stage and shouting into the microphone: "We've lost all hope, so dance your asses off, you fucking freaks!!" I find odd beauty and simplicity in that. Because at some point in time, there is only so much worrying and planning you can do, you just have to step up to the plate and let your freak flag fly a little higher than you ever have before--this half mast stuff gets old. So I stayed with Ella and we went to the neighborhood where her dad and lots of her friends live because she spent the first 5 years of her life there, so we trooped around, 6 parents and 5 kids, all under 5, for a couple of hours and supervised the hunting and gathering. Ella, being bossy and competitive, led each attack, literally sprinting to each door, friends in tow, to bang on a door and then proceed to walk past the lucky homeowner into the center of their living room, silently awaiting her reward of miniature candy bars. She was immensely successful. Upon release, she then sprinted from doorstoop to street, shouting "Miss Piggy!!" the entire way.

I chatted with Keith (her dad) about my memories of Halloweens we had in the 70's, back when NO ONE worried (seriously worried) about snatchers and pickle ticklers and all the freaks you can look up online now that live in your safe little neighborhood. They let us roam free. For hours. In the dark. Completely unsupervised. With pillowcases instead if plastic jack-o-lantern buckets to collect candy in. They sometimes became too heavy for us to carry home. No joke. Keith said they would put on two masks, collect candy from Mrs. Jones, walk down the steps, put the other mask on, and go in for round #2. And there would be packs, hordes of kids just like us, with parents just as trusting and permissive as ours, scouring and trolling through our neighborhood that literally stretched for miles and miles. I have very very fond memories of Halloween inthe 70's. Sure, every now and then some dumb kid would actually slice part of his tongue off by biting into a razor-studded apple, or suck on a hard candy that had been soaking up LSD for several days...but not us. We waited until the '80's to experiment with LSD--why push it?

That's Ella and friend Seamus. She actually managed to utter "Namaste" after each candy bar was dropped into her bucket.

And there is her booty. I guess Kit Kats were on sale this year--she got 10.

I have some other tidbits I will write about later...