Upstaged

Yesterday I held an infant for the first time. I know, I know you can all close your mouths now. She is less than a week old and fits perfectly in the space from my fingertips to my elbows, her warm little head and dark silky hair cupped in my palms and her little feet and bottom curled up in the crook of my arms. I stopped by to see A and M and their new daughter, they live just up the hill, who was born on inauguration day while myself, M, KJ and E dined at the Adobe Inn in Ridgway--part lodging, part restaurant with the best--the best corn casserole you could ever want to eat. I guess they are super secretive about their recipe but I can tell you this: the three most prominent flavors are, in no particular order, butter, corn and sugar. I don't think they have a website but you can click here to read a review if you like. At the end of our meal we asked a gentleman who possesses not one word of the English language to take our photo in front of the crackling fireplace and huge aloe plants. Having failed the task we then waited until he wandered away and asked our server if she would help us out and even with a full command of our native tongue, it was apparently a mind-boggling task that resulted in a single conclusion: they must not have cameras in these parts. Picture #1, as you will see below, is ok, we all look happy and smiling, it's a bit too far away, but look closely--and I give you permission here--look closely between my legs.

What the hell IS that? Like some kind of camel toe gone camel tail, a trick of the light for sure. So we had another go round of it and came up with the perfect Girl's Night Out In A Town 45 Minutes Away Because KJ Left Her Son's Backpack At Another Restaurant And Had To Pick It Up So Let's Make A Night Of It And Call Erika Because She Lives There And We Don't Get To See Her Very Often Photo:

While we were dining and laughing over old stories, especially about the antics of Chilly B, A was in Junction trying to get this darling little girl out and into my arms, ultimately. When they asked if I wanted to hold her, I of course responded, a little too casually I might add, "I've never held a baby before," there was moment of silence and then a bustling around, a changing of the seats, and then I am positioned on the couch, hoping she will open her eyes and look, or better yet, smile at me! No, I never babysat and I was in Hawaii for the first year of Ella's life so this was truly the first time I got to experience this and I will admit, it was rather intoxicating. Plus A and M are super blissed out, her mom is there cooking a roast and the house is full of warm homey aromas while the snow drifts down and the temperature decides to hang out right around zero outside. I was ready to move in!

But I didn't, I skated down the street and came home to a delayed Robe Time and then the sudden and shocking news that an acquaintance and neighbor had spent the day deliberately and literally watching the life run out of her before calling the paramedics at what may have been the last possible moment. What a contrast. One minute I am basking the radiance of new life, of possibility and growth and hope and the next we are watching someone hauled out of a locked and darkened room whose expectations of life had suddenly dimmed to barely a glow. Someone whose world had cinched in to include no one but herself and her cat. And just up the hill the bubbly parents are almost having to turn away friends and family from visiting, just so they can have some time with themselves to rest and enjoy their nrew daughter.

And just that same day in yoga, as we turned from Corpse Pose into the Fetal Position, I commented on the continuation of life into death, death into life, the two linked by a shadow, never separate, constantly renewing each other, urging first one and then the other into the spotlight, sharing the stage. The contrast, the union, the light and shadow, the interplay of different experiences of consciousness.

Just Did It

I cannot believe I finally did it--I taught my first yoga class. And no, it wasn't "that bad." It wasn't that great, but it wasn't that bad, and 97% of it was JUST DOING IT. Right? My theme was the play between fear and faith, how to protect yourself while remaining open. How DO you do that? If we stay in a place of fear, whether it is teaching yoga, looking down a steep ski run, meeting a potential mate, whatever--we tend to be closed because we are keeping ourselves safe. To remain in that contracted, safe place provides very little (if any) opportunity for growth. Conversely, if we have no filters on our experiences and who we let into our lives, we open ourselves up to injury, physical or emotional or even spiritual. And you know what they say, "That which doesn't kill us, maims us." It is healthy to honor our limitations and fears and also selectively open ourselves up to be able to receive the benefits of transformation. And this applies to our yoga practice. Stand on your head? Drop back into a backbend? It seems nuts sometimes, attempting those poses, jumping into a mogul-studded slope, diving into a new realtionship. But that interplay of strength and flexibility is the tool that enables us to both honor our fears and embrace the faith that we will be ok. And tapping into and cultivating physical strength and flexibility when you are on your mat directly translates into the same qualities when you are off your mat.
Peggy came to class and sat right in front and it was really really nice to have a familiar face on my first class. My sequencing was ok but I didn't do very many adjustments, I just stayed up front and got a feel for what it is like to lead people through a yoga practice. And I must admit, I am very happy I did it. The studio in town, Telluride Yoga Center has just opened a second studio, so I may add some classes there, hopefully apres- ski.
I'm not feeling so great today, fighting off a cold, so I am just hanging out at home, resting and drinking tea and watching it snow outside. I will get some photos today to show you what my place is like.

Low Profile

A friend recently pointed out to me that my Match.com profile is weak. He didn't use that word, exactly, but that was what he meant. Which I appreciate. Now, I know what you are thinking: YOU joined match dot com? Holy crap. And yes, I had those very same thoughts myself. But my logic ran something like this. Here I am in North Carolina for two months, hanging out almost exclusively with my family. I enjoy meeting new people, I really enjoy going on dates, which I haven't been on for about 6 months now (I know). And it might be good "practice" writing up my profile and getting comfortable with this whole online thing in the event that I really want to do it for real. And that is the part that I should have been paying a little more attention to.

Now, in defense of my vague and noncommittal profile, I have to say that I found it rather difficult to compose and I couldn't quite put my finger on why until I was lying in the dark last night, contemplating everything and nothing. The way Match.com works is they pick out specific words you use to describe what you like and don't like and then run those against other people's profiles. When a certain number of words match up, you then have a percentage of how matchable you are with someone else. So the trick, and they openly encourage you to do this, is to be very very specific about exactly how you live your daily life and also how you want to live your life in the future. And what the person should look like that you wouldn't mind bumping into when you roll over in bed in the morning. In other words, you have to sell yourself. Which I'm not so good at. Or perhaps more accurately, don't really care to be good at.

In life, we are all aware that there is form and energy, right? There is an energetic component to everything, an inherent quality that defines something at its very essence, and then the form is the physical manifestation of that essence. Of the numerous "bodies" we possess, two of those are a physical body and an energetic body, and as we move deeper into our yoga practice, we start to access the energetic body more. We become highly attuned to the subtle ways we feel and how those feelings are expressed in our hips, our hamstrings, our hearts...anywhere, really. And as we begin moving away from the physical, the form, and into the subtle, the energetic, we start to experience life energetically. Meeting someone shifts from thinking, "She volunteers a lot" to feeling "She is generous." The energy is generosity, the form is volunteer work. Generosity can be expressed a thousand different ways. Where am I going with this, right?

Right. So what I found, as I tried to fill in that damn Match profile, is that I have been moving so far away from form, and so far into energy, that it felt very unnatural to define myself in that way. Constricting, actually. Noose-like. I honestly think I felt my chest tightening a little. The end result was a vague and somewhat despondent description of myself and how I live my life. So much for selling myself.

And it was during this Facebook chat that I clearly saw how lame my profile turned out to be. You all probably know that one of the qualities that I value in people most is honesty. Sure, I sometimes initially feel deeply wounded by someone's opinion and observations but almost immediately my appreciation for the truth eclipses that pain and actually serves to heal the wound. And there is such humongo growth in that! The truth here is that when I saw men who wanted to drive in from the next STATE to meet for a cup of coffee, I knew we were operating from vastly different game plans. My heart just isn't in it, not right now, and certainly not here in North Carolina. So I canceled my membership a few days ago. Big fucking whoop, as I like to say. At the very least I saved someone some gas money.

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!