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The thoughts on this blog aren’t always filtered and the aren’t always focused, but they’re always from my heart and mind and here for your enjoyment. It’s one more way I like to connect with you. Feel-good comments and thoughtful questions are always welcome.

 

 

Monday
Aug162010

Finding my Footing

My feet are what I semi-affectionately call “gimpy”. They were the original source of my scoliosis and have never really reached their potential, though yoga practice has taken them heaps beyond where they were. They’re responsive to exercise but I still have collapsed inner and outer arches and poor bone alignment. It makes for some frustrating sensations when focusing on their healing/improvement.

This morning I spent two hours with Diane Bruni at Downward Dog in Toronto working with Zaa Bands to focus on aligning and energizing our feet. As with many moments in yoga over the past dozen years, this morning I focused intently on lifting my arches, spreading my toes, rooting my big toe, working to feel grounded. My fingers would mimic my desired foot action, but often my feet would just get fatigued without much result. Sometimes I would feel overwhelmed with thoughts like What if I can never fix my feet and always struggle with just the foundation of things? Often I was self-critical and defeated (no pun intended) by thoughts like What kind of yogi am I, not even able to stand much less fly? Needless to say, today was two hours of frustrating melded with good learning … when I could stop feeling frustrated.

My feet, my foundations, are flawed. They don’t support me the way they were built to, and I feel that ricochet up my entire being. But these are true yoga moments. Life will always be full of temptations to quit, judge, compare, be held back, wane or simply make things harder by adding drama/dukkha. The practice isn’t just in lifting my arches; it’s in lifting my awareness. Feeling my physical foundation as weak was an opportunity to recognize why I often feel insecure, unstable, tired by the effort of basic living, and truly not sure-footed in life as well.

Like most women subjected to the daily assault of messages in our culture telling us how we should be, look, do, think, dress, laugh, speak, move, blah blah, I’ve fallen under the tire of self-degradation. I wish my body were less bony, my butt less ample, my feet less gimpy. I have wasted so much of my energy trying to fit the cut-out of ‘the perfect woman’, for whatever that brings us. But instead of letting that self-talk destabilize me, what I was really practicing today was the art of standing on My Own two feet. I directed my fluctuating mind, quieted my emotionality and focused instead on what I could learn, what I might heal, how to work with My body, not to make it into someone else’s version of what it apparently “should” be but to make it the best version of Me it can be.

This is no small task. It often feels like it is my duty to self-loathe, as though if I were to say I’m fine just as I am that I’d be quitting on the noble deed of trying to be more like the woman I’m “supposed” to be. But WTF is that about? Why accept this bullshit pursuit? Will I really never find love unless I have larger breasts? Will I really only achieve what I desire if I fit the bill set out for me by Vogue? Who am I becoming by succumbing to these ridiculous scripts?

You know what I’d prefer? I’d prefer to stand up - on my own two currently-gimpy feet, might I add - in the midst of this crap and say, “I’m going to spend time working on having stronger feet instead of worrying about them being prettier. I’m going to decide that I can be exactly who I am and that will be just damn fine. I’m going to unplug from this Matrix BS and start living a life where my net worth isn’t determined by my cup size. Now who’s with me!!”

Man, I wonder what’ll happen when we Zaa Band my core!

Tuesday
Aug032010

What's at the heart of being a yoga teacher

I couldn’t have said this better myself. This is exactly how I feel about teaching and being a part of people’s evolution with yoga. Thanks for posting it, Ron!

 

Tuesday
Aug032010

Learning vulnerability

Years ago a close friend said to me that I never let myself be vulnerable. I found this to be a ludicrous statement at the time. What? I feel vulnerable ALL the time! And I’m honest to a fault. How could I be more vulnerable? Plus, why would I want to be? Vulnerable = weak in my world and if anything I was working my ass off to be less of that.

Fast forward a few years and here I am starting to see what he meant, learning about what it really means to be vulnerable.

First lesson: Turns out feeling vulnerable and being vulnerable are different things. I’ve felt frighteningly at risk in the world for as long as I can remember. Then I went through a period of time where this sense was honed to a razor’s edge due to having most of my trusted boundaries crossed. During that time I felt utterly devoid of armour. I’d sit across from people in a café and my mind would be thinking, “The only thing keeping this person from reaching across this table and punching me in the face is social convention and lack of motive.” Try walking around with that kind of mentality and see how long it takes before you start to develop a strategy for being a bit less unguarded. Trust me, it doesn’t take long.

I spent years learning to become whole again after that time and eventually I started to understand that I’d played a part in allowing that situation. This wasn’t blaming the victim; this was me recognizing that I had an element of control over events and could influence whether something that negative ever happened again. Getting out of destructive circles of people, taking BJJ, letting go of my love affair with extremism and being a victim, and setting higher standards for myself - not to mention learning how to say ‘no’ when it’s in my best interest - all went a long way toward me realizing that I’d been standing in a lava flow because I walked into it in many ways. I had been vulnerable because I didn’t know how to find my way to safe places. Once I’d figured out how to navigate around danger zones I drastically reduced how at-risk I was.

Trick is I still felt like I could be in danger at any time. So my personality - my samskara - developed around this sense and instead of just becoming wiser when it came to self-protection, a high level of guardedness became my norm. I’d put myself out of reach, and when I felt I needed to justify doing so, I’d step into being vulnerable completely unskillfully, get hurt, and then say, “See? Vulnerability is stupid and I’m not stupid. I’ll just be up here in my tower thank you very much.”

I thought I’d figured it out. I was going through life relatively drama-free. Perfect. My life was nice and simple, not messed up with other people’s crap. I hadn’t signed up for messy processes like motherhood or marriage where people hurt each other all the damn time. I was free. I was responsible for myself and I could care about others without anyone actually needing me (or me needing them). I’d mastered the art of self-sufficiency.

Then I started asking myself what I’m really doing here - in my life, on this planet. Am I here to scoot through relatively scott-free? Is the point of my time here to just float above life, analyzing and critiquing how others are doing with that whole “full engagement” thing while I observe from my café seat, Americano in hand?

Well, yeah, in a way it has been the point. I like being independent, and losing my drama was a huge improvement on being lost in my drama. For a while I needed to prove to myself that boundaries could work and I could get back on my feet and be okay. Sitting in coffee shops buried in a book was a pretty damn good antidote to having dudes running around threatening to kill my family members.

But now it’s time for a little better balance. Now I’m realizing that, ironically, staying in that comfy chair is making me more vulnerable because I’ll be living to avoid things rather than learning how to skillfully navigate them. I’ll be nurturing my weakness instead of developing the strength of character that being vulnerable in the world can create when done with awareness and loving-kindness.

Today’s lesson: Being vulnerable without being weak. How do I wander back to the warmth and life of the volcanoe without being burned? Well, first I won’t hurl myself into the mouth of it. Patience with myself is key. I don’t need to be in perfect balance right now, I just need to be a little more balanced today than I have been. The best way to strengthen a muscle is to work it a bit more each day and the best way to weaken or tear it is to do too much too quickly. The past few weeks it’s been all about staying in the moment, feeling vulnerable and just observing it. It’s amazing what can be learned by just being still and observing.

I stop and just breathe when I need to. I remind myself what my larger vision for msyelf is and I watch carefully that I reduce the amount of harm I might inflict on myself in the process. It’s some of the scariest shit I’ve ever experienced and a part of me hates it because being well-guarded feels really powerful, whereas this feels way too gushy and lovey-dovey for my liking. But it’s okay. I’ll find my own way - my tao - with this as well. It’s important to not be afraid of my life, of myself, of living.

Monday
May312010

Your official pep talk for the day

This is awesome. Makes me want a kitchen counter I could stand on and still see myself in the mirror, coz I think that’s the key to the whole thing:

http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?mkt=en-CA&vid=4e69ebaa-8bb1-4f89-9ae1-f39c93adb301

Monday
May312010

Join the Thrive in 30 Revival with Pranalife Yoga

For those of you who have been following along with the Pranalife Yoga blog, you’ve heard some of us mention over the past week that we’re committing to Brendan Brazier’s Thrive in 30 Diet Challenge for the month of June as the next layer of growth and improvement in our personal and professional lives. This challenge will begin tomorrow, June 1st and I encourage you to jump in and do it with us.

You don’t need any prep or background, it’s fine if you haven’t read Brendan’s books or even heard of him. He’s set up a website for the challenge that will be a series of videos and a short written section introducing you to the basis of vegan diet for optimum health and fitness that will serve as a simple guideline to help you succeed. He then gives you pointers and specific action steps which keep the diet changes managable and easy to incorporate. We will be blogging here on our experiences with the process so you’ll have plenty of support to make this significant step towards achieving a clearer, cleaner, stronger, more powerful life by challenging yourself to try on a new way of approaching food for just 30 days.

You’ll notice that Brendan has a uniquely Canadian persona - very relatable, unpolished and honest. His proof isn’t in his rhetorcial style - it’s in his results (read his bio here). If it doesn’t work, it was just a few weeks, but if it does work (and it has, for so many people), then you’ve just made a decision that’s radically altered your life for the better. Doesn’t that sound worth it? I definitely think so - that’s why I’m doing it. Let’s get better together! Woot!!