Colorado Quiet

We have been in Colorado for the last week and a half.   For the first few days, we were exploring the mountains and creeks around Telluride and for the last 5 days we have been in Beaver Creek at a Suzuki Institute that Eider is attending. Tomorrow is our last full day.  It has been amazing.  On so many levels.  I notice myself pausing from time to time just in total and absolute awe of this magical and charmed childhood that our children are having. 

And, I am ready to go home.  I am ready to dig in the dirt a bit more around our place and see how much our chicks have grown.  I'm ready to have all of the parts of our family together, if even for a short time.  And I am ready to feel into my own rhythm with a bit more attention right now.

You see, I have been feeling very quiet.  Like I am a bit uncertain about how I proceed from this particular point in my life. In many ways, it has been brilliant for me to escape into the momentum and thrill of family adventure with my people.  It has provided me with a little bit of pause from the question being begged.  I am starting to understand that that question is begged of most mothers who have experienced pregnancy loss.  I would love to get past the question.  Or get through it perhaps?  So, it has been great to get a break from it for a bit, but now I am ready to return to my own work with a little more attention.

Before we had left for our trip, I was taking refuge in 3 things.  Plants, Bikram, and Dark Chocolate.   I was planting tons of perrenials.  Like, really, at least a plant a day.  Which is interesting for 2 reasons.  The first is that I have never had a very pronounced interest in planting non-edible foods.  In other words, I am a vegetable gardener.  To varying degrees every year, I plant seeds or starts that will grow into things that I can harvest, prepare and consume.  Sure, I have planted some flowers, but typically of the annual variety.  Which leads to the second reason: they are perrenial!  Like as in, something that may not even take shape for several years to come.  I have been busy putting down some more tangible, physical roots.  Which, for anyone who knows me has not been the case since we moved from rural sw Wisconsin to a small town proximal to a big (for me!) city 3 years ago.  And it is true.  I do feel myself rooting there.  I love my house.  I love our neighborhood.  I love the way the whole of my quasi-urban little yard and home seem to breathe with us through the seasons.  (I remember noting quietly to myself on one especially verdant spring day that I feel as if the plants are talking to me.  Maple, just as much to herself as my comment had been for me said: I always feel that way.  A comment, which in I would argue, totally sums her up.)

The Bikram practice has been an obvious- to me- place in which to retreat.  Because lets just face it, it is so fucking hot in there that the only place to put your attention in on survival.  Basic, raw, human, survival.  That is such a draw to me in that practice.  All I have the capacity to do in the Hot Room is simply the very next thing.  No lists, no real judgements, small and relative expectations.  Just me and the pose and the sweat and sometimes even the grief.  And that is the incredible part. I am suffering in there too hard to even try to do anything with the grief.  No answering questions, no making a plan, no rationalizations.  Just the shitty, ragged, and ugly truth of the whole thing.  90 minutes later, I stand my soaking body up and walk out of the room and in that moment I am beautiful.  Cleansed and Shining and Empty.  My pity party lessened a bit and my mind quiet within the expanse of my own honest humanity.  It doesn't hurt my practice either- but those are some thoughts for another day.

A few weeks ago I was in a class with a local teacher whom I adore.  He might have even just in passing said the word forgiveness and I immediately plugged into something with my kids.  There are all sorts of virtues that we learn from becoming parents.  Some of them are so totally cliche.  Like forgiveness.  But not forgiveness of myself you see.  I had not considered that particular teaching from my children before.  Sure, I have learned by virtue of being their parent that I hold within me a vast and infinite well of forgiveness for them as they stumble through their own becoming.  But I am only just now beginning to consider forgiving my own self in the ways that I forgive them, and that they -on an even a bigger and more profound level- always forgive me.  Of my short comings.  Of my mistakes.  Of the ways that I botch my job with them.  No questions asked.  Just total and complete and absolute forgiveness.  If I afforded myself even a fraction of what we give to each other like that, of what they so freely give to me, unconditionally, I might begin in both small and huge ways, to work myself through this next question of my own becoming.

And, then, dark chocolate.  Because, well, of course.

Settling In.

At this particular point in my life, there is not a day that goes by in which I do not consider my commitment to my husband.  Or really, my commitments to him.  Because, as I have learned, as I am learning, they are many.  In the last year or so, I have actually made it a bit of a daily practice to reflect on our relationship.  What my roles are, what my responsibilities are: to myself, to Chris, to our children,  and also really where I place value.  It wasn't always this way, but I suppose that by virtue of some epic failures on my part coupled with the grace of god, I have done some serious growing up in our relationship.  And I'm not saying that it is so organized that I am like: ok, now it's time to think about my relationship and my marriage and what it means to me.  No.  It is just that, every day, at some random point, the consideration opens up and I choose to sit with it.

I know that there is a lot of talk about co-dependency and differentiation and one is good and one is bad and you better know which is which and when and so on, but I do not think of it that way so much at all.  If anything, I am just doing my best to simultaneaously remember that he is a person totally and utterly distinct from myself and yet we have both chosen and continue to choose to weave our lives into one another.  I have chosen to tend the fires of not only my heart, but his as well.  I am a guardian of the threshold to his inner life.  And I am pretty sure that I am primarily guarding the threshold of his heart against particular parts of myself.

Now, that may sound a little odd, and I in no way mean that I do not let my husband see certain parts of myself.  Au contraire.  He has seen it all.  I guess that what I mean to say is that I am learning what parts of myself get their needs met by turning toward him and what parts have to turn out or self- regulate. But all of it is contained within the crucible of our marriage.  There just are so many more layers than I once thought that there were.  

We have been married for 10 years.  And while that seems like a nice chunk of time, I really feel like we are just getting started and I am finally beginning to have some small sense of what it even means to be married.  I am a slow learner.  And I am stubborn.  Rough combo.  

Over the last few years, he has shown up for me in ways that blow my mind.  And this last week has been no different.  He is a space holder and a truth seer and he has brought a depth and a magic and a freedom to my life that I don't think I ever really even could have hoped for.  

So, I have been considering our relationship- it's many different aspects- as I settle into this current time in my life and re-stoke the fires of self-love.  I have been easing myself into practice. Slow and gentle, full of listening and wonder.  And long holds.  Nice long holds to settle (reconcile) my nervous system and allow my breath to enter deep and true.  This may not seem like the most gentle practice.  But for me right now it is.  It could be all of these poses or one of them on their own- but I am remembering myself through a simple act of self-love and lots of breath and doing the thing that has anchored me to myself for half of my life.  

With all of the big love and gifts I have received from so many over the last week, here is my small offering back.  And like most of the practices that I do, this one is most strongly influenced by Christina Sell.  Both in design, and in the undercurrents of prayer and tone and the deeply rooted belief that there is a grace implicit in the forms themselves.  All of this, I learn from her.

Windshield wipers, Garuda's twist, Succirandrasana, SPG cycle, Supta Virasana, AMS

Shalabasana, Makrasana, Dhanurasana

AMS, Sirsasana 1 (and variations)

Crescent, Standing back arch, Uttanasana, Uttkatasana, Garudasana

Trikonasana, Parsvakonasana, Vira 1, Parsvottanasana, Parivritta Trikonasana, Vira 3, Anjaneya

Handstand, Paryankasana (over the block), Pinchamayurasana  (2x)

Hanumanasana, Chatush Padasana, Urdhva D 3x, Dwi Pada 3x

Baddha Konasana, Paschimottanasana

Sarvangasana and variations

Savasana

loss and trust

I could not have anticipated what this space would mean to me when I set out writing here.  I thought perhaps that it would be a nice way to fill in some gaps and let folks who may be interested in studying with me have a more personal look at who I am.  I did not know then how important it would feel to reveal truths about myself in whatever small ways I do here.  I did not have any idea that I would be able to feel this space waiting for me, like a living, breathing force in my life.  And so, it has felt quiet here for the last few weeks as I have been gathering my thoughts as to what is appropriate to share here.  I have had a few ideas of what I have wanted to write about: a short story about what it is like to work with me privately in my home, my reflections regarding a particular saying of Darren Rhodes and how it has worked on me over the last few years....  But there is a bigger truth that has been swallowing everything else up and eclipsing anything else that I have considered writing about.

The truth is that I really do not know yet what this space is.  I do not know how much to reveal here.  But I do know that one of my biggest values is in being open and honest and sometimes uncomfortably forthright about the truth of who I am, and the times that I have attempted to be otherwise have been to the serious detriment of myself, my marraige, my family and my community.

This week, I have been in the incredibly slow and painful process of loosing a pregnancy.  It is another one of the extraordinarily ordinary experiences that so many women go through during the course of their reproductive lives and so few ever talk about.  And it is so huge.  Especially when you consider the heart-wreching detail that for so many women such as myself you go on for a little while still being pregnant to a baby that is no longer living and that one way or another your body must figure out how to let it go.  I had no idea.  I naiively assumed that it was a spontaneous event.  I had no idea that I would be hanging around my house for days on end wondering if this day is perhaps the day.  And yes, I know that there are things that I could do to move things along.  I am just choosing in this moment not to do them.

You see, with any true story, there is most often a back story which provides relevent context for the current events- and mine is no exception.  Last July, I terminated an unplanned pregnancy.  It was a situation that I truly never thought that I would be in- much like the current one- as I have always wanted a 3rd child.  But last July was only 4 months on the heels of the biggest Dark Night of the Soul that I had ever seen and I was quite literally pulling myself up by my bootstraps and thanking god that my marraige was not ending.  My husband and I were licking our wounds and loving eachother with all of the fierce vulnerability of 2 people who have hurt and been hurt by eachother to the very core of who they are.  And as much as I wanted another baby, my desire to rebuild my marriage took precedent to all else and I made my choice.  

Here again, I imagine I am wonderfully ordinary.  While I believe to this day that that was the best decision for my marraige and my family at that time in our lives, having an abortion was the most devestating way in which I could imagine ever betraying my body.  I felt the discord and grieved intensely for months.  My husband and I processed it relentlessly both at home and in the office of our amazing therapists.  After many months and with a lot of fear and doubt and excitement and thrill we tried intentionally to have a 3rd.  And now the tables have turned and it is my body that is betraying me.

Yes, I know that that is me painting it a wee bit dramatically.  But the triggers are there.  So, while I know that I could go in to the hospital and request a d&c and move this process along- I am choosing instead the path of patience, of waiting, and of trying to re-build the severed trust between me and my body.  A year ago, after my abortion, I felt so alone.  As though all of the Light had gone from me and there was no love or regard for me in all the universe.  This year, even as I am full of tears and heart-ache and longing- I feel so held in the Grace of gods love in the form of Chris, our beautiful children, my mom, my sisters, my friends near and far who have stood with steadfastness in the pain of my current heart space and not waivered in there love and care.  They were all here last summer as well, the difference is that it was not so easy to see as I myself was not so clearly here.  

So I am here.  Taking my time.  Feeling incredibly grateful for all of the abundance in my life.  And also feeling accutely aware of the suffering the we each bear on a day to day basis.  The extraordinarily ordinary tragedies that befall each of us.  

(this picture was taken the day after I realized that I was going to miscarry. maple was holding this sweet little bantam that she had named pepper.  in the great mystery of life and irony of time, when she woke up in the morning she found that her chick had passed in the night.  with the depth of understanding of a quasi farm girl coupled with the truth of a big and infinite heart, we held eachother as we both sobbed big round tears and tried to gain some sort of insight into the mystery.)

Practice at Home..... with children.

This is something that I think about a lot.  Because, well, I do it a lot.  And perhaps it has become normal to me but only because I made it so.  As a woman who is a yoga practitioner, who is also a yoga teacher,  who is also a wife, who is also a mama, it is shockingly hard to find a model of a successful woman yoga teacher out there who also happens to be a mama.  There just are not that many.  And, yes that is beginning to shift a bit now, but SLOWLY.  And we are having to create what it is on our own with very little if any guidance whatsoever.   I find this emergence both crucial and thrilling.  

I wrote the following piece during the first session of Chrisitina Sell's Asana Junkies webinar in January of 2013.  My kids were younger then.  And my vision was not quite as clear as it is now.  I hadn't yet made the choice to homeschool my kids.  I had not yet fully embraced the vision of my home being the actual nexus for yoga as I know it.  But there was a spark.  There was a knowing.  And many things sprung forth from that.  

I am very lucky in that I have had a teacher who for the entire 15+ years of my relationship with her has always said to me: The Yoga of Family comes First.  No matter what.  It did not matter that it was not her dharma to have children, she totally got it.  And has supported me throughout.  That one simple statement, has made all of the difference in the world.  Because my family does come first.  My husband.  Our children.  Our lives together.  The yoga exists as a way of living more fully into the choices that I have made in this particular context.  Not as a way for me to somehow slip outside of that.  

So here it is.  The spark of something.  My own particular beginning and clarifying down a path.  In fact, when I look back on it, all of the work that I am currently doing in my teaching is to support this vision.  Of yoga practiced within the context of our day to day.  Within our mess.  Within the unsettled upheavel of us, who we are.  Right now in this very imperfect, unhoned, transient moment.

I just wanted to speak to something here that was mentioned very briefly on the webinar today regarding practicing at home with small children. I think that in general with little kids at home we often tell ourselves as the adults who care for them that we cannot practice while they are in our care. However, I do not think that this is the case. I think that in fact it is really fantastic modeling for them to see their parents engaged with their passions, whatever they are. I have always practiced with my kids at home, whether they were napping, playing with one another or on their own. Provided that I have assured the safety of their environment, I can generally get in some very decent time on my mat. Granted, it does not always go how I want it to. Some days the shit hits the fan and they are not game for my attention to be withdrawn from them. But more often than not, they love the energy that it creates and recognize it as a natural and safe home activity. My littlest is 3 and a half now and some of my best practices happen when just the 2 of us are home and he will often leave me be for up to an hour and a half. I think that having to depend on themselves for entertainment is a really valuable skill, and we do not do tv here so they are out of luck in that regard. Also, I should mention, that I am absolutely not into kids yoga. I think that it is great that it exists and that people love to teach it. Awesome. Just not for me. So, that is not what is going on at home when mama gets her mat out. Maple, who is 7 now, will sometimes decide to practice with me, but it is not disruptive. They are free in that way. And they are comfortable with that. I have not tried to separate my practices from them or our lives together. They are as likely to join me in chanting as they are in other household activities like cooking or crafting. It is available to them but not about them directly. OK, this is longer than I had originally intended, but I aim to offer a little bit of support and hope to all of the stay at home mamas and papas doing the good work of raising children. And while it is so wonderfully overwhelming, intense and challenging at times, lets not rush these precious early years.

(Alright, as an afternote, I want to say that my kids do occasionally watch a program or movie while I am practicing or teaching a private.  They also do kids yoga.  And they LOVE it.  One of my mentorship students introduced me to Cosmic Kids Yoga, they have a youtube channel.  My kids adore it.  Jamie, the teacher is amazing.  It is brilliant.  And while it is a little young for Maple, she has always been keen on young children and activites well suited for them.  Plus, she has very astutely observed that after Eider has done some yoga he is always so much more chill.  Ahem, that make 2(3!4!) of us.)

these days

Every year during the second part of January we travel to the beach with my mom.  Chris usually comes for most of the trip and my sister and brother join us for part of the time as well.  This trip is one part family time, another part sun time, and still a third part book end to the previous year. 2014 was a journey in personal healing for me.  It was not the first, and it will doubtful be the last, but it was chalk full of hard to swallow life experience that has left me more than a little wrung out, raw, and ready to move on.  The intitiation of this most recent journey into deeper relationship with myself began during last years Beach Holiday.  It was miserable weather.  A real slap in the face for those of us travelling from the polar vortex of the upper midwest.  But it was a perfect mirror for my insides at the time.  Anyhow, the weather this year was glorious.  And the sun shone on my mending heart in ways that make it feel just right to take a solid step into the new year.  Hello 2015.  I am ever so happy to meet you.

A few weeks ago, Maple's horseback riding teacher-and my friend, invited me along to see the movie Wild.  I have not read the book.  I had never heard of Cheryl Strayed.  But my impression is that it is a universal story of our very human experience of walking through our own shadow as we navigate the path back to the Light.  Cheryl Strayed wrote another book, tiny beautiful things. It is a compilation of the letters she recieved and the responses she penned as Dear Sugar- an advice columnist for The Rumpus.  I devoured this book on my trip.  There are many hidden and not so hidden gems in her writting but the one simple bit that I keep returning to is this:

       "But the thing about rising is we have to continue upward; the thing about going beyond is we have to keep going."

I am in my own rising right now.  My own going beyond.  And as with most things, and much of what I intend to write about here, this feels like the path of practice to me.  Much of what yoga is to me is found in the ways I continue, the shape of my keeping going.  I do think that it is a path of wholeness.  One where I hold the hands of all my parts- the ugly and treachorous along with the bright and bold- and walk forward toward the Light.

time

This is definitely way too long a piece of someone else's writing for me to post here, but as it is such an exemplary expression of where my head so often is in the context and content of my days- I'm posting it anyway.  It is an exerpt from Ben Hewitt's recent book, HOME GROWN: Adventures in Parenting off the Beaten Path, Unschooling, and Reconnecting with the Natural World.

"In my life I have seen, time and time again, how things that were within my reach move beyond it.  I think about the people I have cared for who have died or simply moved or drifted away.  I think about the passing phases of my children, how Fin no longer wants to hold hands the way he used to, how I can no longer hoist either of them atop my shoulders at will.  I try to remember the final hand hold, the final shoulder ride.  But I cannot.

Likewise, I have seen how things I could never have imagined needing have become things I can hardly imagine doing without, and to live with the knowledge of their eventual departure is to live in harmony with the grief their leaving will impart.  Sometimes I think of these things as birds landing on a branch.  They perch for awhile and then, for reasons known only to them, take flight again.

Occasionally, I am visited by a sense of nostalgia, not for an earlier era or for some past event but for the future nostalgia I know I will feel for now.  I suspect that is what I am feeling in those moments I want time to stop: the storage of the present experience for a future recalling.... I know it is not merely my memory that is absorbing these small moments.  It is my emotional core. It is my character.  It is my spirit.  It is everything that makes me me, and in the flickering seconds when I feel the influence of these moments on the very core of how I think and feel and perceive the world around me, I have this sense of being held in the palm of this place.  Of here and now."

I came to yoga long before I came to parenting.  It is hard to separate out the 2 or have any real sense of the sort of parent I would have become had I not already been steeping in the teachings. Yoga takes such a broad view of most things and parenting on the other hand is more often than not a down and dirty moment to moment occupation.  And yet it has never wholly been that for me.  I have brought that wide view across into this realm and in so doing have lived alongside the nostalgia for now that Ben so perfectly describes.  I have often said that I am not the sort of parent who is in any kind of hurry for my kids to get bigger, easier, more independent, less needy. I never have because I always could feel the inevitability of just that.  Parenting is a joyful task no doubt.  But is it is also a soul rendering heart breaker more minutes out of each day than I care to count.  It is hard for me to imagine anything else that is so all consuming in the moment and yet, and yet is the number one most giant of giants, path of letting go.

Oh yes.  Practice.  Practice is that as well.

what stays the same

Several months ago I was having a conversation with my longtime friend, teacher, mentor, Darren Rhodes, in which I was explaining to him why I was reluctant to get involved with a particular project that he is quite passionate about.  In no small terms I was attempting to convince him of my incredibly short attention span and vastly fickle nature.  It went something along the lines of: "But D, what good will I be?  My interests in yoga are always changing.  I will like things one particular way and then before too long everything has entirely shifted and I am interested in something else completely.  I am not reliable!"  Good naturedly, he watched me through this lengthy and immpassioned explaination, and then I think he may have laughed.  Like, in my face.  And then he said something that was both so wonderfully obvious and so completely surprising that I have found myself digesting it for these many months.  He told me that he has watched me show up for the yoga since he has known me.  That I have never lost interest.  Yes, perhaps things have shifted, changed, evolved- as they well should- but the consistent thread has been the yoga.  I have never waivered from that.  And the funny thing is, he is totally right.  It's not like I lost interest and decided to devote myself to deep sea fishing (even thought that is probably incredibly cool and who knows I very well may!).  It's just that for a time perhaps I was really gung-ho on doing major deep backbends and now I'm not so much.  Or perhaps I boycotted standing poses for several years and then one day was over it.  Or maybe I only ever worked with my timer for like- forever, and then one day I preferred to count my breaths.  You get the idea.  From the outside looking in- there has been a deep interest in the practice of Hatha Yoga that I have maintained over the better part of 2 decades.  From the inside though that realm itself is so vast and so diverse and embodies so many different expressions...

Funny, though.  Such a simple and yet very profound insight for me.  I think I may generally need to be smacked in the face by what is completely obvious or apparent.  Work in progress.