Practice Me/ Practice You ♥

Practice ... it is what I return to again and again.  As I age, I find myself gathering more and more practices around me - meditation, yoga, art making, prayers, writing.  What is obvious to me now is how life IS my practice in the sense that a commitment to  maintaining alert presence, wakefulness, non-attachment and responsiveness (versus reactivity) demands daily  - indeed minute by minute - attention, effort and commitment. 

Recognizing this truth for myself has been a source of immense liberation. Rather than believing I "ought to have it right by now" I can relax into the vastness of my self, my life, as a work-in-progress.  There is great freedom and possibility in the notion that I am ever and always evolving, growing, changing.  The important distinction is intentional growth versus hapzhard growth. I can let life shape me, but that is a passive experience.  If I am choosing to enter into the conversation of living (as David Whyte describes it) I  am also choosing to be an active agent in this process of growth and unfolding.  And that seems to me to be the more exciting and rewarding option. 

This past year illness and lingering grief challenged me to dig deeper.  Oh, I thrashed around for quite a while.  But when I finally surrendered to it all, when I accepted I felt lost and stranded, then I was ripe for being found. The work of yoga teacher and author Elena Brower has guided and inspired my moving forward. More accurately, her online mentorship program Elevate provided me with the tools and the space to draft my own map home.  Now there is her newest offering Practice You: A Journal which combines all of my favorite tools for self inquiry: creative art play, writing, dialogue and meditation. 

Tarot cards from the Anna K Tarot

In addition to her new book, there is an online offering (a second incarnation of Elevate) to help us squeeze the most out of this already juicy gift. I have worked through the first Elevate mentorship program twice (in 4 months!) and the process was deepened through conversation with a dear friend also in the course. We will be together in this second round ... but what excites me is the invitation to share this work with my yoga students and my Cowgirl. 

Flipping through the pages of  Practice You what is immediate apparent is the versatility of the journal. The prompts and the artwork inspire wildly creative and personal responses. My Girl is not much for traditional journaling (read: not at all!) but the beauty of this work is the invitation to respond in a variety of ways: collage, paint, free flow word play, mindful doodling ... I have yet to explore all the possibilities but I can sense a ripeness for the unexpected to reveal hidden treasures of insight and understanding. 

"i am" page from Practice You

Life with a newly minted teenager has brought to the surface many old and triggersome questions: what does it mean to belong? How do I see myself and my gifts? Who is in charge of my happiness, my sense of self worth? How can I learn to embrace ALL parts of myself to both heal and to honor and understand the complexity that is being a human animal in this crazy wonderful world of ours?  

Just as I am a work-in-progress, so too are my relationships. As my Girl steps into the rocky terrain of teenager, our relationship is changing.  I am grateful to Practice You as a tool to support me supporting her. I don't know if she will engage fully in the process with me, but a copy waits for when she is ready. Meanwhile, I do my work so that I can hold space mindfully and lovingly for those around me to do theirs.

When it seems like Life is throwing up roadblocks, the choice for me has been to lean upon my practice. Illness, pain, emotional challenges, spiritual darkness - each and every time these challenges have visited me, I have felt stranded and abandoned.  Yet when there seems to be no solution in sight, the only option is "keep on keeping on" which for me means: turn to my practice. 

I have a mantra that kicks in whenever I feel lost or aimless: I support my practice and my practice support me. It is my formula for living. I could also say I support my creativity and my creativity supports me. I support my work and my work supports me.  I support Love and Love supports me. Underneath it all are foundational beliefs I have had to extract from the hard rock of inherited attitudes and concepts about myself held for far too long. Here again, my practice(s) have fortified me for this ongoing excavation.  I am excited to discover how Practice You supports and deepens the vital work of Practice Me. For if I want my Girl to understand the full extent of her beauty inside and out, if I want her to explore and express the richness of her talents and gifts, I must do the same.  

pages from my Elevate notebooks

Yoga reminds me that my natural state is Wholeness and Unity; that my experience of living in this human body is a journey of healing through the process of remembering myself already whole and complete. The outcome of this journey is freedom within and connection with Life around me.  

And so, I return each day to practice ... in whatever form it may take ...  it is like a walking stick that steadies me as I make my way forward.  I do the work, but my practice keeps me upright and moving along my path. "This is how I respect myself. These are my practices." (page from Practice You)

* Simplicity *

Simplicity is my intention for 2017 ... along with Devotion (ah, yielding to the Gemini rising in my natal chart ... gotta have two intentions!)  I excel at overthinking, over complicating matters so Simplicity will be a real practice for me. It is already helping me find a path back in after a tumble down the hillside of illness and emotional exhaustion.

Lacking any sophisticated, clever or inspired account of the past month or so, I realize Simplicity tells me to just show up and begin again. Here's my story du jour: I thought I had injured my back and thankfully, that wasn't the case. (I worried I would no longer be able to volunteer with mucking out stalls, turning out horses - the one job I always look forward to!) What I had was a case of the shingles thankfully with no rash, just weird sensations and occasional flashes of intense and random pain. (At times it felt like I had an alien inside my body attacking my back or stomach muscles.) Still, the virus along with polar bear chilling temperatures, have kept me house bound for weeks. 

Weeks at home with only the dog and my loopy aunt of a mind to keep me company. 

Weeks to ponder my itchy navel. (Right side only)

Weeks  shuffling about the house in the one pair of comfy, loose-fitting and warm pants that I own ... weeks wearing oversized underwear of my husband's (who knew?! Men's underwear is infinitely more comfortable! No leg elastic! All cotton, no miracle fabric that tries to mold or cling to my delicate parts ... and no, I flatly refuse what my husband oh-so-gently tried to suggest to me: that perhaps I have been wearing a size too small of my lady-panties. Hogwash!)  A slippery slope for sure. The prevailing mood: Meh and What's the point?

I have no agenda. I have no plans, no real ambitions. This entire past year I have felt like the Hanged Man in the Tarot ... swinging and dangling and wondering when will I be cut down? After frustration, after despair, after confusion and resistance ... yup ... surrender. A slow but steady shedding of the layers of identity that I believed were necessary to bring meaning to my existence, to who I believe I am meant to be.

Lying in bed at 3 am, the virus attacking my back, waiting for a pain pill to kick in, with Mad Men on Netflix keeping me company ... it was a strange kind of rebirthing experience. (I felt squeezed by life in a not-so-loving way) My body, living, current events  (the world ruled it seems by upside thinking and pretzel logic) have me redefining how I want to be living each day.  "You've got to find what matters most to you." This was the advice given to the writer/doctor Paul Kalanithi after receiving a diagnosis of stage IV lung cancer. (When Breath Becomes Air is his beautiful and thought provoking memoir, published after his death)

Apparently, birds matter a lot to me. Interesting experiment: leave lots of pictures on your camera and months later, download them. I had 78 pictures of birds taken from my back window. (A discovery which means I am more my father's daughter than I have allowed myself to believe ... as inheritor of his boxes of seagull slides, the relationship is hard to miss)

These past weeks I have leaned upon what matters to me:  
- my yoga practice (choosing again The Simple: basic poses, breath practices that enliven and refresh my body and mind; complex postures are not better, merely complex) 
- creative practice (learning, playing, observing, pushing myself to develop and grow by taking a drawing class online; immersing myself in the basics of line, tone, color theory and learning about my tools and technique)
- time simply spend connecting with family and friends

Rather than fixating on making something of my life, I am focused upon the simple act of living it. Or at least observing it when weather and illness prevent me from a more active existence.

  

Having fun certainly (there has been much binge watching of Six Feet Under, Mad Men, X-Files, Vera - all in the service of knitting time, of course!) but in turn, my chance to squeeze life back. 

Simply put: to be fiercely disciplined with myself about how I show up in my life: how I speak, what I do, what I think and where I place my energy and attention. And when I catch myself stepping off track, I simply step back on path.  

 

august memories ...

Summer is hard for me. I feel heat and humidity more intensely than the cold and it may sound perverse, but too much sunshine makes me grumpy. 

 

But summer has been bringing me some lovely moments which I record in my gratitude journal -

~the pleasure of sleeping with windows open after a long heat wave
~finding baby peppers growing in the garden box
~waking to bird song
~walking Moose in the coolness of night
~an abundance of marigolds
~fresh peaches from the farmer's market
~monarch butterflies on my walks
~an afternoon thunderstorm
~corn still warm from the sun and the fields

Ah, corn. I buy it from a truck parked daily in the corner of our neighborhood gas station. I buy 6 ears and they always throw in an extra "just in case" an ear is less than.  We usually end up with left-over ears and recently I have taken to cutting the kernels from the cob to use for soup. 

I am cutting a cooled ear when I remember cleaning out my mother's kitchen shortly after her death. In her freezer were six small plastic containers, each filled with corn. Individual meal sized portions of summer corn set aside for winter months when the taste of fresh corn would be most welcome.  I am struck by the hopefulness of that action and then undone by the reality that I held the bits of my mother's last summer. It felt sacrilegious, but I emptied each container down the disposal. There were too many memories to swallow in her stuffed apartment. Crackers of every kind (she was a cracker afficienado), canned goods long expired (stashed away for those rainy days that never arrived), spices I still use, and a half emptied bottle of Kahlua. (DId she drink it with friends? Or by herself? A solitary pleasure enjoyed as a daring gestures in her golden years?) 

I realize part of the weightiness I have felt this summer perhaps can be attributed to a growing list of bittersweet August memories. The last real season with my mother. The last time I saw my father was in August. He was in the hospital recovering from by-pass surgery and I flew out to help my mother for a week. When it was time for me to return home, I hung back from my mother and brother. I slipped back into his room.  I didn't want to believe I was saying good-bye, but part of me knew.  

My father asked me, "Do you think I will be alright?" I can't remember what exactly I said, but I know I reassured him. I reminded him he was going to have a new granddaughter and that he would be meeting her soon. He had to get better.

Less than two weeks later, the Husband and I flew to China to bring Cowgirl home. One month after I became a mother, I lost my father.  He never got to see Cowgirl in person, but at least he knew finally we had become a family.  He never said so, but I know he was thrilled for me to become a mother. 

This month will be our ten-year anniversary. Ten years as a family with Cowgirl. Next month will bring the ten year anniversary of my father's passing. As I get older, I become more fluid in the dance between grief and joy, sorrow and gratitude, loss and hopefulness. I store up memories like my mother put away corn. I feed upon the moments, the memories to sustain and inspire me. 

And we fill up our days with new moments, new memories. The imperative is to enjoy the Now because the future can be a long way out and all we have is right here, right now:  life rich and hard and heartbreaking and heart filling all at once.  

with gratitude

I find it curious that as I deepen new practices, others seem by necessity to languish. Writing being one of them!  I have been feeling deep shifts - tectonic plates within my heart and soul - but lack the language to describe it all. Or perhaps I should say I do not feel the need to explain myself. And that is a little huge for me!

I have been spiraling back to long-lost practices - meditation, yoga, journaling.  I recently realized my meditation practice dropped off just as my creative practice took root. Now I am returning and while my initial reaction is to bemoan the gap of 8 (!) years and all that might have been if I had stayed true, the new and wise me recognizes that I return ready to sink down some deep and tenacious roots. 

I doubt it comes as much of a surprise, but I can be a bit of a curmudgeon. Cantankerous in the sense of needing to go against the flow. Yes, I resisted for many many years the Harry Potter series because, well, I was annoyed by everyone pestering me to read them. (I also worked at a bookstore at the time and resisted ALL books that arrived in bulk. It just offended my sensibilities to pile waist-high stack after stack of one book when there are sooo many good books seeking readers.) 

Another trend I resisted on principle was the gratitude journal. (If it came from Oprah's lips, I turned a deaf ear ... yet I love Oprah? So I own, I am a tortured soul.) It's not the concept of gratitude or the beauty and impact of a regular practice in acknowledging the daily gifts offered by life and living that raises my hackles, but rather a scrapbookish notion of prettifying and pasting gratitude down in a kind of memento mori manner. 

Truth be told, I didn't give it a whole-hearted effort.  Oh yes, I did for one month keep a gratitude journal. I completely forgot I had done so until this past week when I half heartedly decided to answer a journal prompt from a course I am taking. The prompt was to write down 111 gratitudes. 


Let me say, that when writing down so many gratitudes, the heart shifts from half to full. 

What I loved about this exercise was how much deeper the gratitude flows when I pushed myself beyond the usual items of health, family, nature, and friends. I started to see the relationship between gratitude and creativity. For the more I wrote, the more expansive my understanding and the vision of my heart.

So I decided - decades past Oprah's proclamations - to start a gratitude journal.

Which is how I found the journal (that one month experiment) I had forgotten I had started eight year ago. Looking through the entries, I was blown away by the beauty and love within those pages. I was also stunned to realize that at that time, I could not fully perceive the depths of the love and gratitude.

I found these entries which spread wide my heart:

- reading out loud to Cowgirl; feeling her head upon my shoulder
- warm & spicy chai to begin a new week
- seeing the pride on Cowgirl's face as she puts her boots on "all by myself" 
- the drive through French bread bakery and warm rolls to eat in the car   
- the smell of Cowgirl's hair 
- my girl telling me "good job mommy" as she holds my leg
- meditating in the early morning; finding my girl sleeping behind me on the couch
- baby orangutan looking us in the eyes and goofing
- singing together in the car
- my mantra for when things get tough
- Cowgirl singing to her stuffed animals in the dark   

 

 I marvel that I relinquished this practice so quickly, but I probably hadn't even looked at what I wrote down. I was too immersed in it all to perceive the tiny treasures each entry was. 

Now, with the distance of time and perspective, I see how unique and precious each moment can be ... and truly is.  So each night I reach for my lovely gratitude journal (a beautiful book of handmade paper given to me at Cowgirl's baby shower) and I write with my Lamy fountain pen five items for that day.  It helps to be doing so as the sun sets over my garden, the birds singing and the fragrance of new blooms combining with a citronella candle or incense by my feet. 

Gratitude, mindfulness and celebration ... life in these past 8 years has prepared the soil and I am ready to receive it all.

holding on to earth

I like to think I am a glass half full kind of person. Most of the time, it is easy to perceive the bounty of goodness, love, hope and possibility in the world.

But other times? Yes, darkness seems to pull hard and my heart wobbles, my thoughts scatter and emotions surge.  Yesterday I read in the morning paper about the antarctic ice sheet melting due to warming waters. The accompanying photograph is of the penguins and my mind envisions them - along with the polar bears in the arctic - sinking under rising seas. So too my heart sinks and the tears flow. Too much water, too much destruction and too much to comprehend.

 

This morning I learned of more bombings in Belgium. I don't know if my heart can dip lower? Overwhelm threatens to paralyze me. Yet I know burying my head is not a answer nor is it a solution. The ripples of violence, the pall of despair, the numbing of fear and frustration strike at us all. Indeed these emotions are at the heart of what drives the insanity and our reactions to it.

What can I do? I turn to what I believe is both the source of the imbalance and the means of transformation. I look within myself and I consider my relationship with Mother Earth and her fellow inhabitants. I consider the health of my relationships - with myself, with my community, with my home soil, and I ask where is healing needed? What is within my power to effect change? Can I identify my imbalances so that I might lovingly and compassionately begin to correct them? 

I have identified for myself the need to establish a new relationship with earth. To understand in a way that is more than merely intellectual, how I am a part of the whole. How do I dishonor earth when I dishonor my own being? And how might bringing awareness to self care be a means of shifting the balance away from abusive patterns of acting/thinking/reacting and towards healing, supportive action, and an environment of mutual respect and consideration?

I step outside and bring my feet to the emerging green grass. I feel the prickles of dried blades give way to the softness of new growth. I close my eyes and listen to the birds speak across the lawn. I smell damp earth and perceive the slow but certain waking up of life that is Spring's arrival. Here is where I begin. This is what I trust. This is what I hold onto and here is where I pour my hopes and my fears for the future. This lap of Mother Earth. May she guide us. May she remind us we are all one. May we understand the need to pause and listen - really listen -  and hear. May we come to honor her love in more than just words. 

May we find the courage to continue to hope and to see what we do matters and each day there is opportunity to be an agent of positive change. It begins right now in this conversation with mama earth. I promise ... I promise ...