And the Universe Weighs In

There are a lot of stressful things happening around me right now. Nothing I can say too much about --they are private stories and not mine to share. But they affect me nonetheless; some of them deeply.  I am trying to be a lighthouse in the midst of all of these storms. Steadfast and constant and a little beacon of positive energy.

It's hard. I am not always successful.

Yesterday, I went to do my yoga practice and realized, as I stepped on the mat, that I was just awash in anxiety. I said the Mantra for Purification about five times before I felt steady enough to begin. And then, as I began to move, my mind settled into acceptance that most of the things I am worried about are completely out of my control. They will resolve, or not, exactly according to some plan that I know nothing about. I just have to stay the course: walking my walk and breathing through the hard places.

Right about that time, I noticed something on the floor in front of me. It was a strand of my hair, curled in the shape of a heart.

Oh, Universe, you're GOOOODDD.

It's kind of hard to see.  You have to be looking for it. :)

(Please keep my people and me in your thoughts. This world is not for sissies.)

Why I'm Not A Food Blogger

Well, okay, being a teetotaling, vegan, mostly wheat-free, largely raw food foodie is PART of the reason.

But the biggest reason I am not a food blogger is because I cook exactly like I think.  Nothing is according to recipe, nothing is duplicatable, and when I'm successful, there are never any pictures.

Take today, for example.  I made the best soup. SO good.

And I don't think I can tell you how I did it.

It went something like this.

"I'm going to make that fantastic Chipotle Sweet Potato soup I made before."

"I'll just sauté this chopped white onion in some olive oil while I try to find the recipe."

"No, that's not it.  That's not it. That's not it. Okay, well, I can improvise."

"Except these are butternut squash chunks.  And I should really use them before they go bad.  Well, you know, butternut squash makes a FINE soup, and I still get to eat that color.  Win/win."

"Let me just add a dollop of garlic to the onion, stir that around some. Add the butternut squash, stir that around some. Add some veggie broth. Let that simmer..."

"Uh oh. Where did my chipotle peppers in adobo sauce go? Not in the fridge, not in the freezer, not in the back freezer... No can in the pantry. Still not in the freezers.  No, really, NOT IN THE FREEZER."

"Dang."

"Well, I have this can of diced tomatoes with green chiles.  I'll just add that for some heat.  I mean, how bad could that turn out?  There's a lot of squash and only this little can... okay, I'll do that."

"Everything is simmering along nicely. In fact, I think the squash is getting soft. I'll use the stick blender now--gosh, I LOVE this thing."

"That looks pretty good, actually. I'll add some almond milk to make it creamy... oops, the kind in the refrigerator is vanilla.  But I have an emergency carton in the pantry, so I'll use that."

"Only *I* could pour almond milk into soup and get it in my hair."

"That looks good, but maybe a little watery from all that liquid?  I know!  I know! I'll add some cashew butter.  Look at me thickening up my vegan soup like a vegan pro. Starting to be able to speak the vegan food language. Maybe."

"Tasting...wow.  That's good.  Needs a little more blending.  WOW! That's REALLY good. Needs...um...a little white pepper."

"Okay, that's done and it's really good.  I should share it with people, except I'm not sure what the recipe is now that my Chipotle Sweet Potato soup turned into Butternut Squash, Tomato, and Green Chiles soup."

"I'll just post a picture on Facebook."

On the Cusp of Great Things

I love New Year's Eve and New Year's Day.

Even though my celebration has changed dramatically over the years (this year, I am spending this evening either carting my older daughter and her rock band to a gig, or staying home and wringing my hands while Coop does the carting), I love the ceremony attached to wrapping up the old and beginning the new. I love doing silly symbolic things to commemorate the ending of this hard year-- it was a hard year --and the passage into the next one: full of hope and promise and memories yet to be made.

I don't make resolutions any more, but I try to set my intentions for the year. This year, I am doing a juice cleanse over New Year's Eve and New Year's Day to symbolize my intention to continue to eat healthier and (even) more raw foods. To be mindful of how I treat my body, and to celebrate all it can do, rather than its limitations.

I'm thinking about doing a yoga practice for the hour spanning both years. Because I know with full certainty that whatever 2014 holds of me, it will hold a LOT of yoga.  Hopefully a deepening of my practice of all of the eight limbs of yoga, as well as a large dose of the asana (physical) practice.

And I'm writing this blog post, because I hope that 2014 will signal my return to writing --real writing.  I want to write my story, in hopes that it might help someone else stuck in the inexpressible misery of chronic pain.

I guess that's it: Health/Nourishment, Yoga, Writing.

And love. May I have the opportunity and strength to sow it wherever I travel.

Happy New Year.

love,
Barb

Pain and Gratitude

Today was such a good day.

It's World Kindness Day, for one thing. So I had a fantastic new play list for yoga this morning.

THEN, I got to spend an hour with a new student who came to me after having surgery a few years ago. She lives with chronic pain, although not as bad as before the surgery. She came just to see if there was anything for her in yoga.

I think you can imagine my answer.

We spent some time rolling around the floor of my studio, checking out the ways her body moves now and the limitations --some immoveable because of new hardware in her body and some that I think will disappear over time as her body gains strength and opens up. I'm designing a yoga practice just for her, based on Dharma Yoga. I got so excited, I forgot to offer her tea afterward! My head was already full of potential sequences.

And there it was, see: An answer to a question I'd been asking for a long time.

I always wonder why I had to endure those years of pain. How was anyone served by that? The indignity of it --why was that necessary?

But today, what I realized is that I had to endure those years so I could really get inside of that pain. So I could really feel what it feels like to inhabit a body that feels completely foreign. So that I could loathe myself, and then learn to love myself. So that I will never, ever forget what that felt like.

I remember how angry I was, how really deeply enraged I was at this betrayal by my body. I punished myself. I withheld things I loved from myself. Over time, though (and it took a lot of time,) something in my perspective shifted and I began to see how valiantly my body was trying to cope with this pain. And I began to nourish it in a different way, like I would a sick child.

When I stopped fighting myself and grieving over all the things I couldn't do, when I started to celebrate the things I COULD do and to feel grateful for those, it made space inside of me for joy to bloom again.

Which always makes me wonder if I had been able to release my emotional pain sooner, would my physical pain have dissipated sooner, too?

Anyway, because I had that experience with truly dreadful chronic pain, I am uniquely qualified to help others who come to me in the midst of their own pain.

Before every class I teach, I pray that I might be a channel through which healing and health comes for those who come to me. I am overwhelmed with gratitude at the thought that I might help someone in the same way I was helped.

So, I had this huge, enormous, heart-filling joy today.

AND...then I won a cool t-shirt from Yoga Inspiration, who had posted a question asking how yoga had changed its readers' lives.  I wrote, "After three years of excruciating chronic pain, I took my first yoga class. It triggered my healing and now, three years later, I'm a RYT and have opened a small studio. Yoga has been a miracle for me and I'm pretty sure when you get a miracle, you're supposed to share it!"

I'm pretty sure when you get a miracle, you're supposed to share it.

Mistakes and Gratitude

Yesterday was One Of Those Days.  I didn't post, because I was slogging through the muck of my own mind for much of the day. Normally, I would have taught two yoga classes, but events conspired and I ended up not doing any yoga at all and then beating myself up over it for much of the day instead of just getting on my mat.

I get in my own way.

The day was unsatisfactory in other ways, and I was deeply grateful when it was time for bed.  Grateful for new starts--every morning is a new chance to start over. To do better.

I had scheduled TODAY as a day with my Jane (13.)  For some reason, I thought she had today off from school, so I rearranged my schedule so that she and I could have a fun day together. Alas, it was not to be.  (I know what you're thinking--I could have kept her home anyway.  But we're in a new germ pool AGAIN and she's already missed some school due to a stomach virus and strep so she has to go as long as she's healthy.)

So, I have this day stretching out ahead of me with no appointments, no fixed schedule.  I can't remember the last time I had a day like that. 

Which kind of makes me wonder if today was a mistake at all.

Space to Listen and Gratitude.

I went to yoga this morning.  Sometimes I take this class on Sunday because two of my friends take it regularly, and I don't get to see them enough.

So anyway, I went this morning.  There was only one person working the check-in and a line developed.  But because this was a YOGA line, and in Austin, to boot, no one got testy. We just started chatting.  I was eavesdropping on the guys talking behind me and then said something and the one guy said, "Are you eavesdropping?" and I said, "Yes, I really am.  I'm sorry.  I'm a writer and it's kind of an occupational hazard."

And then we talked writing for a bit and he said if I quoted him, I had to use the name Ron Wonderful.  Which made me laugh.

And then we went to class, and the room was overheated, which gave me a headache and reminded me why I don't go to this class EVERY Sunday.

So.

See what I did up there, though?

I introduced myself as a writer.

But the TRUTH is that I don't know if that's the case anymore. I'm not really writing much right now.

I don't introduce myself as a yoga teacher all that often either, for reasons I am not in touch with. Seriously, I need to meditate on that.  I remember how long it took me to introduce myself as a writer.  I think I already had a book out before I could do it without qualifying it in some way. Maybe after I do my 500 hour training, I'll feel legit.

(My brain...I don't understand it either.)

Really, though, I think what I am right now is a Listener.

I'm listening for what it is I'm supposed to be doing.  Am I supposed to be writing my story?  Am I supposed to be deepening my practice? I'm clearly transitioning into a very different stage as a mother.  (From Keeper of the Fingerpaints to Keeper of the Car Keys.) It's a time of huge flux, but very slow.

I'm so grateful for the space just to listen and see what's next. I'm so grateful to be at a time in my life when I'm content to let that unfold as it should --to reveal itself to me when I'm receptive and open. I'm sitting in this gratitude and I'm really patiently listening.

After class, Ron said, "Come with me.  I have something to show you." So, I went, thinking that because we'd been talking about polar dinosaurs,  he was going to show me a fossil or something. It turns out he wanted me to meet his dogs, Ruby and Lucy Lisa.

They were adorable.

When I'm in listening mode, life tends to give me Valentines like that.

Gratitude and Sobriety

I've been wanting to write about sobriety for a while now, but I haven't done it. It's a hard subject  --it tends to polarize people and I'm not really about that. I like to write about inclusive things.

I'm a firm believer in this:

I've never really spoken about getting sober much, but of all the changes I've made, it's possible that this one affected the quality of my life more than any other. It's a hard subject, though, because again, people feel judged when I say I don't drink --as if my very existence as a non-drinker means I'm judging them. Note that I'm not suggesting THEY stop drinking --everyone has to find his or her own path --but people start apologizing to me for their own alcohol consumption. I try to say that people have to live their own truths; this is mine.

So, anyway, I stopped drinking about three years ago. I've detailed before how I was going through a period of time when I made a lot of changes in order to align the way I was living with my value system. One of the those changes was getting sober.

I stopped drinking for a lot of reasons.  For one thing, once I was free of pain, I didn't want anything to take the edge off of my joy. Alcohol is a depressant. I've fought depression on and off for most of my adult life. I've always known that it was a depressant --even when I was drinking and taking anti-depressants.  (Yes.  I did that.)

But at any rate, I stopped wanting anything to tamp down or filter my emotions. It's that whole thing that we've talked about before: you can't selectively numb your emotions. I didn't want to live anesthetized in any way. Even if it means that I have to feel the lows, I don't want to miss out on any part of the highs.

I used to think I had to be drinking to be any fun.  Because I'm shy, I bought into the whole idea of alcohol as social lubrication.  In my case, though, I just FELT more uninhibited --but I wasn't more witty or gregarious.  I know this because I have spent a lot of time now as the only sober person in a room full of drinkers and y'all, NO ONE is more fun when they are drinking.  It's an illusion. Alcohol just magnifies who a person already is. If a person is fun when they're not drinking, they're fun when they're drinking.  And if a person is NOT fun sober, chances are that they are obnoxious when drunk.

It's taken me a long time to work through the issues I have associated with drinking. I think I thought that because giving up drinking was so easy for me, it meant I didn't have a dependence on alcohol. But it wasn't always that way. I had tried to give up drinking before, and with the exception of pregnancy, I'd never been successful. I may not have had a physical dependency of alcohol, but that habit was deeply ingrained. And I had other issues --I felt awful most mornings, I had migraine headaches, my depressions were worse, I was bloated and unhappy --that I can relate directly back to drinking.  Not to mention that every bad decision I've ever made in my life can pretty much be traced back to alcohol.

I feel like getting sober was one of the best things I did for my quality of life and my mental health. That's not to say it's a universal truism --I'm sure a lot of people can use alcohol moderately and remain happy and engaged in their lives.  That's not the case for me --moderation is not what I do best.

If you're wondering about the role of alcohol in your own life, try giving it up for a month.  It doesn't have to be a major event --you can say you're doing it for health reasons --and just see how it feels. Do you feel better or worse or the same? Is it hard? Do you feel like you're thinking about it all the time, taking up valuable bandwidth in your brain that you could be using for creative endeavors? At the end of the month, you'll know whether or not alcohol is an issue for you.  And then you can take steps to deal with it, or not.

I also feel that I want to model a different choice for my daughters. We've moved back to Texas, which is a hard drinking culture.  I want them to know that they have a choice in that regard. Studies say that the earlier an adolescent begins drinking, the more likely it is that he or she will be unable to enjoy themselves without drinking later in life.  I know from watching the people around me that this is true. And my girls have alcoholism on both sides of their family --I want them to know they run a higher risk of having issues with alcohol, but that they are in control of what they put in their bodies. I feel so strongly about giving them all the information they need so that they can make conscious, mindful decisions for themselves.

I guess that's what it all comes down to for me.  Being mindful. Being present. Cultivating awareness of why I do the things I do and whether or not that increases my joy. What choices have you made that increased your joy?