Ode to the YTT...

Tied together by a golden string
We are a web of smiles
Dancing in a dim-lit room,
Tired from emotional upheaval
All for this moment of joy
Where we can lay down the past
For now, and catch the lightness
In our web, cast it into a darker world.

We came unhinged from the eves
Of an old, unsettled house,
Crawled slowly from the shadows
To this unassuming place
That made us remember our truth.

These threads that bind us
Are stronger than
The holes between.
Through this journey
We've learned to show,
And what it means to be seen.

Empty Space & Yoga Modeling

It's funny. Sitting in the dark morning, half asleep, dreaming, mind wandering and then reeling it back in. Forgiving yourself over and over again for being human and having thoughts rise again and again. I often try to feel my skin--that outermost layer of myself that is the most tangible contact with the outside world. Sometimes, I can actually feel the air on my exposed skin, and I sit there contemplating what it is I'm touching. What I've come to realize, though, is that what I'm touching is not so much outside of myself. Instead, it is holding me together in a solid form; I am only this way because of the space outside--it is not so disconnected. And if I can touch and feel this space, I can touch and feel everything that is not my concrete body. I am connected to the world then, as I sit feeling the air on my skin. I am connected to everything outside of me--which, I suppose, is not really outside, it is just all the same whole.

Can you feel the outside world against your skin? Can you feel yourself be a part of the whole. Can your melt into that indifference and change your mind about what you have come to believe is so solid and unchanging. The intangible becomes tangible when we stop and feel what exists. It's funny because it's always there, our connection to the whole, but we seldom recognize it.


On a completely different note...This is a picture of a postcard for my friend's organic yoga t-shit business in Northern California..I got to do the modeling :)

Yoga in the Woods...

Only after did I realize there was broken glass all over this rock...

No moral to this post. Just avoid broken glass.

This is the first posting in a while, I know. I gave up writing for a bit, and kept thinking that blogging was not for me. But perhaps it was just that life wasn’t giving me the material I needed to be inspired, or maybe I was just too wrapped up with other things to notice.

So far August has been ugly and has thus given me something to grab hold of...though, instead of all the hardship, I wish I had won the lottery or something along those lines. But no. Here I am feeling like one of those cat-hair-sticky-rollers, picking up all this crap, rolling on and on until the shiny, clean, pearly surface has been covered with lint and cat hair and human hair and crumbles and whatever other stuff has been lying around, accumulating on your clothes. Yeah. I’m that roller thingy.

I’m not going to get into the details about why things have been hard lately—I’ve been sworn to secrecy to not say a word about some things—and for those of you who know me well, or even for those of you how just know me—you probably know that I don’t hold stuff in well. I am who I am and I have no secrets. When I have to hold on to something and not tell a soul, I feel like a brick is sitting on my heart. But just to give you an idea of things lately starting with the least serious... my job (my daytime job, which entails sitting at a desk, project managing) has been incredibly busy; we were going to buy a house (we both had fallen in love with), but withdrew our offer because it was taking too long and was a complete headache, which then turned into slight heartache; my aunt is in the hospital with liver failure because she’s an alcoholic and abuses drugs and some people in my family don’t really seem to care because “she brought this upon herself”. There’s more, but that’s the sworn the secrecy stuff... and the hardest.

It’s a funny thing. A friend texted me this morning and said, “It’s kinda awesome how even just teaching yoga makes you feel better!”. She’s completely right. When you’re practicing yoga, you are creating space for yourself. You are quieting your mind about the outside world, and going inside to align things in order for you to function wholeheartedly and compassionately towards the outside. When you are teaching yoga, you drop all your shit and have to be there supporting other people as they deal with their shit. This is why it’s hard to be a yoga teacher. It’s hard to put your stuff aside; it’s hard to touch and assist other people when you don’t feel like there’s anyone there for you; it’s hard to speak from your heart when you feel like yours is sinking. But a good teacher uses the opportunity of teaching to lift themselves up.

Teaching yoga, like taking yoga, is therapeutic. Sometimes we just have to bite our tongue—it just doesn’t matter what you feel or what you think, you have to be there for someone else because without your support that person will fall. I’m usually the kind of person that can’t hold anything in. I always feel entitled to my opinions and my emotions and I feel entitled to expressing them whenever and however I want. Most of the time this works, and this is why I don’t usually carry around a lot of emotional baggage—I’m open. But this is not always the way things need to be done.

This is what my trying past few weeks have shown me. And in a way, it feels good to put my stuff aside, know that though I may feel a certain way—I might feel like I’m going to break if I hang on to this secret or if one more thing hits me—I get my strength from helping support the people that need it. And from this terrible month, I feel I’ve grown as a person.

Sometimes we have to be there for ourselves in order to truly be there for others; and sometimes we must really support other people simply because we can. It doesn’t always feel good, but that's life. It's hard. But it's an honor to live it, still.

*****
I wrote the above before leaving for the weekend. Now I'm back and things seem to have settled, like I knew they would...eventually. Life is constantly cluttered with to-do lists and schedules, and work and worry. Once we're able to cross one thing off the list, another task takes its place. I always used to look ahead, thinking that life would one day simplify itself for me. But as I progress through life, I learn over and over again that this is not the case. The bottom line: life is complicated. It takes a certain finess to juggle everything...but with a steady mind and open heart, though it may not always make life easier, the things that come to be, come to pass. And the world goes on. These little every day stuggles are the means to wake up to the good days or all the extraordinary things that happen on Earth every day...things we consistantly fail to notice, like the moon rising every night, reliably changing shape.