The Budding Optimist

   "Yoga Elsa told me it would be okay if I quit training, that no one would think less of me. "But I thought you said it's normal for it to be this hard and for everyone to get injured and for us all to feel like we're dying right now!" I wailed. "It is. But you have to think it's worth it. There has to be something worth it in this for you. If you are just miserable the whole way through, it's okay to stop." Yoga Elsa is pretty badass. I am not sure why this training seems to be so much harder for me than for the others in my class. I'm sure part of it is the failure to rise above my job situation. I think part of it is also that most of the others have someone supporting them -- a partner, or a spouse, or even a studio. I'm climbing Mount Everest on my own here and hoping my oxygen holds out." I wrote that weeks ago now when I was afraid I would quit. It hadn't even occurred to me to quit until Yoga Elsa said that I could, an...

We are nearing the end of yoga teacher training -- done in August! I don't yet feel like I can teach or sequence, but I  did  have COVID and then a killer migraine when we were doing that part of things. Or maybe yoga is one of those things like teaching English where you don't actually feel like a teacher until you've been at it for 5 years...  The last  niyama  of yoga is  ishvara pranidhana -  surrender. Well hot damn, they saved the easiest one for the end! J/K. This one's hard af.  After you've done all the non-stealing and non-excess, after all the self-discipline and self-study, what does it mean to completely surrender? In  The Yamas & Niyamas , Deborah Adele writes,  "We can be so busy feeling cheated or victimized when life doesn't go the way we want it to that we often miss a new opportunity life is offering us in the moment" (165). Well, that's a gut punch. I was talking with someone recently about online dating. We went ...

   Here is a riddle: Without putting too much thought into it, write down 5 words to describe the world. Go on, I'll wait. Do it quickly before you forget. Now, pause and look at the words. Each is more a projection of yourself than a true indicator of the what the world is like. Alarming, isn't it? I spoiled this exercise for some of the women in my yoga course by telling them all about it a week before they were supposed to read the chapter on s vadyaya . It turns out that a downside of reading a million books is that you can't remember what you read where, so you excitedly tell everyone half of everything in an effort to make connections. Even so, here are my words: broken, beautiful, tainted, complex, natural Freud would have a field day. I got to the chapter on self-study and thought, "If there is one thing I do not need help with, it is self-analysis." The 29 journals piled up on my bookshelf can attest to the fact that I am very familiar with myself. This i...