Monette Chilson's Blog

The Wisdom of the Body

A BOOK REVIEW

As books do, this one���Christine Valters Paintner ���s newest, The Wisdom of the Body���came to me at just the right time. I am pretty in touch with my body, but this book has me longing to dance and move for no reason at all other than the pure joy of it. To dance like no one is watching���seriously!

Although I love Christine���s website���The Abbey of the Arts���and have enjoyed several of her earlier books, to be honest, I wasn���t sure this book would provoke any ���ahas��� in me because I���ve read and written so much on the subject. But a few paragraphs in, my doubts were put to rest. This book is the real deal.

I have to tell you up front that I���m writing this while still at the beginning of the book rather than after finishing it. Why? Well, for one, I want to savor this one���try out the contemplative practices and really live into the book���rather than just breezing through so I can write a proper review. And two, I found so much I wanted to share with you in the introduction and first chapter that I decided to break the rules and perhaps read it alongside some of you.

I was blessed enough to receive a review copy of this book just before my new book on Lilith was released. I didn���t see any connection between the two at the time, but as soon as I started reading, it became very clear. In her book, Christine calls us to reclaim the sacred connection between us and our bodies that���s been severed. Part of this severing comes from the treatment of our uniquely female embodiment of the sacred with religion.

And part of that severing, I believe, comes from how Christianity has told the story of women���from the very beginning. There is a misplaced sense of shame that gets transferred to us through the story of Eve, who is presented, paradoxically, as having no authority yet as entirely to blame for the very fall of humanity. By reclaiming the lost story of Lilith���the legendary predecessor of Eve who refused to submit to Adam and subsequently left the Garden���we are in a sense reclaiming our right to use our voice and our body as we are divinely called to do.

Christine does not dwell on this problem, for her book is very much about ���what we can do,��� rather than ���what was done to us.��� She does touch on the magnitude and source of the problem in the introduction acknowledging that in the Christian tradition we get ���mixed messages about our bodies at best and outright disdain for our physical selves at worst.��� She goes on to say, ���Even if we don���t locate ourselves in the Christian tradition, the legacy is there in the culture, voices of shame, and rampant marketing designed to feed our insecurities and sense of satisfaction.���

The other reason this book resonated with me now is that I am finishing up a week-long detoxification program���Panchakarma at the Houston Ayurvedic Center���that has had me connecting to my body in new and profound ways. Christine���s book confirms what I am learning���that the body is wise���and is giving me practices (some new and some that I needed to be reminded of!) I can incorporate into my life to help maintain this new-found connection and the mind-body balance I���m cultivating this week.

The crux of this book���s message is found in a question she poses very early on, ���What if your fundamental commitment as you begin this journey is to only offer your body and soul that which is nourishing, to listen to what depletes you and say no to those things?��� She encourages us to ask of every single thing in our life���what we eat, do, say and support; where we go; and who we spend time with������Does this nourish me or does this deplete me?���

When we are out of touch with our bodies, we don���t even know how to answer that question. To help, Christine provides snippets of poetry by well-known sources alongside those penned by her students. She assigns us a guide from within Christian tradition for each chapter���Allies on the Journey, Christine calls them. These women (Sophia is one!) give us new feminine imagery and provide a touchstone for our own spiritual formation.

But, most of all, you will find new ways of thinking tethered to practice. You will be given concepts but also gifted with actions within which to ground them. The embodied practices include everything from mandala making to yoga poses and are interspersed with easy-to-understand meditative activities like creating a breath prayer and writing a prayer of lament.

I am looking forward to journeying through this book and hope some of you are called to join me. Chime in below if you plan to read along. Perhaps I���ll do a follow-up post when we���re done! You can read more about Christine at Abbey of the Arts, her virtual online monastery, where she supports transformative living through contemplative and expressive arts.


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Practice Without Walls

As one year winds down and another begins, I usually decide to make a change for the better. I set an intention. I pick my word for the new year. I resolve to add or subtract something from my life. But this year, the change found me without any plotting on my part. I���ve had a home yoga practice for years, but I���ve always felt it wasn���t enough���wasn���t consistent enough, wasn���t strenuous enough, wasn���t long enough. Definitely wasn���t on par with the yoga I did within the walls of the yoga studios I frequent.

But this morning when I hit my mat after oversleeping and missing the class I���d planned to go to, my practice found me, and I recognized its beauty and its goodness like I never have before. In doing that, I also recognized my own beauty and goodness in a way I never have before. This is the magic of yoga, my friends. It takes an awareness that we need and weaves it into our being via the body and breath.

Embracing my home practice and my whole self in whatever form it shows up will be my work in 2017.

Let me assure you that it wasn���t that my practice suddenly pulled itself together and looked like a Yoga Journal spread. It wasn���t planned and it certainly wasn���t perfect, but it was a totally organic expression of me in the here and now. I didn���t consult any of the books looking for poses to cure what ailed me this particular morning and I resisted the urge to google a specific sequence or recreate a favorite teacher���s class. Instead of looking outside myself for answers, I simply tuned in. I listened and I wasn���t afraid to act on what I heard. To create a practice that answered the call of my body and soul at that moment.

So what does that look like? It���s one thing to wax poetic about answering the call of one���s soul and another to picture what one actually does when plunked down on a mat, instructorless. I want to pull away the curtain and show a real home practice���kind of like those make-up less pictures people post on Instagram. It���s time we have some images of untouched, non-airbrushed home practices to replace the idealized forms dancing in our collective yoga brain.

Why? Because when you see unvarnished beauty in another, you can start to see it in yourself.

With that, I welcome you to my practice, and I invite you into your own.

First, the music. My play list included the following eclectic mix of songs, each of which speaks to me in a different way.

Anusara Invocation (Joe Panzetta)
Lord���s Prayer in Aramaic (Indiajiva)
The Trees (Shellee Coley)
Wait for It (Shellee Coley)
Echoes of Nature with Tibetan Singing Bowl
Angel���s Prayer (Ty Burhoe & Krishna Das)
Long Sat Nam (Joe Panzetta)
Har Haray Aree Wahe Guru (Joe Panzetta)
I Am Human (Joe Panzetta)

Like everything in your home practice, this is about what moves you to move. Not about what you should listen to, what your yoga teacher plays or what���s yogic.

There���s nothing magic about which songs you choose for your practice except the magic that they ignite in you.

My list runs about 45 minutes which is about right for my home practice. I put it on shuffle so I can respond to the music without anticipation. This is important for me as a recovering over-planner!

Still not sure what to put on your list? Go through the songs on your phone and pick the ones you���d like to hear on your mat. Consider what resonates with you in class and what doesn���t. If rock songs energize you in the studio, they will at home too. If they make you cringe in class, keep them off your playlist!

Now, let go and just move.

I learned this from Star Amoureux, a kundalini inspired teacher of mine who now lives in Alaska. She always started her classes with free form movement, and I do the same. It forces me to figure out what my body needs rather than following some pre-determined plan. I feel the glitches in my body���some old ones (low back) and some new ones (crick in neck). This is priming the pump for the rest of your practice. So I���m cat-cowing and doing a lot of spine undulation. I move into neck rolls and stop at the crick. I breathe into it and picture it unkinking itself.

Next I piled up everything within reach���my bolster, meditation cushion and back pillow���to create a support high enough to rest my torso on in seated wide angle leg stretch. My tight unstretched morning hamstrings needed all the help they could get! Propping in a home practice is all about functionality. Use anything that serves you.

Practice like no one is watching because they aren���t.

As I turned my head from side to side, resting it on my support, I noticed the places my neck was still bothering me. I added some more gentle neck work, massaging my own trapezoid muscles then cradling my head in my hands as I stretched out my sore neck again.

Onward to downward dog, being mindful to let my head hang and not engage my neck. I stayed here a long time. Longer than I���ve ever stayed in a yoga class. Not because it���s my favorite pose or because I was aiming for a certain hold. I was simply doing the work that presented itself. You see, I���ve always gotten my heels to the ground in this pose because I can. But hanging out in that pose at home, I realized the cost of those firmly planted heels. My tail bone, which should be pointed up, elongating my spine, heads south when my heels drop. I played with it incrementally. Heels down a half an inch, tail bone up a half an inch. My job was to find the sweet spot that got my heels as close to the ground as I could without dropping my tail bone and aggravating that low back pain of mine.

The ego that wanted that picture perfect pose had to go. The heels aren���t down, but my pose is better for it.

Home practice is our self-study (the niyama���yogic practice���known in Sanskrit as svadhyaya). It���s where we can stop and examine ourself rather than moving on to the next pose with the rest of the class. I usually don���t work up as much of a sweat at home as I would in class, but I learn things about myself that I couldn���t learn in class. Things I carry with me.

Continuing exploration in my yoga laboratory, I transition into plank and upward dog. The sacral stability I had cultivated in up dog was gone, and I had to start all over to find a way to do this pose without tweaking my low back. In class, I���d grin and bear it. Or skip it. But here I could test out every pelvic angle to find the one that kept the integrity I need in my sacrum if I���m going to be able to do this pose into my old age. I found an approach that worked for me and flowed back to down dog which is precisely when our dog ran up the stairs to join me. Participation of wayward children and pets are definitely a part of a home practice!

With the dog milling about, I switched gears, setting up my meditation cushion and chanting along with my music. During the next song, I grabbed my singing bowl and played along. When Sat Nam came on, I was drawn into the beat of the music and drummed along on a bongo my son had made years ago. Finally, I spent the last minutes of my practice stroking a sequined pillow rhythmically back and forth. Did I lose you with that one? A friend gave me one of those mesmerizing pillows covered in sequins that change their appearance when you rub them one direction and then the other. It is better than a stress ball! But is it yoga? Yes! That is the beauty of your home practice. You are in charge of you.

Trust yourself. Trust your instincts. Be unorthodox and don���t apologize for it.

Remember, your practice doesn���t evaporate when you step outside the four walls of your favorite yoga studio. It is within you. How about committing to letting it roam free in 2017? Even if you end up rubbing a sequined pillow instead of lying in savasana!

I would love to hear about your home practice adventures! You can share your own experience in the comment section below. Still need convincing? You can wear socks or your birthday suit. As Roger Rippey said in class yesterday, let your freak flag fly this year. Happy 2017, everyone!

Your Body Knows

For thirteen years, I���ve had two children at home. Now I have one. I had convinced myself that after our initial tearful goodbye in New York City, it wouldn���t be that hard. With a seventh grader at home, I was far from an empty nester after all. Plus, I told myself I wasn���t one of ���those moms��� (why do we do that to each other?!) who live through their children. I had books to write and blogs to post. I had a plan.

But my body knew. It always knows.

While I was busying myself with the logistics of launching her into the wide world (as if procuring the right gizmos and gadgets from Bed Bath & Beyond could make our separation more palatable), my body interrupted with a big fat staph infection. A bug bite gone bad because I failed to care for it, the creeping crimson tattoo reminding me of the pain lurking beneath its surface. As if it had from spawned from the very pain I���d been trying to avoid. My flawed thinking went something like this: ���I will focus on her needs exclusively now, ignoring mine. Then, when she���s gone, I���ll dive into writing projects, leaving no time for those pesky feelings of mine.��� So, how is that working for me? Not so well.

Because my body knew. It always knows.

This is not a new pattern for me. Some people say their gut tells their truth. My skin tells mine. Even���maybe especially���when I am not ready to face it. During the last trimester of my pregnancy with the same daughter I just delivered to college, I developed an intensely itchy rash called PUPP (Pruritic Urticarial Papules & Plaques of Pregnancy) that mysteriously shows up in 1 in 200 pregnant women. You see, I had a plan then too. It was going to keep things manageable with just the right mix of time in the office and time working at home. I had negotiated my contract with the ad agency to perfection. Or so I thought.

What I didn���t know was how unpredictable life with a newborn can be. I didn���t know she���d have colic and would not sleep through the night for eighteen months. I didn���t know that sleep would become so precious to me that I would snatch it greedily whenever my daughter closed her own eyes. I didn���t know that I���d love her so fiercely that I couldn���t bear to leave her, even for that carefully crafted plan of mine. My plan didn���t work. And that master���s thesis I was going to knock out during my maternity leave? I got a year���s extension and needed every minute of it. My mind was shocked, but my body was not. It had tried to warn me that this wasn���t going to be life as I���d known it any longer.

My body knew. It always knows.

Fast forward six years to the final trimester of my pregnancy with my son. This time ���the plan��� involved a full-time assistant to help me run the business I���d built up in the years since my daughter���s birth and a nanny to help me care for my new little bundle of joy. I had this. I was going to simultaneously run a company with clients across the country and be a stay-at-home mom because me office was right upstairs. This was my best. plan. ever. So, shockingly, I developed a staph infection���this one systemic���that landed me in the hospital for the one and only (knock on wood) time in my life. I didn���t even give birth in a hospital, so I was not at all pleased with this turn of events. I remember trying to tell the doctor who was admitting me that I just needed to make a quick trip to the mail store to get something out before I checked in. He looked at me like I was crazy. And I guess I was. This time, my plan and I limped along for more than a year before throwing in the towel. I didn���t see it coming.

But my body knew. It always knows.

So, I can���t pretend anymore. I���ve seen this pattern. And I���ve told all of you about it. So, what do I do now? Well it turns out, that my skin is a good teacher. First I can take care of myself and my needs. I did this with my staph infection. I set up an apothecary of manuka honey, calendula essence, lemongrass oil and grapefruit seed extract, and I went about tending my wounds. The physical ones, yes, but lying there with a sticky botanical poultice on my leg gave me plenty of time to tend the emotional ones too.

For starters, I stopped minimizing. It is a big f#*&ing deal for my daughter to live across the country from me. I can start by acknowledging that. I can give myself time to grieve. When I felt stronger, I started putting myself back in those places that feed my soul���on my yoga mat, across the kitchen table from a dear friend, and in my favorite comfy chair at my coffice. Sometimes I don���t know what to write anymore when I sit there because even in that familiar space, things feel so strange. But I sit there until words come. And I sit there even when they don���t. I show up and when someone asks how I���m doing, I resist my knee-jerk ���fine��� and I tell the truth. I can���t lie anymore because my body knows. It always knows.

And at long last, I���m listening.


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Finish Lines

Finish lines. We watched a lot of them this month in the Olympic Games. That moment a runner breaks across that line���straining so hard as to appear almost horizontal���there is palpable relief. On their part and on ours. The race is over. The work is done. It is an iconic image, one we try to recreate over and over in our own less-then-Olympic intensity lives. It is human nature to divide and conquer, as in, ���When I accomplish X, my race will be over and I can relax.���

This week, as I prepare to send my first child off to college, I am thinking what a fallacy this way of thinking is in the parenting realm. I remember each stage with her and my idea of how conquering them would lead us closer to that mirage of a finish line. If she could just sleep through the night... potty train... get into the best school for her... survive those awkward middles school years...navigate high school without losing herself to the pitfalls of teenagehood. So, here we are. Every single one of those obstacles circumvented. And bonus���she���s into the college of her choice���off to the Big Apple to study at Fordham���s Lincoln Center campus, smack dab in the middle of Manhattan.

But do I feel the exhilaration of a runner who���s run the good race, who���s crossed the finish line, ushering their offspring from childhood to adulthood? No, I don���t. I feel excitement for her, nervousness about all she���ll face on her own, and confidence that she���s ready for every bit of it. But I don���t feel finished.

I used to think it was ironic that graduation ceremonies were called commencements. It seemed as though they were mislabeling an ending as a beginning. But now I get it. Those milestone moments we fantasize about? They are, indeed, beginnings, not endings���starting blocks rather than finish lines. Invitations to step into what will be and pause to reflect on the hard-won lessons of our most recent race.

That���s what I���m doing now with my daughter as we inhabit this liminal space between high school and college���between childhood and adulthood���that will not come again. Last night, my kids went for a swim at the club down the street. Andie wore an old swim team suit, and seeing her in it took me right back to the decade she swam for the Green Wave in that same pool. The hundreds of races I���d watched. The meets I never missed even when I was two days away from giving birth to Jack.

I listened to the calls of ���Marco��� and ���Polo��� echoing through the night, and I was in the present and the past at the same time, watching her red hair streaming behind her as she disappeared and reappeared, trying to throw her brother off her trail. I listened, willing myself to remember that moment, knowing that there would be no more swims like this for a while. No more impromptu moonlit mingling with these two precious people I���d birthed.

The world as I know it is about to change, to fall apart into something unknowable before it is reconstructed in its new form. We are heading into the college years that will cocoon her until she is ready to emerge. We don���t know what color or shape her new wings will take. But we know they will be beautiful. And so we wait.

With no imaginary finish lines propelling me through this rebirthing of hers. No expectation of where this race will take her. Take us. For it turns out that all my most treasured memories of her happened while I was waiting on those milestone moments.

When I leave her in New York City on Sunday, I will not wish away the heartache, the tears and the already forming hole in my being. I will remember these words from Buddhist meditation teacher Pema Chodron, ���When things fall apart and we���re on the verge of we know not what, the test of each of us is to stay on that brink and not concretize. The spiritual journey is not about heaven and finally getting to a place where everything is really swell.���

Real trumps swell every time. Even when it hurts. And, it turns out, it wasn���t a race after all.

Gardening in the Rain

My capacity for nurturing seems to be more limited than what is sometimes ascribed to those of the feminine persuasion. To my credit, I have managed to keep my beloved children fed and cared for���one all the way to the magic age of 18, theoretical threshold of adulthood. But that���s about the extent of it. I have nothing left over to compel me to willingly care for other dependents of the animal or plant variety. And never, ever upon a run-in with a baby, do I wish myself back to that stage of 24/7 nurturing.

So you can imagine my surprise when I found myself voluntarily gardening in the rain today. I can count on one hand the number of times I���ve gardened in the sunshine, so this was just bizarre. Except that it wasn���t.

I didn���t set out to garden in the rain which is probably much of the beauty of it. I have a hard time with spontaneity. I really like to have a plan and stick to it. And I usually don���t appreciate nature raining on my parade. Except that today I didn���t mind.

Lest you think this was a bliss fest, I���ll confess that when I first starting working (pre-rain), there was a lot of negative self-talk. I was trying to coax my burgeoning tomato plants back into their wire cages. Because of my aforementioned lack of gardening expertise, I kept breaking the plants���hurting them instead of helping them. I could hear the nay sayer in my head chirping, ���Why are you out here? You���re not a gardener. You���ll never be a gardener. You were silly to think you could keep this little vegetable kingdom alive without your green thumbed husband. Give it up.��� Except that today I didn���t.

Then, just as I���d figured out that my carefully lifting the wire cages out of the dirt a few inches, I could ease the plant back into the safe confines of the cage, the rain started. The voice loved this. ���Well, now you have to go inside. Gig���s up.��� Except it wasn���t.

Instead of listening to this seemingly logical advice to go inside, to stay safe and dry, I kept working, lifting cage after cage until all the tiny tomatoes were safe from the birds who covet them. By then I was soaked, and against all reason, I was happy���wet, dirty and content and happy. I felt oddly right in a one-with-nature sort of way, tending the soil while the rain watered it.

I used to say I wasn���t a gardener. Now I add, except for in the rain.

I���d love to hear about how doing things in unconventional ways has felt right to you. Can���t think of anything? Today try something illogical, irrational and completely unexpected and let me know how it works for you!

See Your Goodness

Savasana broke me wide open this morning.

As the teacher read this affirmation,"When I loved myself enough, I began to see the goodness in me," I was overcome by the the realization that Christianity spends an inordinate amount of energy convincing people of their innate flaws, their original sin that makes them need rescuing. If they told folks that they were born as blissful light and that God created them as inherently good, churches (the standard Christian variety anyway) would be out of business.

With realizations like this, my grip on the Christian label grows looser by the day. I subscribe to the theory that there are two ways of relating to Jesus--a soteriological (savior) one & a sophiological (wisdom) one. I go into this in some detail in my book but I am firmly in the latter camp. I think Jesus came to show us the way, not to save us from a vengeful God. The God I know is the opposite of vengeful and doesn't need to send someone to a tortuous death to provide the rest of us access to heaven.

When Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth & the light" he was not saying that so that he could swoop in and save us, but so that we might emulate him and claim for ourselves that knowing that we are the way, the truth & the light too. That's how we save ourselves--by following his beautiful example, by living into his wisdom that lights our way.

I am always amazed at how much I learn lying on a mat doing absolutely nothing. It is fertile ground for me. I would love to hear what your practice taught you this week.

Namaste.


This was originally written as a text to friends earlier this week. The teacher who spoke that affirmation, Star Amoureux, will soon be returning to her native Alaska. You can still catch one of her inspiring classes Mondays and Fridays @ 9:30 a.m. through the end of May at YogaOne���s Uptown Studio.

Through Her Eyes

Most of us know that today is Good Friday, the darkest day of this Lenten season leading up to Easter. But did you also know that today is the day of Annunciation���that is, the day the angel Gabriel came to Mary and told her she would become pregnant with Jesus? This confluence will not happen again in any of our lifetimes. The next time the two dates collide will be 2157.

This paradox of the announcement and his birth and death coinciding has me thinking of Mary���s reaction to the events of those very different, but equally dramatic, days. Which has me thinking about how little we know about how the women of the Bible responded to things in general.

I���ve started an analysis of those named in the Bible for another project, and preliminary findings show there are a total of 2.087 people name in the Bible���269 (13%) women and 1,818 (87%) men. While I am still in the midst of research, it appears that more often than not, we hear about women only in the context of their patriarchal lineage (i.e., daughter of this man, wife of this man, mother of this man). We hear about them, not from them, and the bulk of the females named are obscure Old Testament genealogical references.

As we approach Easter, I can���t help but try to fill in the blanks surrounding the women who were with Jesus in his life and in his death. I miss their voices, and I mourn the loss of their stories, their silencing. I wish I could see Jesus through their eyes. Hear about him through their words.

We don���t have the option of re-writing the Bible to include more female voices, but we can seek out modern-day works that piece a feminine vision of Jesus together for us. To that end, I want to highlight two such resources that have helped me in that reconstruction process.

First, a book���Song of the Beloved: The Gospel According to Mary Magdalene by Lauri Lumby���that made its way into my hands at just the right time. I had almost finished it when my sister Angie was unexpectedly killed in a car accident last year. The timing was divine because this book had me relating to Jesus in the way Mary Magdalene did���as one who was intimately and instantly accessible and without all the damaging trappings that have attached themselves to Jesus in the years since he left the earth. I knew this book would give me fresh insight into Mary Magdalene. I didn't know that it would also help me get back in touch with the Jesus who came, not to create a religion, but to proclaim love, pure and simple. This book is great spiritual reminder, all wrapped up in a powerful story, full of historical interest, but mainly full of love that is best communicated through the storytelling that Lauri Ann Lumby does so well.

Second, a church service like none other. Easter in Memory of Her, hosted by Brigid���s Place and held at Houston���s Christ Church Cathedral, imagines the thoughts and prayers of the women surrounding Jesus, blending them with the music performed by singers from the Houston Chamber Choir and words written by Rice University professor April DeConick and Cathedral Canon Betty Adam. Through this groundbreaking service, held annually on the Saturday before Easter, I���ve developed a fuller, truer picture of Jesus just by seeing his crucifixion This year���s service will be held on Saturday, March 26 at 4 p.m. You will not regret opening yourself up to this unique look at the women who surrounded Jesus at the cross.

During Easter season and beyond, I would love to hear about how you make space for silenced voices to add to the way you experience holy mystery in your life.

Equanimity, Restoration & Centering

I promised to blog on the weekly themes of the forty-day yoga challenge I���ve undertaken at YogaOne, sharing the realizations that are sure to come anytime we commit to being more present in our lives in concrete ways. I���ve been busy meditating and practicing yoga and am a wee bit behind on blogging, so here���s a triple post for you on the past three weeks I���ve spent focusing on equanimity, restoration and centering.

Equanimity
mental or emotional stability, especially under tension or strain; calmness; equilibrium

Notice that equanimity is not about creating an environment free of stress, it���s about us learning to maintain our stability even when���especially when���we are under pressure. It���s not about creating a facade of calm, but of returning to our ever-present core of calmness. Sounds so lovely, but these forty days are not about learning to say they lovely words, they are about cultivating practices that take these words off the page and into our lives���hopefully beyond the forty-day program. Here are two of the ways I experienced equanimity during this week:

Meditation... I have a bench in my bathroom where I often meditate. It is against the back wall of our house which vibrates almost incessantly from the roar of traffic on I-10. You see, our urban neighborhood is paradoxical in that feels like the country but is just yards away from the widest freeway in the world (not exaggerating; truth). This was the perfect setting for me to practice feeling calm and still inside while my body was soaking in tremors from the outside world.

Chanting... One of my own goals for 2016 was to learn to chant in Sanskrit. I can do it when a teacher is doing a call and response, but I���ve never taken the time to memorize them, so that I can invoke those sacred vibrations as part of my own practice. After a few misses, I found a version of my favorite chant (Om Nama Shivaya) that resonated with me. For the curious, it translates as ���I honor the divinity within myself.��� Another common translation is, ���May the greatest that can be in this world be created within myself, within others, and within the world.��� I downloaded it and listen to it on a never-ending loop when I���m navigating Houston traffic. Not only can I now sing it without the audio, I have a new go-to tool for cultivating equanimity even in the most hostile of environments.

Restoration
a return of something to a former, original, normal, or unimpaired condition

Sometimes we must subtract before we add. If you���ve ever renovated an old house, you know this is true. You start updating, but then you find things that were hidden from plain view and are in desperate need of repair or even removal.

When we undertake restoration in our own lives, we discover who we really are and what we can do without. Sometimes we are surprised by how we can function without those props that we thought were absolutely necessary.

Lent, my other forty-day commitment, overlapped with my yoga program and was a key part of this restoration lesson for me. This year I gave up playing games on my phone. I can get rather obsessive about them, and I know they suck way more of my time than I���m comfortable with. Without them in my life, I really do feel like I underwent a restoration. All told, I gained hours and hours of time each week. And I have been able to fill that time intentionally rather than mindlessly since I can���t just pick up my phone and zone out. Because there is merit in downtime (especially the non-screen variety), I picked up a Celtic coloring book, and when I get the gaming itch, I grab my colored pencils and lose myself in coloring intricate knots and crosses. The picture at the top of this post is one of my masterpieces!

Continuing this exploration of doing without, during a group meditation following a yoga class, I realized I���d inadvertently given up one of my sacred cows���my mandatory two hours a day at write at Starbucks. Generally, setting aside that time has been life-giving to me and my work, but when I begin to think I have not had a successful day if I cho0se other pursuits on a given day, I have crossed a line into compulsivity. Believe it or not, I have gone several days without setting foot in my coffice, and I���ve survived. Even thrived, because I am listening to what truly serves me that day rather than obeying a self-imposed mandate .

Centering
to collect to or around a center; focus

The focus on equanimity and restoration lead seamlessly into this past week���s theme of centering.

We did one complete class with a block between our legs to help us direct our energy to our physical center line. After all that work on staying calm in the face of outside agitation, it was amazing how fast we all got flustered by those blocks! The work was to focus on our breath rather than wishing we could ditch those blocks. It gave us a tangible experience to lean on when we left the studio and encountered the natural turbulence of life.

Another bit of imagery I uncovered this week was during an impromptu meditation session three of us fell into following a yoga class. With no teacher guiding us, we sat in silence until one of us���a Jamaican woman with a voice so soothing it transports me to my own little internal island reverie every time she speaks���began describing a field of lavender. We each chimed in with our own images and then sat in silence once more. Although no one had mentioned water as part of our collective meditation imagery, I began to sense my lavender field was on a bluff above the ocean. It occurred to me, as I ���heard��� the surf pounding the shore over and over, that I can find my own calm field anytime. I can mentally perch on a bluff above the powerful tides pulling me this way and that in my own life. I can appreciate the view, but I do not have to be at the whim of it���s tidal fluctuations.

Vitality

So the theme of week two of my forty-day yoga quest was vitality. Some of you extroverts may get really excited about embarking on a week of cultivating vitality. As an introvert (note that doesn���t necessarily mean shy���just that I recharge with quiet, solitary activities), I was a little intimidated. It sounded really high-energy. Like it might push me out of my comfy cocoon. It did. But in a good way. Here are the highlights:

LESS NOODLE MORE MUSCLE... We all have predispositions in our practices and in our lives. I lean toward yin and shy away from yang. I like restorative poses and long holds in hip-opening poses. I am challenged by strenuous sequences that make my muscles shake. When I first started transitioning to a vigorous flow practice a few months ago, I struggled to muster the vitality necessary to complete series of poses that were done repeatedly in most classes. It wasn���t that I didn���t understand how to do them or that my body couldn���t twist itself into the poses, only that I hadn���t pushed myself to do them over and over without resting between them. My muscles were used to working with liberal breaks for introspection and adjustment that come with Iyengar yoga. Guess what? Today���even though this is a cleanse week (all vegan���mostly fruit and soup with a little rice & veggies) and I���m fighting off a cold, I rocked those sequences that challenged me back in the fall. I still cringe when I realize we���re going to hang out in crescent lunge for a bit, but I push through. Which leads us to...

PUSH THROUGH OR BACK OFF?... That is the question. And there is no pat answer. On our mats, we receive an education that is lacking most other places in our lives. Here we become acquainted with our unique set of physical, mental and spiritual leanings. We figure out how to best care for this complex form of ours. We move, breathe and sweat our way into awakenings that create an owner���s manual of sorts���just for us. During this week of discerning what brings me life and what saps it, I had to decide when it was life-giving to push through and when I was enlivened by backing off. I directed my energy toward a tweaky area of my low back that had begun acting up when I started flowing in my practice. I thought for a long time that I needed to back off because I was overworking that sacral region. What coalesced for me during this week was the realization that I was actually underworking other muscles (like my core and some upper back muscles) because I was backing off too much. When I pushed through mindfully, and focused on keeping integrity in my sacrum (i.e. not letting it move willy nilly or letting my tailbone fly out), my low back began to hurt less and feel more like it was an integral part of my body, not the problem child I was always trying to fix.

WHERE YOUR MIND GOES, YOUR ENERGY GOES... This was my meditation aha for the week. Reflecting after a 30-minute meditation class, I realized that all the thoughts that pinged in to disturb my meditative bliss were thoughts about things I needed to do for other people. Rarely did something self-focused interrupt me. In the group discussion following the class, I shared that at the end of the meditation when we���d vigorously rubbed out hands together, they hadn���t even felt like my hands. I felt disconnected from them, and in turn, disconnected from the work I am called to do in the world. With the awareness that���perhaps���I was losing valuable energy fretting about problems (often involving my children) that weren���t mine to solve, I could mindfully commit to focusing on those things that were within my purview. And I could choose to bless the rest and let it go.

I am playing a bit of catch up, as I am now entering week four of this yogic adventure. Look for posts on equanimity and restoration coming soon!

Presence

Presence. Just showing up and keeping your mind in the same space as your body. Deceptively simple, as anyone who���s ever tried to meditate knows. That was the theme of the first week of the forty-day yoga program I���ve embarked upon with the folks at Houston���s YogaOne studios using Baron Baptiste���s book, 40 Days to Personal Revolution.

This first week brought an awareness of how much I ���check out��� and allowed me to discover tools and tricks to keep me present, while not beating myself up when I miss the mark.

In an effort to blog more often during these six transformative weeks, I will present the high points of each week in a kind of stream of consciousness rather than trying to craft a perfectly coiffed essay for you. This is a fine exercise for any of us, by the way. You will show up and be present more often if you give yourself permission to do so imperfectly. That���s really the only way to do it, isn���t it? This is especially difficult to do with something we���re naturally good at. So, that leads us to bullet point #1 in today���s not-so-polished blog entry.

DON���T WORRY, BE SLOPPY... One of my yoga teachers has us do sloppy down dogs or down dog-esque moves at the beginning of her classes. She doesn���t tell us why she does this, but I theorize that it gets us moving and alleviates any lingering perfectionism that will get in the way of the day���s practice. We do this sloppy movement for maybe ten breaths (I love how yogic time is measured in breath). None of our moves look like anyone else���s. To the casual observer, we���d appear quite the renegade class. But there is power in embodying that messiness. Without a model to emulate, we are forced to ask what our own body needs in that moment. And then we move, oh-so-sloppily, into the answer. We shimmy, sway and sag. We bend, breathe and balance. We move into the moment and become present as we embody our own unique reality

DRIVING PRESENCE... This week I realized that the activity in which I am the least present for is driving. Like most of you, I spend a fair amount of time in the car. In my case, I am usually shuttling kids from point A to point B. You may be commuting or making sales calls or any of a number of other tasks that require time behind the wheel. What I discovered is that I actually seek out way to distract myself from the monotony of moving through familiar routes. It���s like I���m on auto-pilot and my mind departs when the engine starts up. Sometimes I���m intentionally multi-tasking���listening to an audio course that���s teaching me more Sanskrit chants or talking (hands free) to my mom or one of my sisters. But, usually, it���s not intentional. My mind just drifts away from my body. It may drift toward grief, taking advantage of time alone to shed the tears that still come so often over the loss of my sister Angie. Or it may drift toward plotting and planning the rest of the day. Or tomorrow. Or the next day. In any case, my body is driving a moving vehicle and my mind has left the building. So, next in this reflection on presence is an idea for reuniting your mind and body when you���re in the driver���s seat.

COUNTING TREES... Trees are my thing. Yours may be different, but find something plentiful along your route to observe. In my tree counting, I am not actually counting (that would be too much like math), but noticing and naming. I notice all the different types of trees I am passing. At one prolific intersection, I sat at a light and spied pine, oak, magnolia, hackberry and a bit of bamboo infiltrating. Plus all those that I noticed but couldn���t name. Houston is a great place for arboreal sightings any time of year, seeing as we don���t have winter enough to send many into hibernation. Maybe you are an architecture buff who sees how many distinct styles you can find as you trek around town. You can even notice something as utilitarian as street signs. The point is to keep your brain engaged with the space you are moving through, rather than sending it back to the past or jettisoning it into the future.

ACCEPTING WHAT IS... Sometimes we don���t actually like what���s going on in the here and now. We���d like it to be different or think it shouldn���t be as it is. Another lesson from the road last week made it clear that it can be downright dangerous to deny reality. Cruising down the 610 feeder road Sunday afternoon, I saw brake lights ahead. Instead of accepting that I was, indeed, approaching a patch of bumper-to-bumper traffic, I noticed my mind began revolting, with thoughts like, ���Hey, it���s Sunday afternoon. There shouldn���t be traffic!��� I questioned, ���Why is this happening?��� Thankfully, all that chatter happened in a nanosecond, and I did stop balking and start braking. How many times in life do we do the same thing? In life on and off the road, we will slam or get slammed if we insist on life proceeding according to our plan rather than the universe���s greater one. Above all, being present means accepting what is and acting accordingly.

I will leave you not this more words but with the image at the top of this post. Because I was fully present instead of playing with my new car���s many audio options or making a phone call, I was able to notice and capture this mysterious beauty going on in the sky above me while I was sitting at a stop light. I���m still not sure what it was. And, really, I���m not interested in a scientific explanation. To me it was a secret portal to heaven, dashed open by God for no reason at all.

So glad I noticed. What divine visions have you observed lately?