om time WOW

Reading Glasses

Yoga is like putting on my reading glasses. It helps me see what is closest to me. Things come in to focus as I take time to look inside. Eyesight may get worse with age, whereas insight can blossom. My vision is enhanced - framed by my stretching in to positions that point me in the right direction. Sometimes like the small jewels that decorate the corners of lenses, life has a sparkle to it. Beauty can be magnified, struggles highlighted, emotion intensified.

I practice daily because I feel blinded without it. Downward dog becomes “seeing eye dog” – a place of trust as I move through my practice. I have pretty colored reading glasses all over our home, just in case I need to read a recipe, a daughter’s essay, or a phone book. Yoga too is always available, like something I can snatch off the varied counters of life to keep my world in focus.

My two sons, now in there 20’s do yoga. My mother, in her early 80’s has begun to practice. My husband always keeps his yoga mat rolled open by the side of our bed for his early evening practice and our golden retriever does downward dog on command. It is a contagious practice passed through our breath, a sweet germ we wish to never heal.

My family is in transition. One son is moving home after college, one son spending more time at college. My husband is changing his job and my mother contemplates moving to Boulder. We contemplate selling our home and I write more and spend time as a psychologist less. None of this feels very graceful as we shift positions and our balance is off. When I worry about all these changes I remind myself that transition doesn’t always have to be difficult. There is a sweet calm in the transition between our out breath and our in breath. Peace is magnified. The lenses of change hold that beauty as long as we remember our glasses we keep neatly rolled in our yoga mats.

Turns out he’s a shaman.

One of my favorite yoga memories is actually sitting in a lecture in the Jungle of Costa Rica, on retreat, listening to Douglas Brooks.

“Life is a gift and Yoga is the blessing,” The moment he offered this short pithy statement, I knew I would continue to unpack it for a long time to come in my heart mind, body and work in the world.

I was right. If you had asked me about the definition of “yoga” at about the same time I heard the comment, I would have had one thing to say. Today, years and years later, I have something else.

Then I would have said, “union.”

Today, I say, “relationship.”

Yoga is my full way of being today and everyday. Operating the studio in the day today requires a full attunement to the relationships it generates: teachers, students, staff, master presenters, competitors, passer bys, and even the random man off the street who wanders in for directions.

On and off the mat we share, we talk, we weave and interweave meaning and experience into one another.

Last week, a man came into the Boulder studio, while waiting for the bus that picks up right out front. He was timeless in age, incredibly well-dressed and carried a lap-top and pulled a small suitcase. His tie was perfectly jointed at his neck and his gait was somewhat stiff. We smiled as he entered and he mentioned he was just browsing so I let him have his space. He mused through the books, through the class schedules and finally across our wall of upcoming colorful events.

He turned to me while smiling and said, “Yoga?”

I said, “Yes, are you familiar with yoga?”

Turns out he is a shaman.

Turns out that this straight-laced man is a spiritual warrior. Turns out his path of spiritual connection and his practice of hiding himself in plain sight in a world of high finance and international travel make him one of the most sought after mediators in the world. Turns out he never shares his spiritual leanings in the boardroom, EVER.

His concealed self and deep connection to the human heart inspires an unseen gift to heal relationships and cultivate a “win/win” state of being. By aiming the parties away from solely the personal into a pulse of the personal and universal aims, he directs and redirects relationships in difficult negotiations. He pleases both sides by allowing them both to feel heard, met, and connected.

He values the relationships we, as human beings, create and recreate above all.

He shared in a few sentences thoughts and ideas that were so big, they blasted ideas abounding in my skull.

He asked me how I felt about relationships and business and people and time and history and dreams and who I was going to be when I grew up.

Different beings, fast friends for five minutes, we wove a small sharing into a tiny, microcosmic friendship. It seemed all too soon when his bus arrived and he dashed outside, after giving me a quick hug and telling me, with all sincerity, that he was glad to meet me and loved our town.

With a glint of his silver hair, he stepped on the bus.

Life is a gift. Relationships are the blessing.

Love and Intention…

That’s why the chicken did not kill us.

My husband and I have many levels on which we bond. We love yoga, we love Rumi, and we LOVE food!

We were recounting the other day, the styles of cooking our mothers each exposed us to while growing up. They were very much the same, casseroles, mac and cheese, the occasional pizza and of course, chicken. There was always a plentiful amounts of chicken.

Meat and ethics was not our topic this day, as we eat very little meat if ever. Simply, we discussed it was how it was prepared, with what, how often and how boring.

We recognized, as we recounted similar mental images from the past, that we each escaped near death, as out mothers BOTH used the SAME wooden chopping blocks our entire childhoods to cut up everything: meat, vegetables, fruits, quick breads, you name it… it was cut up there. It was ALL cut up on the same wooden, porous, dangerous, plank of bio hazard~!

Both of us ended up straight out of college in the restaurant business, he as a chef and I as a sommelier. We have seen things in the restaurants that make us hyper vigilant around cleanliness in the home. Joe has a cutting board for EVERYTHING and of course I am delighted to label and store them prettily.

In our conversation we marveled at the sheer miracle that we did not each die at the age of seven from some severe strain of home born death ecoli faction. This marveling took us into stories of our moms in the kitchen and wow.

Each of us then recounted how some of our favorite childhood memories involve familiar smells from the kitchen, mothers at the sink and sounds of home abounding in the early evening family setting.

That’s how. It was love. It was love and life and solid intention.

Our mothers loved us so much in every simply meal that Ecoli did not stand a chance. There in lies a huge lesson about food. Love your family. Love your sense. Love your body. Love your friends. Think of love and devotion while you prepare a meal and health is nearly a guaranteed windfall of abundant memories to marvel upon.

To all the chicken that has come before us,

Shan

IN-powerment.

My mother would laugh at me as a child and marvel at my sense of creativity with language. I would sometimes hear words as I heard them and offer them the definition to which I felt made contextual sense. I would make words and their definitions my own.

“Empowerment” was one of those words. I remember hearing it and in the conversation it seemed clear to me that the power in question was something that made a person feel good on the INSIDE. I began to use the four-syllable word in the everyday, feeling really, REALLY, really big in my little boots.

Only, I was saying, “IN-powerment.”

My mom asked me to qualify it once, cocked her head to one side and said, “You know, I think you are right.” So she did not correct me. In fact, she NEVER let on at all. I do not actually remember who DID finally point out the snafu but it kind of stuck with me my whole life and I think about it every once in awhile when I feel small, contracted, or a little uninspired.

Who does NOT like to be powered on the inside? Who does not like to feel lit up and in the seat of solid decisions and following truth, joy, inspiration, and intuition?

Everyone can operate from a sense of internal power. This is actually the sustainable state. It is like GREENING one’s decisions and life-lived patterns. When we live without this, our energy falls, we push ourselves to the limit and burnout, exhaustion, fatigue, and depression are not far behind.

Power is something very different from force, though both can be internalized and can find a strong presence in the day to day. We can force ourselves to sit in front of a situation and take it in. We can force ourselves to show up in a situation where we are diminished or told we are not enough, screwed up, somehow not quite right. We can force ourselves to act as though we feel a certain way to attain a certain outcome. We can force a decision to feel right and righteous. We can simply force for the sake of force.

OR, we can soften and listen to the questions we are asking inside. We can soften and listen to the vibrations of grace we are answering to ourselves on the inside. When we soften and tap into the way life and love and energy moves through us, we realize that it is our nature to live in connection to an expanding universe and in lining up to that pulse of expansion and remembrance, placing ourselves in tandem to universal embrace, we too power up from the inside.

We find ourselves IN-powered.

When IN-powered, we are much less likely to make a decision for a small outcome. When IN-powered we don’t really feel the need to push a single agenda. When IN-powered, we look for grace and goodness and cause and pause and a win-win in service to the expansion of the universe herself.

When we live in a state of IN-powerment, there is less fear, there is more creativity and there are rows and rows and rows of more love blossoms blooming. When we are IN-powered, we give unconsicou permission for others to do and live the same.

So the exercise is to sit, to soften, to listen, to re-spond rather than re-act and therein lies the work of a lifetime. However, the power certainly out weighs any sense of force, leverage, or sense of unsustainable lack.

Make a list of all those activities you have in your day to day that lift you up. Make a list of all those people in your life who make you feel held, safe, and present. Do you realize that these people, places, things all live in the vibration of yourself, your memory, your body, your capacity to connect? At ANY one time, you, me, we can turn within and see them, feel them, know that they are part of us from the inside out. We are, therefore, constantly, IN-powered by those and that which we love.

Here’s to living IN-powered,

Shan

Every few months it is time for me to fly to South Florida, not for a vacation, but to visit my 90-yr-old father. It isn’t easy to make the transition from my real life in Colorado to his world in Florida. His retirement community has an eerie quiet to it, where the palm trees blow, the lawns are perfectly manicured - with no signs of a dropped bicycle or a forgotten football. His neighbors only have little dogs - no big dogs anywhere. Although he lives in a busy community, few neighbors are ever outside. The excuse is often the heat but for my visit, “It’s so cold, somewhere in the 60’s, don’t forget your coat dear!” he advises.

My father describes his later years as his “salad days.” He tries to explain that his days aren’t all that important anymore, no longer the “main course.” In reality “salad days” refer to a time of youth and carefree innocence. Actually there is a childlike quality to him as he ages where his wife has to care for him more and more.

“It is so hard to be so dependent,” he confides.

He loves the sun and finds such comfort in its warmth. Our conversations are the easiest when we are not sitting face to face but instead talking with our eyes closed, tilting our faces toward the sky. Like driving my kids somewhere, we safely swap thoughts without eye contact. I bring up my concern that he and his wife have recently had a procedure that injects fat in to their cheeks to soften their faces.

“Dad, I don’t think that is very good for you.”

“I know, but it makes me feel better not to look my age.”

I had just heard a radio commercial about “turning back the hands of time” with cosmetic hand surgery. He now lives in a world where plastic surgery is the norm and over consumption is celebrated. Sadly it looks like such a comfortable lifestyle, yet so many people seem to be so uncomfortable with the inevitability of growing old. A strange dichotomy exists where the elderly dominate the community yet looking old is shameful. Eastern cultures have such deep respect for the elderly. Wrinkles hold wisdom in their folds.

I leave my father by the pool, needing to find myself again. My husband gave me a wonderful gift of a traveling yoga mat before I left. I found my way to a nearby yoga studio in time for their noon class. I stretched and breathed my way in to the comfort of at times uncomfortable positions - so similar to being with my father. Family is like that, both comfortable and uncomfortable. Rolling up my mat at the end of class, it was a relief to realize we all have “traveling yoga mats” that ground us even surrounded by the smoothed out faces of South Florida.

And fortunately my father’s smooth tanned cheeks can’t hide his wisdom or take away his dignity in the eyes of his daughter. My father’s greatest challenge seems to be learning to depend on others. As he leans on my arm and shuffles slowly with his cane, who am I to judge? Accepting my father is living out his “salad days” in South Florida finally learning to depend on others is one of his greater accomplishments and teachings.

Changing the Grey in the World

It’s the New Year and I always feel it is time to make important changes, like hair color. Buried in the rubble of earthquakes, health care, and the economy, it seems selfish to focus on grey hair as I read that the number of deaths in Haiti is close to double the population of Boulder. But there seemed something comforting about being able to change one simple thing on a cold Sunday afternoon. I turned to my daughter who is the expert on such things.

“Easy Mom, I’ll pick you up a good brown at Target.”

As my daughter handed me the box decorated with a beautiful brunette and the color, “dark ash,” in the corner, I started to lose confidence in my newest hairdresser. I was hoping for something a little snazzier than “dark ash.” But the risk outweighed our present financial situation and I was looking forward to some bonding time in my daughter’s bathroom.

It wasn’t exactly bonding time as my daughter donned her plastic gloves and started glopping the awful smelling hair dye in to bunches of my hair. Tired and sniffly, dying her mother’s hair wasn’t first on her list. But we got through it and with clear instructions to keep it on for exactly 20 minutes, no more, no less – I diligently sat hands crossed watching football with my husband trying to ignore the unbearable odor. I also had just read about the odor of the dead in Haiti and quickly got my priorities in order. Relieved to rinse it out and rub in sweet smelling crème rinse, the moment in the mirror had arrived. I had my brown hair back and I probably looked at least a month younger. My husband tactfully commented.

“Looks good to me, but I didn’t really notice your grey hair.”

I don’t think he notices his either and actually I find something comforting about his grey hair. We’re getting old together.

Great Clips was having their annual $7.99 sale so exactly how I clean the house before the monthly housecleaner arrives, I felt ready to get my hair trimmed. Now they wouldn’t say, “you know you could rinse that grey away and it would look great!” So along with a lot of men and young children I waited in line at Great Clips. The wait was longer than the haircut and with a snip, snip, my “do” was complete. I decided to ask if she saw any grey, just to see if my color was looking like the real thing.

“Oh you have nothing to worry about dear, I see no grey hairs!”

I wish that were true, that there really is nothing to worry about. The Dali Lama believes it is we as western woman who are core to changing the world’s problems. Our collective power will make a difference if we work together spiritually and politically to take action. So whether it is taking a yoga class, a run or washing away the grey on a Sunday afternoon, perhaps a bit of self-care is not so selfish. It reminded me that simple changes that make us feel good continue to be important since we as women have a big job ahead of us. There is hope for this world if we take it one grey hair at a time.

If I AM who I AM… and simultaneously NOT who I am… who can I be?

I was just updating my facebook status. As I sat there, before my altar, in my heart, feeling tender at this dawning new day, and someone what melancholy in my mind and heart and body; I felt a wave of relief roll over me… and not leave me. I felt it blanket me and hold me. I felt held in relief, still tender, but held. I felt unafraid of all the hopes and dreams in my heart.

I began to think, to wander in my mind. I remembered, in our Anjali Restorative teacher training week or so ago, we talked, as a collective, about our unique gifts and curses. As we each spoke, we say two sides to one coin became wildly apparent in each person. Each gift is simultaneously a curse. Each quality existed in simultaneity in each woman. I marveled at the bravery as each woman spoke.

One woman’s creativity was her gift, but her inability to carry through to the end her curse.

Another’s curse was her grief, yet it served as a way to finally learn to feel and connect to others in a real and honest manner.

Yet another’s gift was her strength. Her gift was finding some pleasure in hurting herself and others when her feelings became to much to bear.

Layers of understanding rippled from the centers of hearts in the tight knit circle and the room lit with comprehension, compassion, and a richness of trust and understanding. I felt each woman FEEL held.

At a certain point, we learn to DO to get through and to accept. This can sometimes exchange that for BEING, for feeling, for participating in the unfurling of our selves through time and space.

I think this is why I have had an aversion to the word, “surrender.” For a longtime, I feel as though it felt like letting go in a manner of “giving up” or “giving in.” Today, blanketed in relieve I am awash with creativity and hopes and dreams. I am looking into the dreams and painting them and drawing them and writing them on the pages before me through my love of words and wandering.

My dreams are bigger than they once were. They are growing up. They are changing. They are allowing. They are inspiring me to be held and to surrender to what comes next for me.

Surrender, perhaps, means to feel. To really feel and then to allow that which is presenting itself, “change, “to give one “choice.” Choice is empowering. Feeling is empowering. Being instead of doing, wow, deeply empowering.

Change may be deeply painful sometimes, scary, and radically uncomfortable. However, its seeming curse is also its grace and its gift.

So now, here I sit, held, and truing myself towards what IS and feeling deeply. Today is the day, as is everyday, to choose.

To the richness of choice,

Shan