5 Things For Which I Am Grateful

1. Odd coincidences.  Like reading something particularly appropriate for the day at random.  And having it be particularly appropriate for the only student in your yoga class.
2. Sunshine.  It’s yummy.
3. Chocolate.  It’s a part of my break ritual.  So really, it’s the ritual I’m grateful for.
4. Human adaptability and flexibility.  I got 3.5 hours of sleep (in three separate sections), and I can still function today.  That amazes me.
5. Naps.  As explained by #4.

Contemplate the Current World Crises

No.  While it is very important to not hide your head in the sand about the sad things going on in the world, it’s equally (at least) bad to focus on them.

Six Questions

1. How has yoga changed my life?  Awareness.
2. How is teaching connected to your path/destiny?  It’s a part of it.  One of the places my path has evolved to.
3. What is your motivation as a teacher?  Sharing.
4. What do I have to offer that is unique?   My experiences.
5. Who am I?   The sum of my experiences, and what exists without any experiences whatsoever.
6. How do I give my gifts to the world?   With vigor.

5 Things For Which I Am Grateful

1. My husband, for giving me the space, ability, and support, to neither work a full time job nor be always the primary caregiver to Daphne.
2. My daughter, for continuously teaching me that the important things are important, but most things aren’t.
3. For people who take the time to listen, when their job is listening to you voice a complaint.
4. My house.  It’s more than I need, but provides a place of refuge from the stress of the world and gives the whole family the space to be comfortable.
5. Green tea.  Because it is what it is, and it can represent more.

Contemplate the Current World Crises

Some days, it seems like there are more crises than good things in the world.  Of course, though, that’s just a manifestation of what becomes popular in our media, so it’s almost a “crisis” of its own.  In the whirlpool of crisis that seems to make up the state of our world today – if you let it, ignoring the news has some major positive effects on your outlook on life – I prefer to bite off my crises in small, manageable chunks.  We can’t get to the head if the tentacles keep beating us back.

Since it is currently near and dear to my heart, and since it is a place where such huge impact can be made, an area of social change that is currently speaking to me is one of honest and open communication and informed consent in the process of birth.  There is so much misinformation, coercion, oversimplification, and guilt tripping surrounding pregnancy and childbirth that it seems almost impossible to give families the space and support to make their own, informed, decision.

Two examples come to mind: the family in Illinois who recently had their baby removed from them for having a home birth of a breech baby (who is fine, but experienced some nerve damage from a stuck shoulder) and the Wax Paper that uses poor methodology, poor study selection, and faulty logic to proclaim a higher risk of death in home births than hospital births.  These scare tactics prevent a mother, who may feel that out-of-hospital birthing is the best choice for her and her family, from feeling free to make the right decision.  And then she ends up in a hospital, also pressured by oversimplified or plain erroneous information from presumably trusted sources, and finds herself in a situation that is not what she wanted.  Even worse – the whole culture leads to women feeling that a medicalized birth IS the way birth was intended to be.

This culture of misinformation and making decisions for someone else removes first the woman from being able to listen to her own body and her own knowledge, and then encourages her – and the rest of the family – to mistrust the natural instincts throughout the process.  I just can’t fathom the full extent of impact for encouraging someone to distance themselves from their instinct, their true knowledge, their understanding of themselves.  This encouragement of favoring listening to someone else instead of yourself, to surrendering full decision making rather than finding a balance amongst experts, only furthers our culture’s distancing of ourselves from ourselves, valuing the academic knowledge over intuitive awareness.  And, in some cases, to our physical detriment as well as mental and spiritual.

Six Questions

1. How has yoga changed my life?
2. How is teaching connected to your path/destiny?
3. What is your motivation as a teacher?
4. What do I have to offer that is unique?
5. Who am I?
6. How do I give my gifts to the world?