Confessions (the bad news and the good)

Forgive me, computer, for I have sinned. It has been 5 (4? 6?) days since my last blog.

My goodness, where did the week go? Is it really already Saturday afternoon? What happened to Wednesday and Thursday? With the kids home on spring break, they simply slipped through my fingers.

Well, do you want the bad news or the good news first? Seeing that I consider myself an optimist, someone who tries to see the positive blessings in everything, I’ll start with the less than positive.

The bad news is that I totally dropped the ball with yoga this week. I have been hard pressed to create the time to do yoga the last few days, and when I do, I don’t get very far before that inner voice starts begging me to meditate. My energy has been lagging as I flow with the moon (no pun intended, lol), and it seemed like a good idea to meditate.

The problem with me, though, is that meditation does not equal meditation as it does for some people. At this point in the game of life, “meditation” is a big fat excuse to sit my lazy ass on the floor and let my thoughts and feelings drive me absolutely crazy.

Not exactly the point of meditating, right? Haha.

And in my inability to carve out my yoga time, my spirit has suffered. I didn’t have a bad week, per se, but I could feel my inner strength waning. I have not liked how it feels at all. It just feels yucky. Gray. It makes me mopey.

The good news is, there is lots of good news. The heat finally arrived this week, so Mark-Daniel and I took the kids to the beach yesterday and now have the sunburns to match, haha. (I still cannot fathom the surreality of discussing the cons of match.com with two of my best girlfriends as well as my soon-to-be former spouse; it would definitely make a fascinating blog topic all on its own!) Then last night I saw Lisa Loeb perform at Yoshi’s in Oakland. I really liked her a lot. She was 7 months pregnant, and it brought me right back to when I performed a concert of arias with Mark-Daniel in Wellsboro when I was 7-1/2 months pregnant with Nadia. Lisa is really personable and funny, and she makes me miss performing, so now I am manifesting a keyboard or piano so that I can let that part of my soul out on a more regular basis.

Today, I went to a local conference for the American Holistic Nurses Association at the Osher Center at UCSF. Can I tell you how great it was to go to a conference of nurses and do yoga not once, but twice?!?! We started off the conference doing laughing yoga (which, as you would expect, was really funny, especially thanks to the facilitator), then heard the keynote presentation (which I’ll touch on in a sec), then had an organic lunch, and then got to participate in another yoga class taught by another nurse. Awesomeness. And then two more presentations, one on aromatherapy, and one on healing touch. It felt good to be with my tribe of nurses. I even got a new mentor in the process.

The keynote presentation was the best part of the conference. They discussed some of ways stress can affect aging at the cellular level, and how we can also prevent some of that aging. (And guess what can play a huge roll in this? Yoga, of course, from both a meditative standpoint as well as a movement perspective.) I felt so inspired! It got my brain going about all of the different ways we can show “scientifically” that complementary and alternative therapies really work, since that is usually the brick wall that we face.  So much of this research is happening right in my backyard, and I am hungry to be part of it. I have always fantasized about working at UCSF and the Osher Center, even part-time. Are you listening, Universe?

What I most enjoyed about the conference was that it empowered me and took away what was left of that gray and mopey feeling I’ve been dealing with this week. I know all the pranayama we did in the yoga class helped with that, but there is also something powerful about being in a room of 40+ nurses who believe with all their passion that holistic, integrative care is the way of the future, and we are just the tip of the iceberg.

I’ll confess, I plan on leading the way.

Home, sweet home

Finally, some warm weather. No, scratch that. Perfect weather.

I just about froze my tootsies off this morning in SF… the fog was still rolling in at 10am, and that wind! It goes right through me, right to my bones, no matter what I am wearing (and admittedly, I wasn’t wearing very many layers today, and I didn’t even have socks on, because I’m ready for spring!).

It’s amazing how many different climates there are in the Bay Area, let alone SF. I stopped at a friend’s house on the way back home this afternoon, and it was already ten degrees warmer there on the SE side of the City, not too many miles away as the crow flies. By the time I made it home, it was 70 degrees. Finally.

For those of you following Yogamama’s Virtual Yogarians blog, you know that I’ve been writing over there this month as part of her annual April Challenge. I can really feel it in my arms today! I guess I spent a little too much time in downward dog yesterday.

Instead, the warm weather called me outside this afternoon, and I headed over to hike the Stanford Dish around 4:30pm.

OMG.

It was so beautiful. The hills are finally green from the late spring rains, and the views today? To die for. To the north, even though the fog was creeping over the hills, I could see all the way to the silhouettes of the skyscrapers in downtown SF and everything in between. To the east, I could see Mt. Diablo, all the bridges, and even, in the distance, the outline of the windmills on Altamont Pass. To the south, the buildings on top of Mt. Hamilton and Mt. Umunhum reflected in the sunlight, with no smog to speak of, and to the west, as I said, the fog extended over the tree-filled hills like little ghostly fingertips. Hard to believe that Mt. Hamilton was covered in snow not too many days ago.

I was overwhelmed with the feeling of being home. This is my home. This has always been my home.

Days like today make me so grateful to be back in northern California, in all its glory. I know, I know, I complain about sitting for hours at red lights that are out of sync, or the ridiculously inflated housing prices thanks to the inexperienced 20-something homebuyers from Facebook and Google who are cashing in on their stock options, or the fact that I do have to wear a scarf and a parka in the middle of June when the fog comes rolling in like a tsunami. But there is something magical about “hiking the Dish” (as we call it) on a day like today, when a thousand different worlds come dancing together.

You look down in all directions and see the huge Stanford campus… I feel a pride when I look at the hospital, thinking about my work as a student there… not to mention Hoover Tower, the most phallic building on the West Coast! You see the buildings of companies like VMWare, biotech firms with huge solar panels on top, the VA Hospital, NASA, etc., and in the other direction, this huge satellite dish looming over you, with Interstate 280 not too far beyond it. [Incidentally, I have no idea what the Dish does... a friend told me that they use it to search for contact from alien life forms. (I think she's pulling the old, "Did you know that the word 'gullible' isn't in the dictionary?" trick on me.)] You have the bridges and the skyscrapers, so tiny in the distance, but still so powerful. And then you have the nature… the green hills with the grazing cows, the already thigh-high prickly milk thistle and mustard growing off the path, the orange poppies and calendula dotting the hillside, those fat little squirrels scampering around, and the deer keeping their distance.

If home is where the heart is, then mine is scattered in various places across the world. Today my heart grew a thousand-fold, as I tapped into the roots that had been planted years ago, when I wasn’t paying attention.

In my gratitude, I am paying attention.

*****

By the way, fellow bloggers, WordPress isn’t allowing me to link any websites to my posts. (The link button is deactivated.) Any suggestions?

Bloggin’ again

This month I’m blogging over on the Virtual Yogarians page as part of Yogamama’s Yoga Challenge. Here’s the link to my first post. Check it out, and enjoy!

(Note: for some reason WordPress is not letting me add this as a link, so you’ll just have to cut and paste it into your browser tab. Sorry about that!)

http://virtualyogarians.com/2012/04/01/

 

The most important speech of our time

I am posting this link because I truly believe it is the most important public statement of our time, and one that will get little to no press. It is a long read but worth every minute that it takes you. I hope that 30 years from now, we will all know that because of courageous people like Tim DeChristopher, we were able to turn things around in this country before corporations and politicians completely flushed us all down the toilet.

Please share this link on your various tweets, walls, and blogs. This is powerful medicine for our diseased state of affairs.

The ritual of sleep

Do you every feel as if you are undergoing some sort of initiation, rituals which, if you pass, will take you to the next level of your development as a human being?

I’m at that point right now. Knowing deep down that I can somehow make it, but having trouble finding the will to want to make it.

Today is day something of my cleanse. 16? 17? I have lost count. All I know is that Tuesday is my last day, and then I will start incorporating — slowly, oh, so slowly — grains, dairy, and other foods back into my life again.

The problem is, on a cleanse, you are supposed to rest, because you naturally feel tired when your body and psyche are cleaning house and getting rid of all that old stuff that doesn’t belong there anymore.

At the beginning of the cleanse I felt a bit like Wonder Woman, with a will of steel. (OK, except on that day I was being chased by a large piece of dark chocolate.) Now my will falters as my energy falters. My patience is faltering. Life is simply getting in the way.

Sleep deprivation is the worst sort of initiation there is, don’t you think? The last two nights I have been wakened at obscene hours by my children. I am used to waking in the night because of them, but the last two nights have been particularly difficult. On Wednesday night, Nadia woke at 3am crying with a fever and stomachache, and I spent the rest of the night (morning?) comforting her and doing energy work to alleviate the nausea so that she could finally fall asleep again around 6:30. Then this morning, after not getting to bed until 11, Luke woke me up at 5:00 with his tossing and turning and snoring.

I know. I should have gotten up to take advantage of being awake to do yoga. But instead, I went and tried to sleep in Nadia’s bed (since she was again in our bed), though as you probably know, falling back asleep for 20 minutes seldom does anyone any good. It actually made me feel worse. The will, however, was simply lacking. My brain said, “get up,” and my body said, “I don’t think so.”

Right now I can feel the pressure beginning to mount again, the pressure of wanting to just sleep dammit, the pressure of having all this studying to do, of needing to move and do yoga, of mama-guilt, of wife-guilt, of needing to see more clients so we don’t bounce the rent check, and yet the tools I need to release the pressure are simply not available. Is this part of the initiation, to teach myself how to dig even deeper to find the light and love that are the whole reason for being?

Spring Cleaning, Day 11

I’m having a roller coaster day today, vacillating between being really stressed out and feeling really good. Today’s schedule is typically hectic, and just getting the kids where they need to be at the right time — while still trying to find some study and yoga time — has been, well, trying.

On the other hand, I enjoyed some salmon for lunch, I got in 90 minutes of quality study time (which certainly beats last Saturday’s o minutes), and Heather and Emma are coming over for dinner tonight. My energy is fairly high, especially now that I’ve done yoga today, and I’m officially halfway through with the cleanse.

My friend, G, is doing a 21-day no-complaining challenge. What a feat! I think the Purification Program and the April Yoga Challenge are way easier to accomplish, especially in our culture of contagious misery. But since I’m on this road to make myself stronger — physicially, emotionally and spiritually — I might as well throw in one more challenge and see where it leads me.

You’re right… I already know where. And it’s a good place.

Spring Cleaning: Day 10

Today I wrote as part of my dear friend, Kathleen’s yoga blog. (Kathleen is the one I refer to lovingly as “Yogamama.”) Let’s see, if I do the link right, you can click on this link to see it.

Hope you are having as beautiful a day as I am!