Hello, me.

November 12, 2019

As I’ve shared here and there, this summer was an emotional wringer. There was loss, there was letting go, there was a respiratory infection that wouldn’t let go of me. There was helping my parents, bonding with my sisters, and there were many, many opportunities for gratitude, and sometimes even joy. But it was a lot.

What there wasn’t a lot of was yoga and meditation. I’m pretty good at meditating on trains, so I did that, but that’s usually extra meditation, not the only meditation a person should be able to get. When anxiety hit and meditation wasn’t an option, I had to whip out the crochet hook and generate some granny squares just to stay calm. (Totally worked, by the way.)

Now things have calmed down and the dust is settling. It’s a good time to find my way back to me.

Yesterday I got up very early—on my own, without an alarm clock or a cat stepping on my head—because I’d made sure to get to bed early the night before. I actually got eight hours of sleep! That’s so rare it should rate a headline somewhere. After I saw Nathan off to work, I got out my yoga mat (I nearly had to blow dust off the thing). I lit a candle and went through the classic Integral Yoga series, a gentle set of poses. They had to be gentle, and slow, because I’m really stiff from lack of practice.

I wrote a book about 30 spiritual lessons of Yoga that I learned from a friend who found himself very suddenly in a wheelchair. I wanted people to know that there’s so much more to Yoga than the poses, so I spent a lot of time on the spiritual path, and less time on the physical. And during this rough summer, my yoga-teacher-yoga-book-author routine went right out the window. All understandable.

Now it’s time to get back to what helps me be my best: a morning Yoga practice, followed by seated meditation (I’ll do my MedKNITation too). It’s nice to find out that the path back to myself is short—about the length of a yoga mat.

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