Archive | love > fear

I am not on Wall Street. I am on vacation in Texas, and right now I’m sitting on a breezy back porch, looking out at trees and sunshine in their infinite beauty. Everything is okay and I know this completely. There is nothing to hate, only fear to overcome. Yet fear can be fierce. I believe […]

I felt so sad when I read the tweets about Steve Jobs. I wasn’t expecting them. I knew he was sick; he stepped down, after all. But just the other day I watched an entertaining video that at least implied Steve Jobs was okay, and it was fiction, but it felt good to believe it, […]

This past weekend I treated myself to a retreat at Kripalu, which is a center out in the Berkshires of Massachusetts that promotes health and well-being through the lens of yoga. One of my favorite yoga teachers trained at Kripalu, and I’ve heard nothing but amazing things about the place, so when a particularly appealing […]

A lot of people around me have been sick lately, and I have zero interest in joining their ranks. It seems to be a cold that’s going around, so I am paying extra attention to my immune system, making sure to drink lots of water and get plenty of sleep and vitamin C as preventative […]

I don’t usually go to upscale salons to practice yoga, but that’s definitely what I did yesterday: In the course of my two-and-a-half-hour haircut, I had ample opportunity to focus on my breath, connect to my body (image), and become aware of my ego. I even stood in tadasana for part of the time, and […]

“Transformation can be as simple as returning to the breath.” Yesterday I received that wisdom from Cheri Huber, a monk whose work I admire and whose tweets I receive as texts because they’re designed to keep me in the present moment. I’m not going to become a monk. And I’m often far from Zen. But […]

If you’ve been into hip-hop anytime since the 90s you have probably heard of Common, but if you haven’t, all you need to know is that he is an honorable man who has found huge success by staying true to his core values. I recently heard him talk about life and discuss his new book, […]

I’m mad, and so I’ll meditate. I don’t particularly want to meditate, mind you, but yoga is my go-to solution because it’s the least destructive way I know of to cope with my problems. It’s funny, how well I can pull off the Zen thing at times (see previous post) and how at others I […]

I’ve been pretty much prepared to get “bad” news for a few days now, because in my experience, more than a week after a final job interview, no news is not good news. Nonetheless I’ve done my best to stay neutral, persistently telling myself that I wouldn’t really know the answer until I received it, […]

I’ve been pleased with my recent calm–I’m waiting to hear whether I’ll be offered my dream service job, and in the meantime there is nothing to do but make the most of the present, even though I am also anxious to plan for the future. Really, there’s nothing like not knowing where you’ll live in […]

Since I love my mom and dislike hurricanes, I decided to head upstate for the weekend and combine natural disaster preparedness with family time. I was hoping to try out the local studio where my mom’s been practicing ever since her joyful discovery of yoga’s benefits a few months back, but there weren’t any classes […]

I left the community center yesterday feeling uplifted, enlightened, and thoroughly respected. I didn’t speak to a single child. This wasn’t the plan, of course. The plan was for me to plunge valiantly back into the throng of children who last week thwarted my efforts at teaching them how to get calm and stay focused. […]

I am trying, and I am tired. But I am trying! That about sums up my recent sentiments regarding one of my greatest challenges thus far as a yogi: holding a safe space for a crew of kids ranging from age 4 to age 12. It’s hard. I knew it would be–I’m working with a […]

This is how I feel inside!

There. I said it. That horrible pun has been pinging around my mind since Thursday. When the peeling began. It turns out my rooftop asana was canceled by rain, so I thought I’d have a reprieve from sweat and thus a chance at a tan. But the next morning showed a pink spot on my […]

You play in the sun, you’re gonna get burned. At least, you will if you’re me and you experiment with the sun-shielding abilities of shea butter. True fact: Shea butter has natural sunscreen properties. Truer fact: Shea butter does not have enough natural sunscreen properties to adequately protect you on a hot summer day at […]

Yoga is the union of breath and body, the balance of stillness and movement. So is dancing, if you pay attention. A lovely yoga studio in my vicinity held an open house party last night to celebrate its new space, a dance hall. I went with a friend and we weren’t quite sure what to […]

I’ve been doing a lot of balancing lately. Not so much in asana–I think tree pose with a tree is the last time I really tried standing on one foot–but definitely with my breath and in my mind and heart. I’ve been wanting to write about loss. The disruption of peace in Norway, the death […]

Namaste. It’s spoken at nearly every yoga class I’ve taken, but what does it mean? According to Yoga Journal, “Namaste literally means ‘bow me you’ or ‘I bow to you’.” According to Wikipedia, similar translations like “‘The spirit in me respects the spirit in you,’ ‘the divinity in me bows to the divinity in you,’ […]

I can’t vouch for his morality or spirituality, but I sure do appreciate his sequence, and his yoga changed my life. These are facts, as far as I know. I talked with a friend tonight who has never tried Bikram yoga. I think we’ll take a class together, and I asked her to commit to […]