Self-image

Resolving to Be Myself in the New Year


Happy New Year 1910!

Image by Puzzler4879 A Blessed New Year To All via Flickr

As the last days of 2010 speed by, some of us are plotting new courses for a new year, and this means – naturally – making those awful, and often fruitless, resolutions.

Most people concentrate on the concrete. Resolving to lose weight, which more often ends up with the health club having a fatter wallet and no significant body improvements for them save a skinnier bank account. Diet improvement or renouncing counter-productive habits are biggies, as is the ever popular “getting organized”.

Make-overs are big because of the broad applications. Nearly anything can be “made over” and “improved”.

A smaller portion of the population tackles the interior with goals intended to improve, cultivate or jettison relationships.

Typically, I don’t make resolutions anymore. I have goals but my success is not measured by how quickly they are achieved. Rather I look at how they incorporate into my life and I would say that my goals are in a constant state of refinement as I pursue them in a non-manic way.

One thing I have noticed about myself as I head into my fourth year living in Canada, is that I am more and more myself.

In my old life back in Iowa, there were obligations and responsibilities that obliged me to stifle who I am more often than was good for me (though it probably benefited a small group of others). I don’t employ many of the checks by which life was precariously balanced. Nor do I masque myself.

Oh, I can still be inscrutable, but more often, what you see is who I am.

This year, I resolve to continue being more and more myself.

Perhaps you might too. It would certainly be easier and more inexpensive than a lot of other superficial options.

In case I don’t see you again before the new year, have a joyous and peaceful one, dear reader.

You were not meant for crawling, so don’t.
You have wings.
Learn to use them, and fly.
-Rumi

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Guest Posting at Choose You Today


Christmas in the post-War United States

Image via Wikipedia

The always awesomely amazing Julie Pippert, who took a huge chance on me and gave me my start as a blogger beyond my own little realm, asked me if I would share my yoga journey at Choose You today.

Though I meant to blog for you dear readers, the Christmas Express is hurtling at me with deadly accuracy and with in-laws arriving today and the house still at half-ass status (not to mention the demonic dishwasher taking a header – again), my to-do list is long enough to make me cry.

So, head over to Choose You and I’ll update you on the state of progress – or my nervous breakdown – tomorrow.

Oh, and the tree pic? That would not be a representation of ours, which is still a pine-cicle by the swing set in the backyard.

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Slow Burn


Log consumed by fire

Image by quinn.anya via Flickr

My most recent horoscope gibbered something about me slowly burning off the residual matter of the old me and finding a sleek and shiny new me underneath. The gist basically being that I have been in a state of transformation for some time and that I was down to the wire in terms of emerging from chrysalis and flapping my colors for all to see.

Except apparently, I don’t care about the “all” of anyone. This new improved version of me is above “it” and “all”, and though perhaps not quite enlightened in any Buddhist sense, certainly not mired in the way of the new world order.

I was informed also that this burn can be scary and disorienting, but not to worry because it was more than worth the any residual scarring.

Okay.

The idea that I am morphing isn’t one that hasn’t occurred to me. In the past year there have been more than a few instances of feeling out-of-body or even trapped in country. And it’s as physical a thing as it is not.

“My legs are totally different,” I remarked to my yoga teacher, Jade, before class one day.

“Yep,” she agreed. “You have changed quite a bit.”

Again that could be just physical and not be wrong but I have a feeling it goes beyond.

Not being quite through this yet, and not being entirely sure of what comes next, makes the whole “thing” hard to explain.

Rob likes to take some of the credit.

“I’ve changed you,”

“No, you allowed me to be,” I said. “Not the same thing.”

At all.

Too often we go into relationships with the odd notion of “perfecting” or “re-teaching” someone. It’s not possible. People will be who they are if they are allowed though mostly who we are is not who we are expected to be.

Yoga is about being and coming back into a being who’s been forgotten or misaligned by a lifetime of others’ coercive attempts to bend us to their will.

Thy will be done. That’s what we were taught in Catholic school. But it doesn’t make sense. Create imperfection and order it perfect in its obedience only. A divine North Korea according to Christopher Hitchens, but that ‘s a bit of a digression.

I am. More than I have ever been and if I dare to continue, more than I could have imagined being. Fascinating.

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