yoga

Touring the Facility and Picking Up Slack


On training weekends yoga absorbs me utterly. This last weekend proved less difficult than the first when I was certain I had a mouth too full to chew or swallow. I held my own. I have yet to wuss out on a practice ( and yes, I know how un-yoga that sounds) and I earned a couple of nods from the instructor. I found earth and grounded.

But it’s intense and in that way of things when everyone around you is just as keen, clever and chasing it down. By Sunday evening I’d flexed, extended, contracted and expanded every inch of myself. I near aced the Sunday quiz, acquired a wicked looking bruise which tattooed my right kneecap and I was dreaming about yoga poses in Sanskrit. Sanskrit. As if my dreams needed to be kicked up a notch.

And what was happening on the home front while I was away for nine-hour days? Rob was happening. He happened all over the place. The kitchen and dining room were cleaned. Laundry? Done, folded and put away. He had a fresh tea waiting for me every evening when he and Dee picked me up and supper? Home cooked and ready as soon as we got home.

In the old days, I would have wondered what I had done to deserve him, but I have come around to the idea that we are not rewarded or denied by the powers that be. This is simply life as Rob and I have jointly agreed to live it. According to Ariel Gore, only 30% of happiness in life is circumstantial – which is where you live, socio-economic level, married/single etc., and anywhere from 20 to 40% of happiness is based on choosing it.

I know I have talked about choosing before. No need to repeat myself.

The last discussion of the day on Sunday came round to karma. Karma is not about reward and punishment. There is no payback, good or ill. The idea is more about consciousness of action and taking care not to imprint “karma” or your “soul” in a manner that will affect it negatively now, in the near future or another life. Fascinating.

What’s the latter have to do with the former. Absolutely nothing – probably. Have a great day:)

Hate Groups on Facebook


One of the side effects of friending your friends, family and semi-random strangers on Facebook are the things they post on your wall or feed. Too much information is a given and I am certainly guilty of this myself. And not just on Facebook.

Around Family Day (that’s Presidents’ Day to you Americans – our holiday being apolitical and applicable to more than simply government employees) I began to notice that many of my teacher friends from my Iowa days of yore were joining a Facebook group called “Keep Legend’s American Grill Teacher (and Customer) Free”.

I am familiar with the restaurant. It’s part of a chain that is locally owned. I used to eat at its Firecreek off-shoot when I lived in the Jordan Creek area of West Des Moines. They are customers, in fact, of my BFF’s husband. He supplies them with paper products, glass ware and such. I think they are one of his biggest accounts, so a boycott movement would have a direct impact on my BFF and her family in a negative way that no one needs during a recession.

But I didn’t know specifics and didn’t really look into it. Iowa is far away from my life, and Facebook groups are white noise on my home page.

Sunday, I was glancing through the Des Moines Register’s op-ed’s and stumbled upon a piece about this boycott group and discovered that the idea for the boycott began with a teacher who found a hair in her salad.

Yeah. I was a little under-whelmed in the outrage department too.

Who HASN’T found a hair when eating out at some point?

It turns out that a group of teachers chose Legend’s for their lunch break during a recent DMPS teacher conference held at the city’s convention centre. One of them, Marsha Richards, who teaches at one of the high schools, found a hair in her salad and reported said hair to their waitress. In typical American service sector style the waitress said,

“Well I didn’t put it there.”

Again, where’s the outrage? This idea that wait staff, salespeople, housekeepers, and other minimally paid people are servants is widespread in my native land and that when they slip out of character (yes’um, dat’s a hair alright. I is mighty sorry I didn’t ‘spect the greens afore I served ’em) then … well …. middle class entitlement has a fury that hell flinches away from.

Perhaps that isn’t fair? Maybe. I don’t really expect much from service workers in terms of subservience and I am not at all surprised anymore when I ran across those who are having horrid days. Customers seem to think that the little bit of cash they are throwing around should buy them sniveling bootlickers.

The salad, by the way, was comped, but the request for the manager never produced one. Apparently, the restaurant was unaware of the conference and the fact that they were going to be mobbed for lunch. Normally, the downtown is quiet. Dead in fact. Legend’s was understaffed and if I know teachers let loose for lunch on a “school day” – and I do – they’d had their fill of picky, loud, taking up space forever and insisting on separate checks all day.

Unable to let it go, the group of teachers stalked the bar and plagued an overworked bartender until she was forced to drop everything and summon the owner. The owner, incidentally, is not known for his charming personality.

Words were exchanged as Ms.Richards appeared bent on schooling the owner in how to train his wait staff. He went off and told the women to “get out” and that he didn’t want any more teachers coming into his place. Period.

And so they left and one would think that aside from the wonderfully gossipy story this made for the rest of the afternoon – because teachers love to tell tales – that the matter was at an end.

But that would have only happened if Richards didn’t have email and a public school mailing list at her disposal.

The email, which is contained in the link above, called for teachers and those who love and support them to boycott not just the outlet where she was so poorly treated but all the affiliated eateries.

Because of a hair and a frazzled waitress multiple places of business should be avoided in the hopes of ….what? Putting them out of business? According to a response by someone with more people savvy than the Legend’s owner, about 500 people are employed between all the outlets. This doesn’t include those businesses that contract with the restaurants like my BFF’s husband.

So, let’s shit on hundreds of people because one woman has some sort of issue that involved a tremendous need for her hurt, embarrassed feelings to be publicly validated.

Good move.

And of course, because it’s Facebook and – unfortunately – teachers (who can be like lemmings – follow first/think for yourself later) thousands of people joined the Facebook group. Thousands.

I expressed dismay about the group on my FB page and a teacher friend who joined the group disagreed with my assessment. She saw it as discrimination and a civil rights issue as though teachers were some sort of socially cast aside minority which, as I recall, isn’t true. It’s not like teachers in the U.S. are being forced to wear gold stars or are shunted off to “separate but equal” sections of theatres or public transit. We are reviled for our privileged employment status and perks but we aren’t being targeted for any sort of final solution.

As we were discussing Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras in yoga training Sunday evening, the topic of how to deal with “mean” people came up. I noted that the younger the respondent, the more likely “standing up for yourself” was the answer.

I was like that for a long time, and I won’t pretend that people and things don’t sometimes still get my back up, but as Pantanjali points out – and I concur – we have no control over anything but our own reactions and responses. Additionally, our perception of any event is coloured by our own personal stories and may not reflect at all what the event or other person is about in the least.

The harried waitress may well have been inclined to apologize once she was able to step back from a table of eight women passing judgement on her but Richards’ inability to not take the hair and the initial response personally may have made it too difficult. Who wants to be bullied into apologizing for something that wasn’t her fault? Or gloated over for that matter?

Not me and I am guessing not you or Marsha Richards. It’s just human nature.

In the end, all we can do is step back, breathe and walk away when life, and the people who populate it, are caught up in dramas that threaten our own karma. Karma has nothing to do with payback, positive or negative. It is an entirely individual thing that one must mind and guard for one’s own sake.

Oh, and I didn’t join the FB group.

Narratives are Us


I’ll break down the actual Michael Stone* workshop later in the week in terms of nuts and bolts, but today I am going to talk about narratives.

Stone talked about how our stories distract us and keep us stuck in patterns that no longer serve us or actually inhibit our lives in some way. These internal narratives run on a continual loop that we may be aware of but are just as likely not to notice. In terms of meditation, which was one of the themes of the workshop, our inability to silence/redirect or otherwise reprogram these stories we tell ourselves interferes with our ability to focus on our breathing. On a larger stage, our stories enable us to avoid reality.

An example, my youngest sister, BabySis, exists for the most part in a life that must seem like some waking nightmare to her because I am certain that even she would not have wished for it back when she was sixteen and planning to trap her very first boyfriend by getting pregnant. She saw hearts and flowers and an infant cross between the baby Jesus and a child model in a Pampers commercial. She did not see an alcoholic not too unlike the dad she wanted to escape or living in a double wide on the farm where he would be employed as a diary hand. She didn’t foresee him physically abusing her or her body run down and broken by  a combination of vertebrae scrunching laboring in a nursing home laundry and twenty years of junk food, cigarettes and too many babies.

Her narrative to explain her reality boils down to this …

“Mom and Dad made me give my baby up.”

And with that, she neatly side-steps the truth – which was that our parents told her she needed to live in a home for unwed teen mothers to learn how to be a parent on her own – and she has had a handy emotional bludgeon for purposes of guilting her family into putting up with her behavior for the last couple of decades.

A lot of people carry around the “parents” narrative to explain away their missteps. I taught rooms full of children who are probably still playing the parent card.

Interestingly, the first time I ever looked another person in the eye and told her I was not going to accept her story as the basis for my relationship with someone we both knew, a parent story was playing**.

I skimmed blogs on Valentine’s Day and wasn’t surprised to see the “Valentine’s is bad. Stupid Hallmark holiday.” theme weaving in and out. Anyone unattached by choice or happenstance snarks pretty much the same tired, trite reasons that Valentine’s is trivial and shouldn’t be allowed.

But Valentine’s is just a day on the calendar that carries some historic significance and, at it’s root, is harmless. So what if people wear pink, buy flowers and send cards? Perhaps it is something we should do for no reason as well – acknowledge the people we love in a tangible way, but that shouldn’t invalidate reserving a day for it. Trashing it because one is feeling unfairly left out ? Story. No one is left out who has someone to give to and we can all give.

The first Valentine’s after Will died came two days after I buried him. It was a cold afternoon. Just the sexton, me and Dee and a hole in the ground. I went to school that Valentine’s with treats to give my students, and this was after I’d left a box of baked goodies at Dee’s daycare for the caregivers, who were beyond wonderful to her and I.

All day during the passing periods I saw girls and boys linked together. Flowers. Cards. Candies. And it felt … hopeful. It warmed me up a bit knowing that love existed and was being shared.

I suppose I could have woven a story for myself full of pity and bile, but where the point would have been in it I didn’t know, so I chose to give to those I could and trust that someday I would receive again.

The next Valentine’s I found a box of roses on my doorstop from Rob, as he and I had just begun our romance.

Narratives push us away from paths that can be good, or down alleys that are bad, for us depending on the quality of the story and how much we chose to believe in it.

I wouldn’t say that I am story free or that I can completely resist the temptation to try to enlighten others about their own narratives – though I hope I am getting better with the latter. I do know I am experiencing a period of rewrite.

Rough drafts are being polished or trashed depending and I am scaling back from epics to novellas. I’ll update as necessary.

*Stone’s website offers free downloads of his lectures. Click here.

**It was my sister-in-law. She blames her current mixed up life on her mother. The first time I met this SIL, she rambled on for a good 45 minutes about the evils of her mother. Finally I said, “I like your mother. Your history with her is yours to take up with her, but it doesn’t have anything to do with she and I.”