yoga

A Life’s Purpose


What if what I am supposed to be doing is exactly what I am doing?

I ask only because I read a blog entry of a friend who is searching for her direction in life. Or redirection. We can never assume, after all, that where we are, what we are doing or who we surround ourselves with is permanent.

Life is about change – at its core – not about permanence.

I was a teacher for twenty years. When I left, I can count on one hand the number of minutes it took for someone to ask,

“So what are you going to do now?”

As if emigrating to Canada, remarrying and focusing on my writing/blogging in addition to giving the stay at home mom thing a full-time go for the first time in the five years I’d been a mother wasn’t enough.

What are you going to do with your life?

So that it’s meaningful – in the eyes of the world – is the question behind that question.

But what if, maybe, I am doing what I am meant to do?

Given that nothing is permanent, and I can reasonably expect the circumstances of my life to change over the course of time, why couldn’t what I am doing … right now … be what I am meant to do? Right now.

And isn’t that enough?

Writing for blogs, studying yoga with an eye towards teaching a few classes – maybe having a studio one day – isn’t nothing. Though I recognize that like “having it all” or “having enough” it is an eye of the beholder thing.

Does anyone’s eye matter but mine in the assessment of what makes my life meaningful or gauging what I should be doing with my life?

I think not.

And a life’s “purpose” is more than what one does in terms of culture’s obsession with the idea of work and career (which, frankly, is the measuring stick in our Western world to an unhealthily large degree).

What if, what you are doing right now and where you are is “it”?

For now.

Taught My First Yoga Class


Jade, the owner of the yoga studio I frequent and my teacher, asked me if I would take her Wednesday drop-in class this week.

I hesitated not.

This coming weekend will be my final teacher training session. Tests, demo teaching, Sutra presentations – the works. Teaching for real was just the thing I needed to prepare.

Over the course of training weekends, we practice teach on each other. It’s not the same as having real students and reminds me of practicing on my fellow students back in university. During the run up to student teaching (I was an English major), we’d craft lessons that we’d present to each other as though we were actual kids in a classroom.

Yes, that’s just as empty of substance as it sounds.

In yoga training, practice teacher of other yoga teachers usually devolves into workshopping as we pull poses apart and share our perspectives with each other. Not that this isn’t valuable. It has value – just not as a way to gain teaching experience for the “real” world.

Yoga studios are so not the real world.

The drop-in class is 45 minutes of what is basically an abbreviated Ashtanga practice. Surya A and B, Standing, a wee bit of seated, maybe Bridge, possibly a twist or two and Savasana.

I started on time and ended on time. Forgot to start Surya B in Utkatasana the first time and got turned around on my left vs right a couple of times, but no one fell over, everyone sweated (people who come to Ashtanga expect sweat in an oddly Bikram sort of way) and at the end, some were smiling and everyone said “thank you”.

There was an older woman, who’d never been to the class before – and who only studied Hatha previously – who might not come back.

But otherwise?

Great success.

Why?

I was teaching. Like teaching for real. I didn’t hesitate. It felt homey and I slipped right into the role as though it was crafted just for me.

But I am a teacher and always have been and that’s a hard instinct to put aside. It was only a matter of time before I found my way back to it.

I don’t know that it prepared me in any way for this weekend’s testing. I feel over-full of yoga at the moment and am not certain I can access anything specifically or consciously, but I am not worried about whether or not I am a yoga teacher.

The photo is urdhva dhanurasana or wheel pose. I totally pulled my left levator muscle and irritated the hell out of my trapezoid at the same time coming up into that earlier in the week. I hurt as I demo’d in class despite having gotten there 40 mins early to warm up. Consequently, I won’t be doing the arm balance practice on Friday – which I could use because my arm balances suck (a very un-yoga but entirely accurate, in my case, term). But, I was psyched to get up into the pose on my own. I haven’t come up into a wheel since I was ten – at least.

If You Ever Had Enough


I found this on a yoga blog.

What I have now, probably for the first time ever in my life, is enough.

I am not complacent about it.

I recognize that relationships are active and therefore require tending. I know that nothing about the strata of society I occupy is immune to disaster.

But in societal terms I have come to recognize as my norm, what I have is plenty. There isn’t a single thing or experience I lack. My emotional well brims and is replenished continually.

Perhaps this is what has been nagging at me of late.

My conscious mind – conditioned as it has been by years of North America consumer driven life-style and middle-class faux career ambition – feels I am not working hard enough to be … what? I don’t know. My inner-self has been quite weepy about it in a pushed around little girl sort of way.

She knows we have enough. Time to acknowledge it and let a few things go.

I have dreams. Modest and unassuming. But they are not deal-breakers for me and really never were.

I have enough. It’s almost verboten to say that out loud as many people fear it invites the active mocking of the fates. That’s flatly ridiculous. Nothing is permanent and fate has nothing to do with that anyway.

If you ever had enough, could you recognize it?

A fair question.