Monday, March 29, 2010

Change verses growth


The only thing constant in life is change, and for some reason, we always seem to want to resist it. I admit to loving the comfort of a good, old routine, something that stays constant from one day to the next. But the reality is that this life is always changing, and we are either left to let life change us unexpectedly, or instead become active participants in our own lives and find personal growth to either match or spur life's changes.

I made a commitment today to a professional yoga teacher training program through YogaWorks. It was a big decision; a large commitment of time, energy, endurance and money. But I hardly thought twice. Lately, I've found so much joy in teaching and helping others, and the more I teach, the more I realize where my limits are as a teacher. I realized that if I want to continue down this path of teaching yoga, I must break down those limits so that I can grow as a yoga teacher, a yoga practitioner and as a person.

Recently, I have been resisting change. Change came along for me in the form of sore back muscles and vertigo, and yet I keep resisting. "I don't want this," I keep thinking, "I hate this. I want to get back to the way my life was before this." But that can't happen. Instead, I should be saying, "Wow! I wasn't paying attention to the change in front of me. I wasn't active in my growth to keep up. Now I have vertigo and a sore back. What are these things trying to tell me? What do they want me to learn?" I am confident that once I learn the lesson they're putting in front of me, I'll find growth and move past these hurdles.

So I asked my vertigo today, "What do you want? Why are you here?" And it said back to me, "I am here because you have been playing the victim and looking for love and companionship outside of yourself. You need to learn to truly love and accept yourself." Wow, so that wasn't heavy or anything. And hadn't I just admitted to a shopping addiction due to feeling unloved and lonely? I was looking outside myself for love, and if the addiction wasn't enough of a clue, now my body was acting up, too.

Of course, you could just say, "Well, vertigo is a medical thing, right? I mean, why are you 'talking' to it?" Because it's all energy. Energy causes joy as well as pain. A happy emotion can make you feel light as air, and a stressful emotion can cause you to feel heavy and tight until your shoulders are bound to your ears. It's all energy. And it's every changing.

So. I'm moving forward. But I'm also slowing down enough to take the time to listen to what my body has to tell me. What does your body have to tell you? Do you manifest your spiritual/energetic messages through your body like me, or do your electronics stop working and your car breaks down? Stop to find the message behind the mayhem, so that you can learn to grow with the change, rather than be a victim to it.

Monday, March 22, 2010

Working Energy

Life can be tough. We fall down, we get hurt, we feel sick, we feel low, we feel alone. But we keep on living. Because we hope that soon enough, we'll get back up, feel healed, be full of wellness, be on a natural high and surrounded with affectionate friends. Life can be tough, but it can also be so beautiful. And everything that we experience in life is simple: it's just energy.

I've still been experiencing vertigo, to varying degrees, the past few weeks. I've seen medical doctors, who are miffed that a healthy twenty-something year old can experience lasting vertigo. And although western medicine is great at diagnosing and fixing symptoms, it largely fails to look at the entire picture, and it fails further to look at the emotional, spiritual and energetic causes behind dis-ease. If you were to take a look at my aura, my space, you would be able to see exactly what is going on, because it's all energy.

I spent nearly the entire weekend in meditation at a gathering of clairvoyants. It was a workshop for us to come together, learn new skills, look at each other's spaces and have more time to work our own. I'd had a hard time looking at my own space, since every time I sat down to close my eyes, I felt like the earth was heaving underneath me. What I would have realized if I had stuck through the meditation, like I did this weekend, was when I can use the meditative tools I have to move energy through my body and my aura and start to reclaim my space, the vertigo dissipates and largely disappears.

It was an intense weekend, to be sure. Sitting in meditation, or trance, as some call it, for 15 hours is definitely a marathon of meditation and sure to both invigorate and tire the mind and body. As clairvoyants, we read and heal each other, and everyone who read me first said something along the lines of, "Wow. I can't believe you're having to deal with this energy. It's so strong. I'm so sorry. Find some amusement." Because as big and bad as energy can feel, it's just that--energy. Have you ever been in a room where you could almost cut the tension with a knife? And then some wonderful soul cracks a timely joke, the room fills with laughter, and the tension is gone? That's the importance of amusement for moving energy.

I always ask my yoga students at the beginning of class to check in and see if they brought their sense of humor, and if they've arrived ready to play. Yoga can be a great discipline to the mind and body, but just like any type of practice, it is largely dependent on how you set your energy, and energy that is serious (like that room we just talked about) doesn't move. So keeping your sense of amusement is very helpful in having a successful and joyful yoga practice.

Bottom line: when you're feeling blue, or when your yoga isn't moving in the direction you want it to, take a step back and find amusement in the situation. It's all just energy. Crack a joke at yourself, find something to laugh at. So if you need a joke, here's a slightly inappropriate one for you to mull over (inappropriate can always make you smile) -- you should never take life to seriously -- no one gets out alive, anyway.

Friday, March 12, 2010

Living on a ship

It's been a long time since I've written, and for a few reasons. First, I was on vacation. Yay, vacation! I couldn't mention it here, since it was a surprise for half of my family, so I snuck away one Sunday night and met my family at the Salt Lake City airport Monday morning and we flew to Cancun. Our final destination was Playa del Carmen, and we spent week in the sun (and the wind), sitting by the ocean, eating tacos, drinking margaritas, and shopping in town. Our good friends live there, and they showed us around. It was fabulous.

I did do some yoga. But sometime between leaving Salt Lake and landing in Cancun, I acquired a case of vertigo, just severe enough to be extremely annoying and nauseating. Yoga, and the movement of up and down, up and down, didn't help much, so I only practiced twice while in Playa. The vertigo is still around today, and my doctor found fluid in my ear and quite a nasty sinus infection, to which I was unaware, as the culprit. We hope. It could also be an inner ear problem, and we won't know that until I've taken the antibiotics for a few days. So until something gets fixed, I'll just keep hanging on to the railing of this pitching ship that I seem to be on.

But even though I can't practice daily, yoga is still the calm place in my life that brings energy and spark into my body and mind. I am still teaching my regular classes (do not be alarmed if I grab the wall suddenly) and each class still leaves me with peace of mind and the dynamic between inner stillness and deep excitement that feeds me more deeply than the best food in the world.

Today, I'm going back to my roots to work on a primary series practice in my yard. I'm hoping that if I'm outside, I won't have such reaction to the vertigo. We'll see. I'm also just excited to be practicing in the yard, which is almost done! A few more hours of work this weekend and we'll be able to start weekend classes outside!

Namaste.