New Digs

I’ve got nursing school on the brain, so I’ve started a little nursing school blog over here. Drop by sometime and say hello. 

A Break

I’m thinking of officially retiring this blog, or at least taking a long break.  I started it a couple years ago when I was settling into my new life after school, travel, and a really awesome yoga teacher training.  This was a period of great growth and exploration for me, and I felt like I had a lot to write about, especially when it came to yoga.  Now I find I’m settling into a phase where yoga is in the daily background of my life, which is nice in its own way, but it speaks to me more quietly now.  I’m switching back to old-fashioned paper journaling right now.  Creating an archive to keep on a dusty bookshelf rather than to broadcast across the vast, dazzling interwebs.

I’m still reading other yogis’ blogs — it’s so nice to hear other perspectives and approaches to practice, and it’s helpful to be reminded there are people across the world practicing away every day, especially as I am going solo for the time being.  Thanks to all the passionate bloggers out there.  I may want to start blogging again when I start my intense professional training in a few months because my thoughts and emotions will certainly be flying, but then this will be a student-nurse blog, quite a different thing.  Or maybe not such a different thing.  I’m open to the possibilities!

Mini-Practice

If you’ve been reading this blog at all over the last few months, you can tell I’ve been struggling to keep my home yoga practice alive while being temporarily teacherless in addition to over-scheduled in other areas of my life. So recently, in the midst of feeling overwhelmed with life, skimping on my yoga practice and feeling kind of down on myself about it, I finally stopped and asked myself what advice I would give to a yoga student in a similar position. Without hesitation, my mind responded, set realistic goals for yourself. Duh. This is what I would advise for anyone else, so why do I always try to hold myself up to a different standard? So I told myself to set up a reasonable practice, go with it, and don’t get all caught up in the results you want for yourself. Abhyasa vairagyabhyam tat nirodhah. Simple as that. That’s the way to keep on keepin on.

So to be fair to myself right now, I’ve given myself permission to have 1-hour practices on 4 weekdays and one longer practice on the weekend. If I do my whole practice up to my 2nd series poses, it takes about 2 hours, so I’ve had to be a little creative in creating something that fits into an hour, is still ashtanga-ish, and allows me to get to my whole range of poses. Thus was born the mini-practice. So here’s what I’m doing these days:

Surya A (3)

Surya B

Padangusthasana

Trikonasana A

Parsvaknonasana A & B

Prasarita Padottanasana A & C

Parsvottanasana

Utthita Hasta Padangustasana series or Virabhadrasanas

Followed by a 7- to 10-pose chunk of primary or secondary- – I haven’t quite figured out a system for this.

Urdhva Dhanurasana

Sarvangasana series or Sirsasana

Yoga Mudra

Savasana

The downside of this set-up is that it is all too easy for me to leave out poses I dislike (navasana) to make time for poses I do like.   But maybe that’s okay right now and I just need to chillax.   This shortened practice is working for me right now- – epic 2-hr practices will have to wait for another day.

Exploding Snot!

Practice was blah today, but I had a really fantastic nose-blowing experience before practice, so I’ll share that instead.  Please feel free to stop reading at this point.

So this morning before yoga, I felt inspired to do jala neti to clear out my nasal passages, which I do now and then if I feel a little stuffy.  Shortly after neti, I blew my nose, which produced this amazing crackly, exploding sound seemingly emanating from deep in my sinuses.  Wow!  Sure enough, this blow produced a good amount of snot.  The really great thing was that the super-snot-explosion kept happening every time I blew my nose.  Double wow!  All this snot coming from nowhere.  I felt so light and clear afterword- – it was like I didn’t even need to do yoga!  Weird to think I was carrying that gunk around in my schnoz without even knowing it.   I have long been a moderate fan of the neti pot, but now I love it.  Yayyy!

Mountain Pose

Skied up to a peak with an awesome view of Mt. Rainier this weekend! Yoga on the deck of High Hut:

Minty fresh:

What a nice mountain. Maybe one day i’ll climb it.

And finally, my ever-cheerful skiing partners (you wouldn’t guess from this pic that we’d just emerged from a rather grueling off-trail ordeal):

Radiator Salutations

First, an apology to anyone who cares but mostly to myself: sorry for disappearing from the blogosphere for months without comment nor explanation! I have a tendency to occasionally disappear from people or things in real life too- – a real immature habit, but that’s a whole ‘nother book.  The main issue this time was that I was feeling terribly overwhelmed with grad school applications (on top of work, classes, volunteering at the hospital, community organizing, holiday-making, and trying to maintain a home yoga practice), and something had to go.  I was up to my ears in internal self-reflection, so I just couldn’t bring myself to blog on top of it all.  Alas.  I miss it.

Anyway, my radiator:

Oh, glorious radiator, my neopagan yuletide bonfire harkening the distant sun!  (I’m feeling . . . Shakespearian today.)  Seriously though, this radiator more than perhaps anything else has enabled my home practice to be reasonably successful, or at least extant.  I set the timer to have it on from 5 am to 7 am, so when I wake up and stumble into my yoga room (usually after making/drinking a cup of coffee), the room is at least over 60 F, unlike the rest of the house.  Then I turn on a lamp and light 5 candles (decadent, I know) to brighten the room in lieu of a rising sun, and yoga begins.  I keep the radiator ON, and by the time I get to floor poses, the temperature is pretty good.  I love you, programmable radiator.

I guess having a yoga room is pretty handy, too.  Our appartment just happened to have an extra room, and we didn’t need an office, we didn’t need a guest room, thus I established a yoga room.  Of course the living room would have worked fine, but there’s something really wonderful about having a dedicated space.

It’s obscured in this photo, but I have my ‘graduation gift’ from the Yoga Thailand teacher training up in the window- – a red and yellow silk scarf imprinted with a large unbroken OM and the Gayatri mantra.  <3

Yoga Keeps Me Sane

Ah, yes, so that’s why I do yoga.  Daily.  It keeps me sane.  Or I suppose a better word is grounded- – more calm and connected to reality.  Less neurotic.  Unfortunately, I had to have a couple months of somewhat sporadic yogaing and increasing crazy-going to remind myself of that.  Bleh.  That’s over, thank goodness.  I’m back on the mat and feeling MUCH BETTER.

Now I just need to find a way to stop over-committing myself to things I don’t want to do and under-committing myself to things I do want to do in general.

Natural Curiosity

Pop, pop, pop!  Some otters say hello at Heart Lake in Yellowstone.  (Click for more pics.)  We aren’t the only species curious about the world around us. . .

In other news, I’ve been in a terrible head-space for yoga lately- – I start doing sun salutations and it just brings out the crazy.  Not sure what’s going on with that exactly.  I’ve been getting kind of down on myself about it, but I suppose an approach of gentle curiosity might be more appropriate.

I’m back!

Back from a 2-week hiking/camping/backpacking vacation in Yellowstone National Park.  Haven’t done a lick of yoga in 2 weeks, so I wonder what starting up again will be like after this time of over-using my body yet relaxing my mind. Hmm . . .

Pictures later. 

It’s HAPPENING

Oh god, it’s happening, right now, as I write: Fall is coming!

As I was practicing this morning, I opened the window for some fresh air, and there it was.

The smell of Fall.

Faint yet unmistakable.

Beautiful and bittersweet.