YogaMamaMe

Not Gone, Just Somewhere Else

2008-06-09T13:21:00.000-07:00

So it's happening slowly, but the YogaMamaMe website is happening. Imagine me, at 41 years old, hunched over a computer typing HTML code. Cool. Or not really. But working.

The site isn't done yet, but I'm begun posting there, so I'm inviting those of you who read my posts to take a visit: http://yogamamame.com

The posts are up and running and all linked up to stuff. You can search by pose. Not so much by category (that's next), and I'm not quite sure what I'm doing with the forums, though you are more than welcome to chat amongst yourselves there anyhow -- you don't need me to do it. Soon, too, I'll have some beautiful pictures up, taken by a teacher at Jake's school.

I don't know that I'm ready for you to share it yet . . . but soon you'll get the email about its launch and then, yes, you may hit that "forward" button as many times as your heart desires.

And my heart will thank you for it.

Booster Seats and Boosting Yourself

2008-05-25T10:16:00.001-07:00

Thursday's life lesson took place in the unlikely location of a Babies R Us in a strip mall off the exit just past the Asheville Mall, second-rate real estate where the stores squat sadly as if aware they have been banished.

I entered already full of the anxiety large, glowing box stores induce in me, determined to make it to the booster seats and back to my car before I passed out from breathing the oft-recirculated air. The salespeople lacked not in the cheer and charm department, but came up woefully short in terms of knowledge of the store -- sending me on more than one jittery revolution of its perimeter before I found the booster seats for eating at the table rather than the booster seats for riding in the car. You could just see them waiting for the call about their application to work at The Children's Place or Gymboree or some other children's store ensconced in the more desirable environs of the Mall.

Once I had zeroed in on my target, I found myself in a Mama quandary -- which one to buy?

If I were Mike, I would have better spent my time at home on my computer reading Consumer Reports and hunting down the safest, most environmentally friendly, and of course the most cost-effective booster seat to be had. But I'm not Mike. I'm a frazzled mother with a to-do list far longer than the amount of time I have while Jake is at school who suddenly decided she could not tolerate a single day longer of serving as a human booster seat for her child who refuses to eat in his high chair.

Now I was confronted with the choices. The Cooshie Booster was mighty attractive, a simple foam seat that boasted the approval of an upscale parents' magazine. But its intended age group started at three, over a year and a half past Jake's age. At more than thirty-five dollars, or the prospect of having to return to a store I dislike on principle for a return, the risk that Jake would topple off of it to fall to the ground amongst the detritus of dried pasta bits and cracker crumbs overlooked by the dogs seemed too high.

And yet the booster seats recommended for his age group seemed so plastic and baby-ish. I probably shouldn't admit to fretting about his aversion to the straps that adorned the molded plastic Fisher Price booster because it really isn't up to Jake whether he wants to be strapped in or not. Except it sort of is because we elect to "watch him closely" rather than fight over using safety straps. At any rate, I realized, after careful examination of the picture on the box, the straps secured the child to the seat, but the photo cleverly obscured the disturbing fact that they did not seem to secure the seat to the dining room chair upon which it sits. One thought of Jake falling to the floor with a yellow plastic seat secured to his butt, and I tossed it back on the shelf.

In the end, I went with the ages 3+ Cooshie. And he loves it. He has not fallen out of it once, although he has an alarming habit of twisting around to see if the dogs are in the room so he can tell them "No!" and just this morning I caught him standing up on it.

Still, ignoring what the label said about when my child would be ready for the Cooshie seat has been a lesson well learned. Not just to trust my Mama instincts about my child, but to break away from the set expectations we -- and others -- create for our lives. Jake, in other words, is far wiser than I because he doesn't care when the box says his Cooshie is for three-year-olds.

It's All too Much to Expect

I started thinking about that booster seat a few days later, when I found myself hitting the preset button on the car radio for a ghastly "light" music station. Ghastly, yes, but the fact that it pushed a new nostalgia button every two and a half minutes far outweighed the sickening feeling that I am now so old and un-hip as to not only listen to a soft rock station, but to set a button for it on my radio.

Actually, radio in Asheville is pretty sparse. So it's not like I displaced a perfectly respectable indie-rock station or even the distant second NPR broadcast that sometimes snakes its way over the mountains, instead reserving a spot for sappy love songs that all end on either a soaring diva-note vibrato or a soft whisper of regret. Why not, I reasoned, make it easy to return here when I once again -- as I predictably will -- have one of those days when I'm wallowing in weepiness and need to torture myself with candy-colored memories of my junior high school days?

Yes, I have taken to telling myself that those carefree days of my youth -- when I sported rubber bands anchored to various wire implements cemented onto my teeth, tried desperately and tearfully to achieve the Farrah Fawcett feather in my limp, fine hair, and generally hadn't a clue about how to feel good about myself -- were happier than my current state of ragged YogaMama-ness. I did, after all, have my life ahead of me, cringe-worthy as that concept was back then. I had all the time in the world to indulge myself in whatever I wanted to do -- at least once my algebra homework was done. But the point is I didn't know what I wanted to do. Other than have hair that looked like Farrah Fawcett's.

Regardless of how awkward and decidedly unglamorous my junior-high life was, as I sat in my car singing passionately to "Waiting for a Girl Like You" I was willing to go back to 1981 and do it all differently. Well, maybe not all. But the part where I fail to publish a novel or become a great actress or, you know, do all those things I'll never get to do now that I have a child who won't be able to so much as make a tuna fish sandwich for himself until I'm fifty.

I was, to be brutally clear, mourning the fact that I haven't done all the things I feel I should have done by now and feeling gypped because I don't think I ever will.

And then, just at the brink of driving off the side of the road in a swell of over overly dramatic whining fueled, no doubt, by channeling my inner fourteen-year-old, I thought about the appropriate-age-designation on Jake's Cooshie. And in a decidedly twisted version of lucidity, I understood that I was creating an age-chart of my own in which I've outgrown all the cool, fun games and am therefore destined to spend the rest of my life sitting stiffly on the couch sporting a pained little smile as everyone else gets to play with abandon.

Trust

We pay attention to things like the age labels on boxes because it makes us feel safe. It's the same reason, I imagine, that we allow parents, friends, pediatricians, the teachers at our children's preschool, and absolute strangers to give us unsolicited child rearing advice, even if we will ignore it after a long internal battle over whether we are, in fact, bad mothers for doing what we think is right instead of what the bossy woman in the grocery store assured us was. It's just plain scary to run on instinct alone.

Who can blame us? We live in a culture where it's assumed there are answers to everything. Look how far science has taken us, a true believer might point out. But has science really provided more answers? Or just left us with even greater questions -- about how much harm we are suffering from the pesticides used to grow greater crops, the fuel emissions billowing out of our global economy, the latent side effects of the immunizations that we are told will keep our children safer, at least in the short term?

If it's hard to resist the desire to have someone else explain to us how to take care of our own bodies, homes, lives, there's no way at all most of us have the strength to ignore the "experts" when it comes to our children. I purchased or received as gifts no fewer than four books on pregnancy and childbirth and five on babycare and early infant development. I read at least parts of them all and shelved, gave away, or threw away every single one of them. But not until I had cried and equivocated, see-sawed and capitulated over how to feed my child, diaper my child, help my child sleep, stimulate my child, and, well, just be a mother to him.

You get so used to charting your child's "progress" against a big, fat chart of averages that it becomes second nature, even though you tell yourself that it doesn't matter if he's using two-word sentences well ahead of his peers or walking far later than three-quarters of the kids his age. We all, I hope, come around to knowing that our children are perfect just as they are. But we are still expected to walk past the signpost that tells us what "perfect" is supposed to mean.

It's reassuring, tapping that signpost as you head on past it, glorying in your ability to not (really) care about it. Not unlike the pleasure I found as an undergraduate rubbing the nose of the Rockefeller statue in front of the library for good luck on my exams; I didn't for a minute think it would give me good luck, but it certainly couldn't hurt.

And so, I'm convinced, we start looking to the signposts in our own lives. After all, if there are certain things our children are expected to do by certain ages, why not us? Sure it was once easy for me to pooh-pooh the notion that I was "supposed" to be married by thirty (I wasn't) and to have a child by thirty-five (I didn't). But now I suddenly see all the things I should have done by now. And it suddenly bothers me that I haven't.

Is it motherhood or just advancing age? I can't separate the two, as they arrived together. But, really, I don't think it matters. Because if not motherhood, there would be a million other things pressing against me, reminding me that I have missed some important milestone, some measure of my worth, happiness, satisfaction.

The simple fact -- and I'm taking a long way to get here, perhaps because the simple things are frequently the ones that are so hidden we can't quite see what we're missing -- is that we far too rarely let go and trust.

I've written before about trust, and how yoga helps you to trust in something bigger, which, in turn, helps you let go of the need to control that only ends up tying you up in knots. But this aspect of it, I think, is something I haven't fully explored myself. This frightening step of letting go of any notions of how things should be and just letting life happen.

I'm talking about even more than trying not to control things. Control would be something like looking at the label on the Cooshie and setting up a plan for your child to achieve Cooshie status by age three. What I'm suggesting is refusing to even look at the label. Refusing, in other words, to use any external measurement by which to gauge your life's choices.

So, instead of thinking of all the things I want to accomplish in life, feeling bad for a few days that I haven't accomplished them yet, and then figuring out how to get them done NOW, I'm suggesting letting of them completely. That's not to say they won't happen, nor that you should just sort of stop and stagnate and wait for things to happen to you.

No, what I'm suggesting is that we are all, as mothers, in a unique position to parent ourselves in a way as kind as the way in which we parent our children. Because we wouldn't dream of telling them about the developmental expectations that are revealed to us as their caregivers, any more than we would berate our perfectly beautiful offspring for failing to meet some externally generated standard. No, indeed. If some anonymous testing center told me that my son is lagging behind in, say, social skills, I would pick apart the basis for the standards and the means by which my child was tested. Most of all, I would determine that my child is exactly where he needs to be and I dare anyone to tell me otherwise. (Unless, of course, he's exhibiting truly disturbing behavior like hurting small animals; but, other than pulling the dogs' tails in an exploratory sort of way, I know for a fact that Jake has none of the warning signs of a true psychopath in the making.)

What I look forward to is the day when I can defend myself with the same intense certainty with which I am prepared to defend my child. My intention -- the direction in which I would like my life practice to take me -- is toward a place where I can dismiss labels, expectations, and should have's as firmly as I dismiss the things that threaten to place my child in a box.

Maybe we're all already in boxes built around us when we were too young to know better. And maybe it's just a little bit too scary to step out of them right at this moment. But if we keep working on true trust -- on believing we can negotiate our lives without anyone, including ourselves, telling us how to do it -- we will, I feel certain, open ourselves up to the beauty of our own lives.

Urdhva Prasarita Eka Padasana (Standing Splits) -- A Lesson in Trust, Play, and the Fallibility of Expectations

My moment of learning trust in asana yoga came when I managed my first handstand. It's one of those poses where you just have to jump in. One moment you're rightside up, the next you're upside down. No two ways about it.

But it's hard to get to the point where you're willing to dive in like that. For me, it came with my decision to pretty much turn my life upside down -- quitting my job and moving to California to be a writer. Without such impetus, I've since found myself stalled at jumping into handstand with two legs, or trying it without a wall. The all-or-nothing aspect of the pose, in the end, proved too stringent to include here with a lesson in trust.

Instead, I offer urdhva prasarita eka padasana, which, by the way, is never called by its sanskrit name. Standing splits provides one with a more conscious means of turning upside down, reaching for the sky, and opening up. And, of course, like any asana, it gives us the strength to turn further, reach higher, and open more deeply.

And, hey, if you want to get into the scary part of trust, there are a few variations at the end of the pose that will allow you to do just that. Trust where you are, and practice in that mode. It's the first step toward trusting where you are in your own life as well.

Standing Splits Instructions

1) From adho mukha svanasana (downward facing dog) step your right foot forward about 6-12 inches from your hands. If you are new to this pose, place your foot at least 12 inches from your hands -- the tighter your hamstrings and the shakier your balance, the further away you want it.

2) Shift your weight toward your front, right foot, using your hands on the floor for balance. As you are ready, let your left foot float off the ground.

3) As your left leg starts to lift, feel the connection between the leg and your core; let your navel pull in toward your spine and up toward your heart and let the strength and heat you are generating be what propels your left leg up as if your toes could draw a line on the ceiling.

4) Pause before you lose the feeling of being solid and conscious of your left leg. Press your right foot more firmly into the floor and feel as if you can draw energy from the earth through the sole of your foot. Watch that energy move all the way up your standing leg and out the toes of your lifted leg.

5) Now start to engage your trust. Trust the energy you are drawing on. Trust the strength of your standing leg. Trust the heat you are generating in your core. Never mind what the pose is "supposed" to look like; it is your own expression of it that counts. With this thought, let your shoulders relax and your spine lengthen, and see how these actions of letting go tip you forward, so your head comes closer to the floor.

6) With this sense of trust energizing your pose, let your floating leg sing and let the toes float even further in the direction of the ceiling. Gaze at your fingers or, for more of a challenge, at the toes of your standing leg as you confidently radiate the energy of the pose -- toes reaching for the ceiling, torso reaching along the length of your strong standing leg, crown of your head releasing toward the floor in a gesture of surrender.

7) Concentrate on your breath now. Let each inhale through your nose bring you energy and confidence. Let each exhale release doubts. Stay here for 8-12 long, slow, beautiful breaths.

8) If you want a more challenging variation, you may move your hands closer to your standing foot, deepening the pose. To create an even greater challenge, you may hold your (right) standing ankle with your left hand. If you are feeling ready to truly trust -- and maybe even to fall -- press the standing foot even more firmly and surely into the ground, engage all the muscles of the standing leg, engage your core, and reach your right hand to the ankle as well, so you are balancing entirely on one foot with both hands grasping your ankle. Keep reaching your floating leg toward the ceiling. And if you're really flying today, you can reach both hands behind you, either interlacing your fingers and lifting your hands with your floating leg or placing your hands behind your back in reverse prayer position.

9) When you are ready to come out of the pose, slowly and consciously lower your floating leg so your left foot rests next to your right. Bow in an easy uttanasana (standing forward fold) and truly surrender. Trust is about acknowledging that you don't control everything, including a beautiful, strong pose.

10) Once you have a clear picture in your mind of trust, step back to adho mukha svanasana and repeat with your left leg as the standing leg.

Remember to have some fun. Because what's the point of a trusting, wise, peaceful life if it's not kind of fun as well? In fact, I'm going to invite Jake to practice this one with me. Because I know for a fact he'll remind me that having fun is what it's all about.

Letting My Child's Inner Beauty Shine Past the Tests

2008-05-20T07:26:00.000-07:00

At Jake's school this morning one of his teachers showed me the developmental evaluation they had filled out for him. It was a standardized list of questions -- a la "Can the child pick up a Cheerio between his thumb and forefinger?" -- in such categories as Communication, Gross Motor Skills, Fine Motor Skills, and I don't know what else because I'm still stuck on the Communication part.

I'm trying to figure out how to say this without sounding like the crazy, pushy, competitive mom I became this morning. But, frankly, they WAY underscored him on Communication.

This is, the rational part of my brain acknowledges, not important. His score still landed him safely in the zone where he doesn't need to be evaluated for some sort of developmental issue. And it's not like he gets anything special for scoring way above that cut-off.

But I drove home listing all the words he knows, beyond irked that next to the question "Does the child use at least four words in addition to mama/dada?" was a big, fat "NO." NO?! What about "dog" and "book" and "ball" and "car" and "big car" and "juice" and "all done" and "bye bye" and-- I'm going to stop here because I am about to become once again just what I became by the time I got home:

The Pushy Over-Achievement Mother. Have we all been there? Please tell me we have.

The Line Between Thinking He's the Greatest and Knowing It

Here's the really crazy thing I did. I called his school.

Never mind that I had been there just five minutes before making subtle comments like, "Oh, I see it's dated April 4, so this isn't where he is now, right?" and, "I've noticed he's kind of shy at school because he talks a lot more at home." His teacher gave me a patient nod that as much as said, "We've got another pushy one."

I told myself that it's not that I wanted everyone to know how brilliant my child is, even though I think it should be immediately apparent. But, yeah, I did want some reassurance, given that this was the 14-month questionnaire on which he was barely scoring in the safety zone on communication; he's nearly 17 months now, so does that mean he'd fail the 16-month evaluation?

His teacher said things meant to offer the necessary reassurance. Things like, "Boys are slower to talk than girls." But not MY boy! What about "baa baa" and "bus" and that time I swear he said, "That's the big dog"?

She told me they began filling out the evaluation on April 4 and only just finished it now, six weeks later. Could it be that Jake used only a few words six weeks ago, that he has only recently stumbled into the treasure trove that is language? Entirely. But.

I am still powerless in the face of the panic that overtook me as I paced the living room muttering that my child should have scored a perfect 60, not a middling 40. WHO CARES? Not you, not anyone.

I do not wish to be one of those mothers who shows up to her child's school on a weekly basis demanding that he be placed in the highest reading group, be given special assignments that tap into his brilliance, be assured a spot in the gifted program. I hate to think I would place that pressure on Jake, and I know it would be far healthier for me to cede such control to the professionals.

But as soon as I found my way into this calm moment I conjured up distressing images of Jake at school. Does he shrink back against a wall while his friends shout the words in books? Does he stare mutely when the teachers ask him what the thing in the middle of his face is? ("Nose!" he says as he hits mine. "Mouse!") Have they pegged him as the sort of dull but athletic sort? Is that why he scored perfectly on Gross Motor Skills? Given his parentage, I did not agree with his teacher that this was to be expected.

And so, yes, I called the school back. I considered calling the head of school, to whom this crucial document was about to be sent, but I was able to exercise at least that modicum of restraint. Surely I could manage not to be the mother storming into the principal's office insisting that her child's genius be acknowledged.

"I just want to be sure it doesn't matter what the questionnaire says as long as he doesn't need evaluation," I said with probably only a tiny portion of the apology in my voice that ought to have been there. I was up to apologizing for anything that might sound like an accusation, and for wasting their time, but I couldn't quite see my way clear to apologizing for my own pushiness.

The teacher who answered the phone was awfully sweet about assuring me that Jake is doing just fine and all the questionnaire does is ensure he doesn't have any problems.

"I understand that," I said, my voice rising despite my best efforts at keeping it under control. "But what if it's wrong?"

"He's just fine," she repeated soothingly.

"No, no," I cried, sounding a lot like Jake when the dogs eat something he has dropped on the ground. I was mighty close to the attendant temper tantrum as well. "He should have scored better."

There. I'd said it. My son is supposed to score better. I am humiliated yet possessed. Because, while I find it a source of great relief that this questionnaire will be filed away somewhere never to be glanced at again, I am still slightly depressed that Jake does not shine so brightly that all of his teachers recognize what a talent he is.

And I sense this difficulty I'm having letting go of the notion will remain with me for quite some time.

The Beauty in You

When I first started teaching yoga I went from a day spent lecturing law students in heels and tailored pants to evenings demonstrating yoga poses in bare feet and stretchy yoga clothes. It's amazing how much more at home I felt in yoga mode and how much less self-conscious about how I looked. My make-up lost somewhere under the fluorescent lights of my office, my flattened hair bunched into a stringy ponytail, my stomach pouching softly over the top of my yoga pants, I felt beautiful.

I felt beautiful because in constantly reminding my students that they were beautiful -- in believing it as I gazed upon their poses -- I was reminding myself of my own beauty as well.

There are few things as lovely as gazing upon someone deeply in an asana, bending in ways you can barely believe a body bends. Just glance at the Yoga Journal sitting by the check-out at Whole Foods if ever you shop there or someplace similar. It's enough to make you empty out your cart and start all over with nothing but fresh vegetables and nourishing grains.

But I can also assure you with all honesty that the students I saw in less intense variations of the poses often looked absolutely beautiful as well. The ones who believed in their own beauty and therefore owned the pose as it worked for them had a grace and a fluidity that I admired. Only when someone failed to acknowledge the beauty in her own pose and struggled to force her body further, into something it wasn't, did she start to look awkward, uncomfortable, unnatural.

I'm hardly saying anything astounding by suggesting that the same goes for our lives. We all know the better we feel about ourselves the easier, more comfortable everything seems to be around us. I still think, from time to time, about a woman I knew passingly in college. She wasn't the prettiest girl or the most vivacious and she didn't even seem to try that hard to be attractive. But I knew an awful lot of men with powerful crushes on her. What is it? I would ask from the crushingly insecure perch of a slightly bookish 18-year-old. "Self-confidence," I heard, over and over.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We've all heard about self-confidence, and maybe sometimes we even grasp it, but it's not exactly something you can force on yourself. In fact, the more I used to admonish myself to have a little self-confidence the more I was confronted with my astonishing lack of it. Which, of course, only made me feel worse.

But as I walked through the rows of students in my first yoga classes as a teacher, I understood. I saw the beauty in my students and found it in myself. I learned from them how to practice honestly, to appreciate everything my body could do rather than all the things it couldn't. I felt the beauty of the poses, and that beauty entered me.

It's the same, I know, with my child. Everything about him is excruciatingly beautiful to me, from his milky clear skin to his Fred Flintstone feet to the guttural sound he makes when he says, "bookh." It's not up to me to force that perspective on others. Much as I might want to explain to strangers witnessing one of his tantrums that his scrunched up little face is simply exquisite if you can ignore the keening wails long enough to gaze upon it without annoyance, they probably don't care and wouldn't agree. And, really, is it about Jake or about me?

Actually, it's about us both. Beauty comes from within. It comes from Jake being who he is in that unself-conscious way that sadly disappears as toddlers grow into peer-pressured children. And, just as my beauty comes from letting go of how others see me and instead embracing what arises when I let myself be me, where my son is concerned beauty come from my letting him be exactly who he is.

Ustrasana (Camel Pose) -- Shining Your Beauty Out and Finding It Within

I immediately thought of heart openers here because beauty most readily surfaces when you open your heart. It's as if letting others in allows your true beauty to shine, rather than the prepared version of prettiness we try to manipulate with make-up and hair cuts and the outfits we choose. (Not that I am prepared to give up any of these things because in the 23 years since I admired that woman in college I am still not quite there.)

Even if you are familiar with ustrasana, try approaching it from the inside out. Think about letting your heart shine without worrying about what it, you, or the pose looks like. Let it carry you into a belief in your own beauty.

Ustrasana Instructions

1) Kneel on your mat with your knees hip distance apart. If this is uncomfortable, try folding your mat over to provide more cushioning. The lighter you let yourself feel in this pose, the less weight you will feel on your knees and ankles.

2) Place your hands on your hips and use them to help release your lower back by subtly tucking your tail bone, drawing your navel in toward your spine and up toward your heart, and physically tipping your pelvis so it slides up a tiny bit in the front and down a tiny bit in the back.

3) Move your hands to your lower back, fingers facing up if you can or down if this is more comfortable. Draw your elbows together and feel your shoulder blades sliding down your back and closer to each other as your heart/sternum lifts. Be aware of the bottoms of the shoulder blades; this is where the back bend happens.

4) Check in one more time to be sure your navel is strongly pulling in and up to protect your spine.

5) Tuck your chin slightly as you take a long inhale, letting it lengthen your spine.

6) As you exhale, let your heart shine. Slowly and consciously let it start to lift up toward the ceiling as the lower edges of your shoulder blades press into the back of your heart and you start to bend back. Think about lengthening your spine to give your heart space to shine. Remember, the bend comes behind your heart, not in your lower back.

7) You may release your head all the way back if you can keep your neck long as you do so. If you feel any discomfort at all in your neck, tuck your chin. This will both protect your cervical spine and strengthen the muscles supporting it.

8) Remain here, breathing slowly through your nose and concentrating on opening your heart and letting your beauty shine out.

9) When you are ready to come out of the pose, let your heart draw you upright and sit on your heels. Rest for a few breaths.

10) You may repeat the above one or two more times, go directly to step 20, or move on to Stage Two Ustrasana:

11) Kneel again and tuck your toes so your feet are perpendicular to the floor and your heels are raised toward the ceiling. Check in with your alignment as in steps 1-5.

12) This time, as you exhale and lean back, reach one hand at a time for a heel (right hand to right heel; left hand to left heel). Draw your shoulder blades together and feel how that action lets your heart shine even more strongly.

13) Remain here, breathing and concentrating on letting the beauty of your heart shine. Once again be aware of your lower back and your neck. If your lower back hurts, come out of the pose and go directly to step 20. If your neck hurts, tuck your chin or come out of the pose and go directly to step 20.

14) To come out of the pose, bring your hands back to your lower back for support and let your heart draw you upright. Sit on your heels and rest for a few breaths.

15) You may repeat one more time, go to step 20, or try Stage Three Ustrasana. Remember, it is about finding the beauty of your pose, not forcing yourself into somebody else's.

16) Set up as in steps 1-5 above. This time, place the tops of your feet flat on the floor. If this is uncomfortable, you may place a rolled-up blanket under your ankles.

17) As you exhale back, reach one hand at a time for your heels. Note that they are several inches further away this time than when you had your toes tucked under.

18) Draw your shoulder blades together, lengthen your spine, and let the beauty of your heart shine.

19) When you are ready to come out of the pose, place your hands on your lower back for support and let your heart lift you upright.

20) Sit on your heels, widen your knees, and fold forward into balasana (child's pose) with your forehead on the floor. Draw your navel in to fully release your lower back.

21) Now turn inside and locate your beauty. Believe in it. Stay here for as long as you'd like.

Be sure to really appreciate your inner beauty so you don't lose sight of it when you come out of the pose and into your day. If ever it falters, let your heart lift and sing just a bit -- your shoulders will release, your spine will lengthen, your navel will draw in, and you will, I promise, feel a little bit more beautiful.

My Child Broke My Japa Mala

2008-05-19T06:39:00.000-07:00

What does it mean when your child breaks your japa mala?

A japa mala is a set of prayer beads some people use when chanting to Hindu or Buddhist deities. I got mine during my month of is-this-me?, Indian-print-skirt-wearing, chanting-at-five-in-the-morning, living-on-an-ashram yoga teacher training. I can't say I've used it a whole lot since returning to my world of blue jeans and computers; I'm not good about meditating, and I don't remember any of the chants anyhow. Plus, my japa mala was kind of defective, sporting something less than the 108 beads necessary to help you keep track of your chants.

So the answer to my question may very well be: nothing at all. There is no reason to attach gloomy symbolism to Jake's pull at the beads he rather adorably draped around his neck, nor to the way they tumbled onto his diaper table. This common child act did not illustrate the break with inner peace having a baby has wrought; it did not suggest that in becoming a mother I have broken with my life's path.

Although I did suggest to Mike that it would be be sort of disrespectful to throw the beads away in the diaper pail.

So did it really mean nothing? Or is the issue not what happened but how I choose to view it?

YogaMamaMe

The whole point of YogaMamaMe, of course, is to share the ways I find to stay centered when I'm tipping over as frequently as my toddler running after the dogs.

I no longer have the luxury of taking off for a month to live on an ashram outside Boulder, Colorado, where my responsibilities are no more onerous than memorizing the sanskrit names of poses, helping in the kitchen once a week or so, and showing up for the aforementioned chanting. (A friend who had been through the program before offered the helpful suggestion that I join in the dancing around with symbolic items like an umbrella during the evening chanting because it was preferable to spending yet another hour sitting cross-legged on the floor. You have no idea how much it can hurt to sit cross-legged on the floor for six or seven hours a day. And until you've done it, you can't truly appreciate just how much fun it can be to twirl around with an umbrella in a sacred dance.)

Nor is there any way to guarantee myself daily, focused, intense asana practices. Even if I could find the plethora of classes available to me in the distant past of our home in West Hollywood, I have neither the mental focus nor the physical energy to practice the way I used to. Rather than my classes providing me with a sure, clear path to mindfulness, they now are mostly a chance for me to feel not quite so old and like I can have fun without a laughing little boy in the room.

With my mind necessarily on my child, I also can't eat as purely as I once did, sleep as regularly as I need, or spend the oh-so-precious time being quiet that I found I needed once I embraced my years of living alone.

A deeply dedicated life of yoga, to put it bluntly, is a deeply selfish life indeed. Easily shared with a sweet, patient basset hound, but less so with a child who rightly demands as much attention as you can possibly muster for him.

So there's the choice I've made. My life is about my child and my husband and my nice enough but far from replacement dogs. It's about moving to Asheville, where the air is clean and the neighbors are friendly and our porch is an excellent place for playing. My child is my center, right there in my heart, and he leads me in directions that have more to do with his inner peace than mine.

Mine, I am realizing, must be found in the jumble of a life filled with wooden blocks, colorful board books, and lots of time spent at the dining room table with a boy in my lap eating sweet potatoes or corkscrew pasta or the ubiquitous yogurt.

That Connection to Everything

It's funny, how when I think about those days when yoga more or less defined who I was -- or at least was the means for me to search for and express that person -- I see myself alone. Not alone in a bad way. Just free and easy and unhassled. Able to create my own rhythm, to find my spaces of silence, to create my own type of meditation somewhere in every day. Powerful and centered without a shifting phalanx of baby chores to throw me out of that center.

I wasn't lonely in this alone place because I maintained my awareness that -- as we believe when we practice yoga -- we are all connected. I wasn't on this journey alone because I drew energy from outside of myself. It's like when you practice asanas in a room full of good will and camaraderie; your practice is easier, more soaring, stronger than when trying the same poses alone in a room at home. We all have known times when the people around us created a certain energy that affected us. At the very least we have all felt that electrifying surge of happiness created by our child's beaming smile.

So maybe, once you have a child, the challenge is to step out into that world to which you're connected. It's one thing to carefully receive and offer energy, to do so within the safely constructed confines of your independent days. It's quite another to have your energy, your heart, demanded, and then, when you think you have no more to give, to have love thrust at you so eagerly you can barely breathe for joy. It's proof, isn't it, that we're not in control?

For me, those first years of yoga were about freeing myself, opening my eyes and my heart. Maybe I needed to be alone to find it, able to step out of the comfortable patterns of reasonable, regular job, lovely home I could just barely afford, and mornings at the gym doing all my motion and sweating before showering and donning the clothes of respectability. (That last bit might be disputed by the students in my very first law school class, a few of whom suggested on teacher evaluations that a real lawyer doesn't wear short skirts and tights. So you see how far I was headed off my path when I succumbed to tailored pants and safely long skirts.)

But you don't progress -- in yoga or in life -- if you don't challenge yourself. And what better way to truly understand the challenge of our connection to all things than to become a parent? Never mind biology; I'm talking about that intense, shapeless bond that comes from being a mother, no matter who gave birth to your child. If ever there were proof that we are not strictly autonomous, independent beings, this must be it. That this intense bond carries with it some mighty difficult struggles -- sleepless nights and loss of your quiet time and reading Good Dog Carl twenty or thirty times a day -- only proves that it's real. Because, after all, no one said life is without struggle.

In the end, I suppose, Jake breaking my japa mala did mean something. It meant that I haven't had the time and patience to sit and meditate in the six years since I lived on the ashram so I ought to find another means of meditation. It meant that I'm no longer the woman dancing with an umbrella in my swinging Indian print skirt. It meant that Jake has something to say about what yoga means to me now, how to find my way to mindfulness, and what it means to to be Yoga. Mama. Me.

Meditation in Motion: Surya Namaskar B (Sun Salute B)

I toyed with a few versions of sun salutes to offer here. The beauty of any sun salute lies in the repetition, in bringing consciousness to poses you've practiced many, many times before. It's a reminder of the cyclical nature of life, and also of how complacent we can become. "Been there, done that," or something like it, lets us become bored, restless, certain we need something more from life. So in repeating the motions, we learn to move beyond the fallacy that we have, in fact, done them before, because we haven't done them exactly the same way. And, of course, practicing the same cycle over and over frees you to not think about what you're doing so much as to observe it, to quiet your mind, to, yes, meditate.

I chose Surya Namaskar B in particular for a few reasons. First of all, it's pretty strenuous, and I'm in need of a kick in the pants right now. Since it's strenuous it's also heating, and heat brings energy. It offers opportunities for pronounced heart opening. And, fittingly, it incorporates Virabhadrasana I -- Warrior I, and, well, need I say more than "warrior"?

Surya Namaskar B Instructions

1) Stand at the top of your mat in tadasana (mountain pose): feet either together or hip distance apart, inner thighs rotating toward the back of the room, tail bone tucked, navel moving toward the spine and up toward the heart, shoulder blades down the back, heart lifting, crown of the head open to the sky.

2) Inhale and sweep your arms to the sides and overhead, hands meeting at the top. Let your arms be energetic and at the same time think about the energy all around you that you are gathering to begin your sequence.

3) Exhale and sweep your arms to the sides as you swan dive into uttanasana (forward fold). Be sure to lead with your heart, keeping your spine long by strongly pulling your navel toward your spine and rotating your inner thighs toward the back of the room.

4) Inhale as you place your hands beneath your knees (or, if you are more flexible and experienced, on your ankles or the floor) and let your heart lift you half-way up. Your torso is parallel to the floor, your shoulder blades are moving strongly down your back, and you are gazing at the floor to keep your neck, and your entire spine, long. Think of offering your heart in this position.

5) Exhale back into a deep, surrendering uttanasana. Let your thoughts and tensions fall out the crown of your head with your breath.

6) Inhale and step back to plank pose -- or upper push-up position, arms shoulder distance apart, fingers spread wide, palms pressing into the mat. The key to this pose is to create energy in your legs and core so your arms aren't doing all the work. Rotate your inner thighs toward the ceiling, draw your navel in toward your spine and up toward your heart, and -- here's a really helpful hint -- pull your shoulder blades so far down your back that your heart moves toward the front of the mat. This places more of the work in your back, rather than your arms.

7) Exhale and slowly lower to the floor (or, if you are more experienced, cadaranga, hovering a couple of inches from the floor). It is really important here to keep your inner thighs and abdominals working, and to pull your elbows so close to your sides they brush against your ribs. Your whole body should lower to the ground in one piece.

8) Inhale into bhujangasana (cobra pose) -- elbows hugging in to your sides, shoulder blades down the back, inner thighs rotating toward the ceiling, and your heart literally lifting away from the floor. Keep your arms bent and your pelvis on the floor so the back bend happens behind your heart, not in your lumbar spine. (If you are experienced and lowered into cadaranga instead of all the way to the floor, you may inhale into urdhva mukha svanasana (upward facng dog) rather than bhujangasana.)

9) Exhale, tuck your toes, and lift your hips into adho mukha svanasana (downward facing dog). Be sure not to dump your weight into your hands; keep it moving back toward your feet as you continue to pull your navel in and rotate your inner thighs back.

10) Inhale and step your right foot between your hands, drop your left foot to the floor (at about a 45 degree angle so your toes point toward ten o'clock) and, keeping your right knee bent toward a right angle, sweep your arms up overhead, bringing your torso with them (perpendicular to the floor). You are in Virabhadrana I (Warrior I). Keep your shoulder blades moving strongly down your back.

11) Exhale and, with a long spine, bring your body back down so your hands are on the floor on either side of your right foot. You may either inhale into plank and exhale as you lower to the floor or skip the inhale and come from Virabhadrasana I all the way to the floor (or cadaranga) on one exhale.

12) Inhale into bhujangasana (or urdhva mukha svansana).

13) Exhale into adho muka svansana (downward facing dog).

14) Inhale stepping your left foot forward into Virabhadrasana I.

15) Exhale your way to the floor (or cadranga).

16) Inhale into bhujangasana (or urdhva mukha svansana).

17) Exhale into adho mukha svansana.

18) Remain here for five long, slow, deep inhales and exhales.

19) After your last exhale, either walk or hop to the front of your mat.

20) Inhale, lifting your spine parallel to the floor, hands on shins, ankles, or floor, offering your heart.

21) Exhale into a deep uttansansa (forward fold). Surrender completely.

22) Inhale and let your heart lead you, with long spine and arms reaching out to the sides, to standing. Your hands will meet overhead.

23) Exhale and draw your hands in front of your heart.

Your intention should be to eventually repeat this four or five more times. But, as we all know, it's best to be kind to yourself when you're a parent (and, by the way, when you're not). If you don't have the time or the stamina to do this sequence more than once, then embrace that fact, and the energy you are still bringing yourself and, yes, the little being who is responsible.

Breathing My Way into Feeling Good About Who I Am

2008-05-18T09:25:00.000-07:00

We went to a party yesterday! A real, live, social, people-who-speak-adult block party.

Granted, I spent the majority of the festivities chasing an increasingly bold and energized Jake down the hill, into the yard where he found the prize of a whiffle ball half-buried in rotting leaves, in front of the band to whose rendition of "Psycho Killer" he performed an impressive, hand-waving dance, across the street to Daddy to show him what fun we were having, and back down the hill to begin the circuit again. But we were out, having fun, acting like our lives are more than time snatched for ourselves while Jake is at school (also known as "work"), exhausted evenings seeing what Jon Stewart has to say about the election, and rushing to bed so we can spend a few precious hours sleeping next to each other before Jake ousts one of us (almost always Mike) with a coughing fit.

Amazing how good I felt running down the street with my winsome toddler to the strains of my era music played by my era dads having too much fun to really care whether they were as cool as they hoped. No one but Mike would have guessed that just a few hours earlier I was throwing clothes on the bed and sighing with such deeply felt exasperation that Mike had to ask me what was wrong.

"I'm just not as young as I used to be," I confessed in what didn't come off nearly as lighthearted as I had intended. Best, I knew, to joke about it, because I was unlikely to find any sympathy from my life partner.

In fact, I didn't have much sympathy for myself myself. After nearly thirty years of desperately trying to recreate just the right young, hip, casual-yet-not-sloppy woman for every single social gathering I've ever attended, I had to admit it was getting old. You'd think, in thirty years, I would have just once managed to buy that perfect outfit I tell myself I should have hanging around for such occasions. The one I know will look good no matter what. I could swear I buy it a couple times a year. But when the occasion surfaces . . . it's dematerialized, my closet suddenly resembling that empty chest/box/briefcase the heroine has pursued for most of the movie only to find it does not, as she had thought, contain the Holy Grail/Maltese Falcon/secret to saving the world.

And so, yesterday afternoon, there I was, my hair stringy rather than swingy, my make-up no longer the right balance of made-up and un-made-up it had been when they put it on me at Nordstrom, and my hips bulging over the top of my skinny jeans. Okay, so I did fit into my skinny jeans. But that didn't make me feel any better about myself, and it didn't keep us from leaving the house a good hour later than we had planned.

I hate it when that happens, I really do. It's just that it happens all the time.

Just Don't Say No

It doesn't seem right, does it? Someone who goes around applying soothing yoga philosophy to the normal anxieties of approaching-middle-aged, trying-to-be-hip motherhood does not gain great credibility by confessing that when faced with a party (or dinner with her parents) she becomes ridiculously -- embarrassingly -- insecure about her face, her figure, her wardrobe. You want a thirteen-year-old girl dispensing YogaMamaMe advice? I doubt it.

I truly do wish I were one of those women who has come to peace with who she is, who is beautiful purely by dint of being comfortable in her own skin. I should, by all rights, be embracing the little signs of age, surrendering to the permanent effects of bearing a child, glowing with the freedom of shedding the chains of my slavery to fashion magazines and Pretty People sitcoms. Else what has all this yoga brought me?

My frustrating pattern last night (which ended, as they nearly all do, with me feeling pretty darned great once I got away from a mirror) reminded me of how Jake LOVES to push the button to turn the television on and off. Over and over, for months now. And the more I tell him NO, the more he does it. In fact, he thinks it's pretty darned hilarious when I raise my voice, which I guess is a good sign that he can't imagine I would actually yell at him because I'm mad.

But, see, I'm going to stop yelling at both of us now because I know it will do absolutely no good. My need to beat myself up while getting ready for a party is just like Jake's reaction to that lovely button on the front of the t.v. set. It is, quite simply, irresistible.

It's not that I want to end up a self-hating wreck every time I try to undertake what should be the relatively un-fraught activity of getting dressed to go out. Nor, I suspect, does Jake find it a hoot to turn the t.v. on and off, considering his attention span for any other amusing activity. We don't do it for pleasure any longer. We do it because it's what we do.

Telling myself to just stop, then, is likely to have just as much of an effect as telling Jake to just stop. That is, if anything, it makes it even harder to resist.

I hit upon a good old-fashioned Mommy solution to Jake's television on/off button OCD the other day, when I decided I was tired of making both of us cry and worried that one of the neighbors would call Social Services if I continued to yell. Our television set now sports a most becoming piece of masking tape over the on/off button.

Believe it or not, it works. Jake can return again and again to the scene of his usual crime. But there's no button there for him to push. Either the t.v.'s or mine.

There is, I believe, a lesson in all of this for me, something I can use next time I'm faced with the frightening prospect of a social gathering. The best thing to do, I've decided, is to crudely blot out that tantalizing button.

Letting It Happen

A few years ago, when I had the time and space to be really, really obsessive about yoga, I went to a mysore practice six or so times a week. In mysore, one practices an astanga sequence -- a set of poses followed daily -- at one's own pace. You walk into the room and just start.

The teacher's job is to go around the room helping individuals. In the case of this particular teacher, it meant helping me to push myself. Really hard. It meant he made sure I left every class slicked up with sweat and not much good for anything more taxing than a shower for the rest of the day.

His instructions to me invariably had to do with moving a body part in a direction I just couldn't make it move. I put tremendous effort into it, and maybe eventually saw some progress. But when I think of my practice now what I marvel at most is my raw determination.

I wish I could recall getting ready for a social outing during my mysore days, but I can't. Still, I can't help suspecting that I didn't do any better then than I do now. Because, you see, I was in the habit of telling myself how to find my way into a pose or peace or a yogic state of mind.

More helpful, I find, is reminding myself -- and my students -- to let things happen in a pose. Rather than straightening that back leg to support a lunge position, I let my leg straighten. Less brute effort ensues, as well as a clearer sense of just how far my body can go. Because, you see, I am letting it tell me.

Yoga is, as I've said before, about respecting your body's limitations as much as its abilities. It's entirely possible to do that while telling it what shape to assume; you just have to stop telling it to go further when you become aware that you've reached your edge. But how much easier, how much more effortless, how much more in keeping with the "whatever" attitude one must adopt when living with small children, to simply let your body do what it can. This, it seems to me, exhibits a greater respect for limitations -- a trust, if you will, that your body won't lie to you.

It also feels like more of a kindred relationship between me and my body. I'm not policing it; I'm not going through my watching, telling mind to reach it. I'm simply going with it. This, I am starting to think, might be key to feeling comfortable in your own skin.

I don't have any social plans for the immediate future, but I promise to try it when they come. I'm going to let myself be who I am as I get ready. I'm not going to scold if I don't like what I see. Instead, I'm going to put a big, figurative piece of masking tape over my desire to go down the road of constructing some person out of clothes and hair and a body I don't possess.

Instead, I'm going to take a big, deep, cleansing breath and -- try it with me if you'd like -- I'm going to jump right into my very own 41-year-old, mother-of-a-toddler, woman-who-has-neither-the-time-
nor-the-inclination-much-less-the-money-to-shop-for-the-latest-trend
skin.

Ujayi Breath -- Drowning Out the Same Old Chatter with the Fresh Sound of Your Breath

Ujayi breath is something we are urged to practice all the time as we go through our asanas. It is a simple constriction of the throat that produces a lovely sound much like the ocean. Breathing this way creates heat, which is important in any asana practice (on the most basic level, your muscles aren't exactly at their most flexible when they're cold, right?). But it also -- and here's the reason I offer it now -- quiets the mind.

Your mind, I assure you, is unlikely to ever stop dancing in the same circles to which it is accustomed. At least, it's not going to stop just because you tell it to. So, to put it bluntly, the best thing to do when it's really pushing your buttons is to drown it out with some good, loud breathing.

Maybe, yesterday, if instead of sighing with exasperation I had taken a few deep ujayi breaths, I would have magically felt beautiful and like I could wear an old pair of yoga pants and a stretched out tee-shirt with panache. Well, maybe not. But I'll bet it would have at least made the ordeal of putting together an outfit and deciding whether to wear my hair up or down kind of -- I'm warming to the idea already -- fun.

Practicing Ujayi Breath

Try this simple exercise to reconnect with your ujayi breath so you can whip it out next time you find yourself sidling toward that spiral descent into old patterns. (I see myself perched at the top of a twirly slide Jake made me go down with him last weekend, a tube enclosed on all sides that, frankly scared me more than a little bit.) Practicing just ujayi breath alone regularly will make it easier for you to access it when you need it -- or just during a tough asana practice.

1) Sit comfortably on your mat -- legs folded in front of you either in an easy cross-legged pose, in ardha padmasana (half lotus), or in padmasana (full lotus). The important thing is to be comfortable, not to push yourself into a position that you can't hold for a while. If you are in comfortable cross-legged pose or half lotus, sit on the edge of a folded blanket to tip your pelvis forward slightly.

2) Close your eyes and breathe normally for a few rounds. Observe the breath coming into your nostrils and moving into your lungs. See if you can slow your inhales so you can see the breath move all the way down your spine to the floor and follow it back up on the exhale.

3) When you are ready, gently constrict your throat. Send the breath directly to your throat, as if your throat alone were responsible for breathing. See if you can find the place where you hear the sound of the ocean.

4) If you have trouble finding this place, you may try dropping your chin slightly or moving your head from side to side until you find the right spot. Or perhaps you practice the throat constriction without finding the ujayi sound and honor your body's limitations.

5) Start moving the breath more forcefully. Don't be violent; simply be very conscious of it once again moving into your nostrils, through your throat, and into your belly. Let your abdomen expand and contract to help add to the force.

6) See if you can find the peace in this heated breath. Listen to it and let your thoughts melt. Let the sound be a release for tension. Fully explore it and make it your own.

I know I'll be listening to my own ujayi tune next time my mind starts its same old song and dance.

A Sick Boy and a Lesson About Intentions

2008-05-17T08:59:00.001-07:00

I really didn't mind too much when I got the not-unanticipated Please Pick Him Up call on Wednesday from Jake's school.

True, I had picked him up early on Monday and kept him home all day Tuesday, which I really thought ought to have scored me a few points with the teachers. And he had seemed perfectly fine when I dropped him off two hours before the call; he had practically sprinted for the climbing toy, even looking a little bit disappointed that none of his friends were pushing him off of it. Plus, it was more than a little bit annoying to find they had taken his temperature a second time before I arrived, managing to get that magic number of 100 that means he can't return for 24 hours. And, sure, they were closed for a conference on Friday, so I might have let a touch of bitterness creep into my voice when I said, "Have a good weekend," as we left.

Still, I had managed to get a little bit of work done in the five hours he spent at school all week. And he did actually seem kind of feverish when he finally got over the excitement of coming home with Mommy so early in the day and let his nap overtake him. In fact, as I settled into bed next to his little sleeping angel form to read a book, I felt pretty centered about this sick child thing. I felt like I was getting the hang of surrendering to the moment and understanding that the work will get done in its own time while I spent precious moments with my ailing child.

That perspective, apparently, can end up a bit battered -- chewed up and wrung out -- by the end of a sleepless, fever-ridden night. I was crying well before I began a cold, rainy Thursday with a bored and truly sick child suffering diarrhea and an attendant diaper rash from the antibiotics he received for the lung infection and two ear infections that were, we discovered at the doctor's office, laying him low.

I tried to be in the moment and just play with him, I really did. We got some fresh air on the porch and read tons and tons of books about animals and I let him sit in my lap for every meal in the hopes it would encourage his appetite.

But a suffocating sense of being shut in and helpless rode on my shoulders all day, occasionally clambering onto my chest to crush it with the weepy certainty that I'm just not cut out for real motherhood. The very thought of reliving those early infant months of endless baby-baby-baby so much like this single day of it now convinced me in no uncertain terms that I could not -- absolutely can not -- do it again.

Worse, I found myself wondering if I have what it takes to keep doing it now.

How Do Those Full-Time Moms DO It?

I always found it somewhat odd when people warned me that my whole life was going to change once I had Jake. "Well, duh," I thought. "I'm having a baby." Anyhow, I assured them, I was going to be forty when I gave birth, plenty old enough to have done all the other stuff that needed doing in life. I was ready to be a mom.

Four months after his birth, holding up little brightly colored animals for his amusement for hours on end, far too excited by the prospect of being able to turn on the mobile for a few minutes of having something else do the work of entertainment, bored beyond belief and feeling mighty guilty about it, I realized that full-time mothering, like anything else, comes more naturally to some than to others.

It's not that I feel any less of a mother because I'm not endlessly fascinated by watching my child play. I love him just as much as the mothers who actually enjoy blowing bubbles on the front porch for more than, oh, five minutes at a time love their children. I am just a restless sort of soul, someone who needs projects and adult words and to sometimes be able to walk in public without a twenty-five pound child resting on my left hip.

I lost only a few work days homebound with Jake. And yet I felt as if I was coming apart. Sunless days, sleepless nights, and a cranky boy surely didn't help. But -- being completely honest here because I know others have felt this too, and anything to make anyone feel better during such moments seems like the kind thing to do -- I really felt as if I didn't have it in me to be a good mother. In those few days I was tired of the hormonal shifts, tired of being tired, and firmly convinced that I left the person I'm supposed to be far behind somewhere between saying "I do" and meeting Jake, wobbly and wide-eyed, for the first time.

Those days home with Jake this week were, to put it mildly, a low time, a period of sluggish depression, occasionally churned up by crying jags over how, just, crappy I felt. And when Mike came home to relieve me and Jake refused to leave my arms, I took it as my due, the unwritten agreement that comes with motherhood: My child comes first, and if there's nothing left for me, then nothing is just what I'm left with.

I was through it by Jake's Friday mid-day nap. A good yoga session at home -- I had given up Thursday and Friday classes, barely energetic enough to get Jake downtown where Mike could watch him for a couple of hours, must less ready for a tough bunch of asanas -- followed by a lovely shower with the sun poking brightly out of the clouds from time to time brought me pretty close to my center again. At least I felt human. And at least Jake seemed up for a quick trip to the store, after we read a bunch of books and he finally decided maybe he was hungry enough to eat a little bit of applesauce.

Not that there weren't a few more tears on both our parts by the end of the day Friday. And not that I would have minded if he had let Mike put him to bed instead of me. I'm still a little groggy, even though I somehow cobbled together close to eight hours of sleep, wound around the hour and a half in the middle of the night when he was coughing and then not but still wouldn't let me put him back in his crib; his angry wails when that's just where he woke up at 6:15; and handing him off to Mike to fall back asleep to the sound of him crying, crying, crying for Mommy who was, at this point, too burned out to care.

And not, to be honest, not that I'd be willing, if confronted with the choice just at this very moment, to go through this all again with another one. Or -- did I ever really talk about having three with Mike? -- another two.

I've just got to believe it's normal to sometimes want your life back, even if you know your life is better for having that child who took it away from you.

Being Led by Intentions Instead of Goals

Often, in teaching a yoga class, I remind my students to approach their asanas with intentions, not goals. For example, touching your toes in a forward fold should be approached as an intention, not a goal. The difference? An intention gives you a direction in which to move -- making your way slowly, gracefully, and with a great deal of exploration along the way, toward one day grasping your toes. A goal -- Must. Touch. Toes. -- not only makes you miss the journey, but sacrifices the benefits of slowly opening and creates a risk of injury. You lose all consciousness of what you're in that pose for and instead single-mindedly focus on touching those toes, which is really, when you think about it, pretty darned insignificant.

While it's relatively easy to give up on goals as minor as touching your toes in forward fold, it gets a bit stickier when you're talking about things like, oh, having a career, fulfilling a dream, doing something that completes you. So, when I'm forced to spend a week with a sick child right as I'm feeling antsy to get my website going, my book proposal written, my life as ME back on track again, I more or less collapse.

Most immediately, it was hard for me to let go of the momentum I'd been building. At first, I just tried to fit my projects into the time I had free -- finishing up a blog posting while Jake was napping, writing a legal memorandum while Mike was putting him to bed. The problem, of course, is that it's impossible to just squeeze everything that was supposed to take seven or eight hours a day into scattered clumps of two hours at a time. Especially when you're not getting much sleep.

But the crazy-making part was that when I lost the ability to fulfill the goals I had unconsciously set for myself, it was as if I lost that part of me entirely. Rather than seeing a small detour along the path to my dream -- a half-mile loop to the scenic lookout of a nearly seventeen-month-old boy who, if you take the time to read books to him, will readily, charmingly, tell you the cow pictured says "Moo" and the duck "Kack, kack" -- I instead saw a precipice over which I had fallen, leaving the fragile, deluded hope of achievement far behind.

Things take longer when we have children. It's just not realistic to think we can squeeze these huge, enveloping, amazing beings into our lives without displacing other awfully important parts of us. For example, daycare does not enable us to have careers unaffected by our children, even though it seems like it should. Because our career doesn't fit into those eight hours a day we can leave them there any more than they fit into the time we have free. If we think it works this way we end up that much less equipped to deal with the days when suddenly daycare isn't an option.

What I suppose I was thinking -- in some primitive, unconscious, barely thinking way -- as I cried hollowly while Jake hit me in the head with a plastic measuring cup was that the life I was trying to make for myself was being taken away from me along with the time to make it. When, in fact, it's still there, if only I'd stop focusing on some future, end-result version of it and instead come to terms with the journey.

Because, really, while my intention is to one day be able to share YogaMamaMe widely, there's an awful lot that can happen along the way. And losing a day or two here and there to my child doesn't make me someone who has nothing but him to shape my life. It makes me someone who is navigating a complicated and beautiful life with my complicated and beautiful family.

How to Keep the Intention from Becoming a Goal: Prasarita Podattanasana (Standing Straddle Fold)

I remember well those years of yoga when prasarita podattansana was for me an occasion to mutter angrily to the teacher suggesting otherwise, "I don't care how far I spread my feet apart, my head is never going to touch the floor." Which made the pose not one of my favorites.

I'd probably have had a few things to mutter at myself right now, as well, when I say Bravo! to those of you who can't imagine ever resting your head on the floor as you fold forward with your feet far apart in a straddle. Because you are lucky to have in front of you an intention that simply will not slide into a goal when you're not looking. It's not like there are just a couple of tiny inches between your head and the floor -- the tips of your bangs brushing it tantalizingly -- so that you hunch your shoulders and bend your knees and otherwise assault the integrity of the pose in the hopes of achieving that goal on which you have telescopically set your sights.

Nope. If your head is a good six inches from that floor, you have the luxury of perspective. Your head on the floor is nothing more than an intention, so best to tend to the important parts of the pose -- letting your hamstrings open, lengthening your spine, releasing tension from your shoulders and neck. If only someone had pointed out to me how great upavista konasana is for tension release way back when, I might not have cared so much about my stupid head and the stupid floor.

And here's the beauty of this pose, and the reason I offer it here. Even if you can rest your head on the floor, it's oh so easy to take that false little victory away. You move your feet closer together and suddenly you're in the same boat as those lucky people who have had to accept that head-on-floor is nothing more than an intention because it's not a realistic goal. And you, too, get to focus on the physical benefits of the pose, as well as the bigger benefit of practicing letting go of goals in your life off the mat.

Prasarita Podattanasana Instructions

1) Stand facing the side of your mat. To begin the pose, step your feet wide enough apart so that when you hold your arms out to the sides in a T your wrists are over your ankles. You can adjust the pose to suit your body later.

2) Place your hands on your hips and draw your elbows toward each other, giving your shoulder blades space to slide down your back. Your heart should feel free to lift and your neck should feel unencumbered. There is a tendency in this pose to start bunching up the spine and shoulders, so try to hold this open feeling to bring with when you fold forward.

3) Once you have found the openness in your upper spine (step 2), try to find openness in your lower spine. Draw your navel in toward your spine and up toward your heart and notice how this creates a little bit of space for your tail bone to draw down toward the floor. At the same time, press the outer edges of your feet into the floor to activate your leg muscles, and think of gently rotating your inner thighs toward the back of the room. This is more of an intention than an action.

4) Inhale and find the balance between the effort of creating this length and space and the lightness the length and space bring.

5) As you exhale, let your heart lead you forward. When your torso is roughly parallel to the floor, reach your fingertips or hands toward the ground.

6) With your fingertips or hands on the ground, look at the floor to keep your neck long, inhale, and feel your heart pulling strongly in the direction of the crown of your head. The idea here is to create as much length in your spine as you can.

7) On your next exhale, draw your navel in, pull your shoulder blades toward each other, and, keeping the length in your spine, fold forward as far as you can.

8) Place your hands shoulder distance apart and in a line with your feet if you can -- fingertips lining up with toes. Draw your elbows toward each other so your forearms are parallel. As you inhale, feel your inner thighs rotate toward the back of the room and your sitting bones lift. As you exhale, feel your spine lengthen.

9) If you find your head on or close to the floor, walk your feet closer together so the floor is too far away to struggle toward. If your head is so far from the floor that you feel wobbly in the pose, walk your feet a little farther apart.

10) Stay here for at least 10-12 long inhales and exhales, focusing on the integrity of the pose with each inhale and feeling the release with each exhale. Think of the inhales traveling up your legs, letting your shift your weight forward toward your toes. Think of the exhales lengthening your spine and freeing your shoulders to move away from your ears.

11) Next, if you have a block, place it under your head in any way that gives your head something to rest on. A stack of folded blankets may work as well. Use your prop to start to feel a real heaviness in your head -- a complete sense of surrender. Stay here for another 10-12 breaths.

12) If you are enjoying the pose and would like to practice some variations, you may lift halfway up -- torso parallel to the floor -- and either: a) interlace your hands behind your back and, as you fold forward again, draw your hands in a line along the ceiling and behind your head, opening your shoulders; be sure to keep your palms drawing together to protect your wrists; b) place your hands on your hips, elbows drawing toward each other, and leave them here as you fold forward, concentrating on keeping your shoulder blades down your back; or c) reach for your big toes and grasping them between your thumbs and the first two fingers of your hands, then folding forward and letting your elbows start to bend out to the sides; in this version of the pose only you may let your shoulders move up toward your ears.

13) When you are ready, place your hands on the floor (or, for more abdominal work, on your hips), and inhale halfway up, so your torso is parallel to the floor. Exhale strongly here. Place your hands on your hips if they are not already there and inhale to standing, leading with your heart.

14) Bring your feet together or hip distance apart and stand in tadasana (mountain pose), either with your arms at your sides or your hands in front of your heart in angeli mudra (prayer position), feeling the benefits of the pose.

Now comes the fun part -- giving yourself all sorts of beautiful things to tend to on your path, just as you had adjustments to keep you occupied in upavista konasana. I'll bet you ended up more deeply in the pose than you expected. Which seems to suggest that you may find yourself somewhere beautiful in life as well, if you keep practicing letting go of those goals and instead being led by your intentions.

Geez, I Haven't Had the Hip Replacement Yet, or Thoughts on Age and Youth

2008-05-14T07:49:00.000-07:00

Something occurred to me yesterday in yoga class as I observed the places where I feel just a tad tighter and achier than I did before my pregnancy.

"Maybe," I thought with a rush of horror threaded through with an unsettling warmth of acceptance, "I'm just getting older."

For the past couple of years I've had these built-in reasons for not feeling at my peak. Pregnancy. Infant. Recovery from pregnancy. Crouching over to steer the walker away from furniture as Jake pushes it in endless circles of our downstairs. Carrying a twenty-five pound boy on my hip while stooping to drop dog dishes on the floor because if I don't hold him he will steal pieces of kibble and put them in his mouth. Not getting enough sleep because I am forever hopeful that tomorrow will be the day he sleeps past 6:30. Growing accustomed to pushing forty pounds of boy plus stroller up the hills of Asheville. Hormones, hormones, hormones.

I've been so busy excusing myself with these excuses that I haven't had to grapple with the concept that maybe, just maybe, my body isn't as strong, flexible, energetic as it once was because I am -- surprise, surprise -- getting older.

I am, in short, slowing down while my child is just getting started.

Coming to Grips with Coming to Grips

I am not, I want to make perfectly clear, conceding to some kind of Centrum-Silver senior citizenship. I've still got a few arm balances left in me, thank you very much.

And, too, I'm not prepared to over-estimate the utter weariness created by caring for a toddler, no matter what your age. It is endless work, and no matter how much of a jump-start one huge smile can give you, it doesn't last as long as, say, a week's vacation with nothing more taxing to do than reading trashy novels on the beach. (My sister has been emailing me about her scheduled trip to Hawaii, and I'm feeling more than a little bit envious, not because she didn't invite me (she did) but because Hawaii, at this stage of my life, means about twelve hours on airplanes with a small child prone to temper tantrums and precious little time actually reading a book of any sort once I finally make it to the beach.)

Still, watching Jake reach the age where he seems to speed up -- it's astounding how he gains momentum as he gets bigger, learns new words, gains coordination, walks more steadily, understands things more readily -- only heightens the fact that I'm on the other end of the bell curve, slowing down. I know that's what parenthood's about -- passing the torch and all that -- but that knowledge merely depresses me more. You mean I don't get to be the one who will one day star in a movie opposite Andrew McCarthy? (His turn as the middle-aged rich guy with the bad New Yohk accent on Lipstick Jungle merely proves my point.)

It's not true, I know, that we don't get to keep growing and achieving just because we have kids. After all, my mother graduated from law school pregnant with my sister and didn't start her first job as a lawyer until I was in kindergarten. My mother-in-law got bachelors and masters degrees when Mike, the youngest of four, started high school. I'm just now figuring out what I might, maybe, want to be when I grow up, and I sure took my time having a child.

But there are limits. Our hours, energy, and even our single-minded drive to succeed (if we ever had it) are cut way, way back by this little being whose greatest ambition is to walk down stairs unassisted. Priorities, those shifting, shapeless blocks of our life, glom on to our children like fat cells to our hips. They are, quite simply, more important than our own ambitions.

Which isn't to say I don't have plenty of ambition. Only that when it comes to choosing between, say, finalizing the template for my website and keeping Jake home from school with the cold that proves daycare has not yet fully immunized him against illness, I push the website launch off to some future date and lie on the bed reading Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (oh, how I miss The Wire) while my stuffed-up boy snorts sleepily on my chest. And there's no place I'd rather be.

So, I suppose "slowing down" is the apt way to put it. I haven't stopped yet. There's just more space between the Me things, space filled to bursting with Jake things -- blowing bubbles on the front porch, throwing a ball in Mommy's lap with admirable accuracy, running down the hill to ogle the dogs next door. Sure, it's hard to slow everything else down, but it's also kind of a rush to get swept up in the joy of childhood.

Yoga Age Versus Chronological Age

When I push myself, I have to admit all this fuss I'm making about hitting "middle age" is only skin deep in sincerity. Sure, I'm 41 years old. ("Melissa's forty?!" one of Mike's work colleagues cried recently. I treasure these moments and, even more, treasure Mike for knowing it'll stroke my ego rather pleasantly to hear about them.) But I also don't buy that 41 is as old as it's made out to be.

Consider the source of that statement. I started trying to get pregnant when I was 38 years old. I was, and remain, deeply offended by the automatic assumption of more than a few doctors that I would both need and crave assistance in the form of synthetic hormones and invasive surgeries. I truly believe there is a place for these things when women need them -- and I can think of more than a few beautiful children who wouldn't be here if it weren't for the forceful hand of medicine. But, just as truly, I knew I didn't need it just because of my age. And I turned out to be right.

It's not that I have some super youth genes or an inflated ego urged on by luck or even a misplaced sense of youth that makes me one of those unfortunate women wearing mini skirts when she is many years past the time she should have stopped. (The minis never make it out of my bedroom, if I'm foolish enough to buy them in the first place, so at least I know I'm not that deluded about my true age.)

What it is is simple. Yoga. Asana yoga; healthy eating yoga; getting (almost) enough sleep yoga; surrendering before I have a nervous breakdown yoga. Trying, faithfully, to remind myself that all I really have power over is how I treat myself.

I'm not saying that I am a superior, youthful being because I gave up cheeseburgers on a teenaged whim twenty-five years ago. Nor that you're going to be old before your time if you regularly subsist on five hours of sleep a night. I am not, I want to be clear, judging anyone else, though I fear it sounds that way.

All I'm saying is that I try -- goodness knows, not always successfully -- to respect myself. I mess up all the time. (Just witness the three pints of high-fat ice cream sitting in the freezer because, don't you know, they were on sale, or the way I dash around the house cursing when I'm late to pick Jake up.) But then, sometimes at any rate, I remind myself it's all a practice, and even that bit of forgiveness is a beautiful wallop of self-respect.

So I respect my body (most of the time), I respect my spirit (when I'm not too busy breaking down to forget about it), and I respect other people. Does it make me more youthful? Who knows what that means? It does, however, make me just a little bit more flexible, a little bit more open, a little bit more trusting, and, thus, a little bit less likely to succumb to true middle age before it really is time.

And, with any luck, I'll be respectful of that too, when the time comes.

Ardha Chandrasana (Half Moon Pose) -- If Youth Means Flexibility, Playfulness, and Sometimes Falling Down, This Is a Youthful Pose

Pretty much any asana is going to keep you "youthful," or whatever word best describes conscious, respectful, flexible, and strong. An asana practice, after all, is a lot like life. You experience moments of discomfort, sure, but the more open you are to transcending the discomfort, the more you open your heart, the further it will take you. Embrace your limitations and it's just possible they will melt away. The longer you do it, the longer it will take your physical limitations to catch up with you.

I chose ardha chandrasana here because it's both challenging and fun. It offers possibilities for variations and therefore a chance to practice respect for your own limitations. And, once you find your way into it, you get to fly.

Which, it seems to me, is strictly the province of the young at heart.

Ardha Chandrasana Instructions

1) If you're new to this pose, or experienced enough with it to know it always leads to frustration, try it by a wall. Place a block against the wall and follow the instructions that follow. The wall will be there to support you for balance.

2) I recommend using a block for this pose unless you are so experienced with it that you can open your heart and look up to the sky without one. In which case, you probably aren't reading these instructions anyhow.

3) Place the block about a foot to a foot and a half in front of your right foot and line up the left edge of the block with the outside of your baby toe. You may need to adjust this spacing depending on your body. If your hips are tight, set the block on the small end so you don't have to reach as far down for it. If your hips are relatively flexible, place it on the long end, so you will be reaching closer to the floor.

4) Place your left leg a large step or so behind you. Your intention is to start to open your navel and heart to the side wall once you are balancing, so think of this idea as you start to shift your weight to your right foot.

5) Place your left hand on your hip. Consciously bending your right knee, reach for the block. You should have space for your spine to lengthen; adjust the block if you need to.

6) Feeling the foundation of your hand on the block and your right foot on the floor, let your left leg start to float off the floor. Keep gazing at the floor, feeling the length of your spine, as your left leg floats higher and higher. The intention is for it to form a straight line with your torso.

7) As you find your balance, let your left elbow start to point toward the ceiling. This action will start to open your left hip so it stacks on top of your right hip. Keep your nose pointed toward the floor and your gaze steady.

8) Remain here for a moment and assess where you are in this pose. Draw your navel in toward your spine and up toward your heart for stability. So much is going on -- balance, flexibility, strength. Respect where your body is but don't let the idea of limits defeat you. Instead, let the energy course through the shape of your body and feel your heart start to open to the side wall.

9) Consciously let the changes in this pose happen. One day, perhaps, you will have your left hip stacked on top of your right, your left leg level with your torso. Perhaps you will be able to release your left hand from your hip and let the fingers point toward the sky so your right and left arms form one straight line of energy. Maybe you'll even be able to turn your head on your neck (an extension of your spine) and gaze toward the ceiling.

Or maybe not. Maybe you'll fall. But you'll fly for just a moment before falling gracefully. Or not. And you'll laugh either way. Because one of the biggest differences I've seen between middle-aged me and toddler Jake is his ability to laugh off his frustration.

So go ahead and laugh one more time when you come out of this pose and realize you get to try it again on the other (groan) side.

Trust with a Capital T: How's That for a Mother's Day Gift?

2008-05-12T07:53:00.000-07:00

"Think of what you'd like to do tomorrow," Mike said Saturday night. "I want to do something special for you for Mother's Day."

A perfectly reasonable request. But I am not, as it turns out, a perfectly reasonable person when it comes to being feted on Mother's Day.

As Mike headed off for an evening shift at work, Jake crashed following our afternoon going down slides at Azalea Park, and I settled in to watch Lost on TiVo, I truly did give some thought to what I'd like to do for Mother's Day.

Pretty much everything I came up with involved a sun-soaked lunch near the beach. Which was a problem, as we live four hours from anything resembling oceanfront property and the weather forecast was calling for gloominess and rain.

"Well," I thought as I paused the episode to grab the last of a carton of ice cream, "I guess I don't want to do anything in Asheville."

The feeling persisted Sunday morning. Jake greeted me at 6:30 and, since Mike had worked until midnight, it was up to me to stumble downstairs with him. Some lovely wrapped gifts sat on the table by the purple columbine fresh from our garden. Instead of sparkling with specialness at the sight of what my sweet husband had done for me, I felt sad and unworthy, and when Mike roused himself to make sure I got a Mother's Day morning break, I just felt worse for being so gloomy. I didn't feel like I deserved all these favors, and I couldn't figure out why.

Happy Mother's Day, indeed.

When You're the One Being Taken Care Of

If it were Father's Day, you can bet I would have something special planned for Mike. I get it. I understand that even though Mother's Day has devolved into a way for retailers to make money with vaguely menacing ads depicting bland, cheap diamond-earring adorned female models who intone that a good child/husband will buy his mother/wife a Mother's Day gift, even a commercial reason to remind someone she's special is a reason to remind her she's special. I get that.

And I know that Mike thinks I am special, and Jake would too if he understood the concept. I just felt uncomfortable acknowledging that I deserve a little bit of fuss.

Which is not to say I don't know how to fuss over myself. Birthdays are sacrosanct day spa time. Yoga classes in the middle of the work day are non-negotiable. And goodness knows I can lift that certain feeling of dullness and creeping middle age with a satisfying clothing and/or make-up splurge now and then. In fifteen-odd years of being a single adult woman, I became quite skilled at the art of treating myself.

This skill, sadly, does not appear to translate into letting someone else treat me. Even the two people I love most in this world.

And, yet again, I don't think I'm alone. In fact, it's kind of a tired trope, how mothers spend their lives sacrificing for those they love but don't know how to let someone else do for them. "No, no," we're practically programmed to say. "I don't mind giving up the last piece of flourless chocolate cake on my plate if my child wants it, even if he just scarfed a much bigger piece of his own." Or, "I don't mind unloading the dishwasher if you'd like to go to sleep, honey." (Actually, unlike giving up that bite of flourless chocolate cake, I mostly don't mind unloading the dishwasher, but that's kind of the point, isn't it?) Nor do I think two-to-three years will prove nearly enough time for me to stop feeling guilty when I let Mike take Jake upstairs to change a poopy diaper while I read the Arts and Leisure section of the paper.

So, okay, why not let your family do something nice for you if offered a dopey excuse like Mother's Day?

The answer, it seems to me, lies in crossing over from trusting yourself to just plain trusting.

How to Practice Trust

I was going to entitle this section "How to Trust," but it quickly occurred to me I don't know how. Since yoga is about practice, however, I know practicing trust is something I can do.

I was lucky enough, when I discovered yoga, to embrace the concept of trusting my heart immediately. Writing was something I'd always done, pushed to the side, returned to. So it was there waiting for me when I took that first tentative look inside. The summer I embraced yoga, I wrote a screenplay. The summer I got my yoga teaching certification I wrote several television "spec" scripts -- episodes of existing television shows that make up the portfolio of someone trying to break into the business. I got an agent, quit my job, and met my husband, all in short order. All I had to do was embrace what had been there, inside, my whole life, waiting for me to put it front and center.

So easy -- but, of course, not easy at all unless you think quitting a steady job and moving 2,000 miles with someone you've just met but want to spend your life with is easy -- to follow my own heart. Just as it's become easier -- with practice of course -- to celebrate myself, honor myself, believe in myself. Doing these things for myself fit what I'd been taught to be: Autonomous. Independent. A strong woman who doesn't need anyone else.

What I haven't had to do, until now, is simply trust -- trust something over which I have no control, something outside myself. I've followed my heart and the writing path to this very spot, to the high dive board. My toes are curling over the edge, gripping at the certainty. And any day now, I'm going to have to jump into a big, open unknown. My website is going to go up, and I'm going to have to do it. Not just write because it's in my heart, but trust that, to other people, people I haven't met, I'm a writer. Who knows? I may perform a graceful swan dive, cutting smoothly into cool, sweet blue water. Just as, if not more, likely, I could perform a big, loud bellyflop and have to dog paddle my way, more than a little bit embarrassed, to the edge of the pool barely able to drag myself out to tend to my stinging skin.

It's almost as scary as letting my husband do something special for me on Mother's Day.

That big, empty space between the diving board and the water below is like this amazing, fascinating aspect of yoga that I love. The endlessness. Not in a scary, void, black hole way. Rather, in yoga, your muscles can always stretch just a little bit more; you can fly a bit higher, be a bit more weightless; you can discover parts of your spine just beyond what you thought was the end; you can find a place deeper inside than you've ever gone. Layer by layer, like the lotus flower, you discover more. Every meditation and every asana practice -- every day if you're living consciously -- is a journey.

So now that I've spent the past seven years or so consciously trusting my heart, I shouldn't be surprised to learn that there's a more challenging path ahead. In fact, I'm rather awed. Instead of trusting something within myself, it's time for me to trust something bigger.

I'm not suggesting there is something out there deciding exactly what my fate should be -- although I completely respect that belief for others. But in yoga, the idea that we are all made up of the same energy means that the light inside each of us, residing in our hearts, is at the same time a light bigger than everything because it's made up of and goes beyond all of our collective hearts. Hence, when I find peace inside, I discover Peace with a capital P. The same thing for Beauty; I find my own beauty by discovering the Beauty of the world. And, too, it's got to be the same with trust. I've learned to trust what's in my heart. Then I should be able one day to Trust the much bigger something of which my heart is simultaneously a tiny piece and the whole enchilada.

This is all a rather abstract way of describing the Something Bigger as I conceptualize it. And to explain how it is possible to trust your heart and yet not simply trust.

In a way, I see it as the difference between letting go and allowing. When I let go I'm proactive and, therefore, retain some control. I see where my path is leading me. I may not know what's around the bend, but I can tell myself to let go and trust to what happens. Because I'm on my path, you see.

Allowing, on the other hand, it's more passive. It's just . . . allowing. Allowing the wind to fly past my office window at 40 miles per hour rather than resisting, feeling buffeted, off, irate. Allowing the people reading my postings to like them or not, to share in the YogaMamaMe community or not. Allowing this to be what I do with my life or having it turn out that I can't. If I trust, then it doesn't matter what happens. I'll still find happiness.

Mother's Day was a good place to start practicing. Because, come on, in the big scheme of things it really is relatively easy to allow someone you love to do something nice for you. And, it turns out, when we did go to lunch at a lovely little restaurant called "Sunnyside" that maybe, because of the name, makes me think of the beach, we saw a couple with whom I've recently become friendly and would like to become friends. Which made living in Asheville feel pretty great.

Especially when the sun came out, and I played with my son on the patio.

A Heart-Opening, Playful Path to Follow: Urdhva Danurasana Walk-Up/Walk-Down

Remember when you were young and having fun kept you from worrying about, say, breaking a limb? Twirling on the monkey bars with nothing holding on but the backs of your knees, swinging so high the chains holding you to the swing set wobbled in mid-air, riding your circular moonwagon down the big hill on Castlerock Road tipped back on the fifth wheel mounted to the back -- they were all so much fun it never occurred to us we could get hurt.

Now, we all know we might have. And as mothers, some of us are shuddering at the idea of our children doing the foolish things we did. Let Jake sweep downhill on his bicycle with no hands on the handlebars? No way.

Maybe, though, just as we will look the other way to allow our children some adventurous fun -- and the development of self-confidence and, yes, trust at the same time -- we can learn, in a small way, to ignore the part of us that worries so much about getting hurt that we don't have fun. And, not incidentally, that we fail to discover the limits we can reach when we approach them playfully.

So I offer here a sequence one can perform at the wall with urdhva danurasana, upward facing bow. If you're not ready for this pose, you can practice setu bandha sarvangasana, bridge pose, and, when you feel open, perhaps try urdhva danurasana with your hands on blocks against a wall. (Instructions for both poses can be found in recent posts.) You have something to trust -- the wall isn't going anyplace -- and maybe that will let you approach it as fun. You may find your heart opening into the full pose.

If, on the other hand, you're way farther along the path to Trust than I am, you can certainly do this sequence without a wall. Maybe one day I'll join you.

In the meantime, if, like me, you have some experience opening and playing in urdhva danurasana but aren't quite up for free-fall drop-backs, here's a sequence to play with it. You'll discover that when you trust, your heart opens and you get to have a little bit of fun. Who knows where that attitude off your mat might one day take you?

The Sequence

1) Set up for urdhva danurasana with your hands at the wall. With your palms on the floor next to your ears, the spot where your palms meet your wrists will be right at the joining of the floor and wall. Make sure your feet are close enough to your buttocks for a tight, energetic pose; you can check the distance by seeing if you can just brush your heels with your hands.

2) When you are ready, keeping your inner thighs rotating toward the floor and your elbows hugging toward each other, let your heart lift you into the full pose. The wall is, yes, close to your face -- that's part of the fun, if you don't let it freak you out.

3) Take a few moments to warm up in this pose by letting your heart draw toward the wall. If your legs start to straighten, see if you can walk them closer to your hands. Activate your upper back muscles so the lift is coming from your heart, not your arms.

4) If this is enough for you, stay here breathing and opening. When you're ready to come down, lower slowly as you tuck your chin toward your chest -- likely brushing your head against the wall.

5) If you'd like to move on, feel your heart lifting you so strongly you start to float. Trust that you can. And then -- here's the fun part -- start to walk your hands up the wall. As long as you keep your feet firmly rooted and your heart -- all that trust! -- strongly lifting, you will go up. And if you start to doubt, you can always walk your hands right back down to the floor.

6) At some point, your hands will start to come off the wall, and you will need to lift your heart so much you bring yourself to standing. Notice that you are floating through the air, sort of like my high dive. Only, of course, you are firmly grounded through your feet, so there's really not so much to be frightened of.

7) As you come to standing, draw your hands to your heart in angeli mudra, prayer position, and find your center. Notice what's going on in your heart. It just might be kind of giddy.

8) Root your feet firmly, rotate those thighs toward the wall behind you, and, with your hands still at your heart, start to lift your heart again. Really activate those back muscles to help. Let your head fall back gently so you can see that wall behind you. If that freaks you out, come to standing and move into balasana, child's pose, to absorb all you've done.

9) If, from standing with your heart lifting and your head tilted back to the wall behind you, you'd like to move on, trust your lifting heart to support you and consciously reach your hands back, still lifting with your heart, until your hands come to the wall. Walk your hands down the wall until you find yourself in urdhva danurasana with your hands on the floor. Let your heart lift once more, tuck your chin, and slowly lower yourself to the floor.

Wherever you go in the pose, release it with something that feels good and a little bit playful -- dead bug (or happy baby) on your back with knees bent, soles of your feet facing the ceiling, and hands holding the outsides of your feet is a great pose for this.

And, hey, if you want to jump and dance and play a little bit after dead bug, definitely do it. You might even invite someone you love and trust to play with you.

Happy Mother's Day

2008-05-11T06:07:00.000-07:00

I don't know about you, but I'm not feeling too comfortable with the idea of this day where I'm supposed to be suddenly special for being a mother.

I mean, it is special being a mom. As well as exhausting, rewarding, confusing, and frequently humiliating. But why am I more special than ever on this day? And what does that make me the other 364 days of the year? (365 in this leap year, yet.)

It's probably not the time for me to delve into the reasons I feel so uncomfortable being lumped with the greeting card-posed mother models, in their Sunday best and pearls, as Special Mothers. Instead, I'd like to offer this lovely facet of Mother's Day I just learned:

In 1872, Julia Ward Howe, after writing "Battle Hymn of the Republic" and then apparently recoiling in horror when she saw her poem used to symbolize the carnage of the Civil War, organized a Mother's Day for Peace. Her proclamation began:

Arise then...women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
"We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."

Timely? Oh, yeah. Relevant to YogaMama's? It's all about peace, baby.

My Mother's Day gift to you: a restorative pose to bring you peace within. Your gift to others: spread that little bit of peace to everyone you see today. In this way, we can bring peace to a world greatly in need of it.

Supta Baddha Konasana (Reclining Bound Angle Pose)

When your partner and/or child asks what you'd like to do today, tell them you need fifteen minutes of absolute peace and quiet. Then grab a bunch of pillows and blankets and head to a room where they will honor your request.

1) Sitting on your mat (or any other firm, comfortable surface), place a bolster, firm pillow, or a blanket folded into a rectangle and then into thirds, right behind you with the short end against you and the long end stretching back. It will be touching your sacrum (lower back), waiting for you to recline into it.

2) Place the soles of your feet together in front of you, forming a diamond shape as your knees splay outward. If you own a strap, you may use it to bind yourself: place the strap behind you, holding the ends in your hands. It should pass along your sacrum. Drape each end over your knees and under your feet. Close the belt and tighten so it is gently supporting your knees.

3) Place pillows or folded blankets under your knees to support them. The idea here is to be peaceful with yourself -- no strenuous stretching. Give your knees something to sink into.

4) When you're ready, recline back so your spine is supported comfortably on the bolster or blanket. Make sure your neck is supported -- sometimes a little kink in the blanket is all it takes. Or you may find a flat pillow to cradle your head.

5) Let your arms fall to the sides, palms open to the sky and receptive.

6) Close your eyes and relax into the pose as you breathe deeply. Let each exhale sink you into your pillows. Trust the pose. Trust the peace you are building. Trust yourself.

Think about how important it is to let yourself be special. And when you've given yourself the gift of this pose for five, ten, fifteen minutes -- or longer -- gently come out of it by loosening the strap if you are using one, rolling onto your side, and very slowly coming back to seated.

When you are ready to rejoin your family, let them treat you like you're special. Because, by bringing peace into the world, you are.

There's Something Bigger Than Forgetting to Buy Antibiotic Ointment

2008-05-09T06:47:00.000-07:00

It was plainly my fault. Because, I feel deeply, anything that distresses my boy is.

Bath time, these balmy spring evenings, has been a tad more fraught than usual. Mike has been arriving home right around when Jake and I sit down for his dinner. So we all head out for the deck, where Mike and I share some of our cheese and crackers with Jake and Jake excitedly drops things, like my cell phone, between the deck railings. This is so much fun that whenever I choose to start running the bath, it is sure to be way too early by his reckoning.

Still, a bath he must have, at least this week when he has been sporting a couple of persistent diaper sores that I feel are well served by a soak in warm water. I chalked up his rejection of this proposal over the past few nights to being over-excited and having a very clear sense that bath time was the first step on the road leading to bed.

Last night he made it very clear, however, that the factors prompting his complaints were far more dire.

First, we opened his soggy diaper to find it distressingly full of poop. "Distressingly" in this case refers to the fact that Jake was standing in the bathroom, where he sees no need to, say, be still while we clean him up. He explained this point to us in no uncertain terms as Mike struggled to hold him while I grabbed some wipes.

Then came the wipe with blood on it. Jake's teachers had informed me a few days before that a bit of his diaper rash was bleeding and that I might want to put some antibiotic ointment on it. A quick canvas of the house confirmed that whatever antibiotic ointment I might have purchased, probably in, oh, 2002, had disappeared. Pressed for time, I managed to locate a tiny foil packet of Neosporin in an emergency kit that, incidentally, still had the plastic wrap intact. It's not that we don't hurt ourselves around here; it's just that we don't bother with much in the way of medical first aid.

At any rate, one dose of the antibiotic ointment on Monday night seemed to have done enough healing to make me both lose the Neosporin packet and conclude that I was in no rush to get to Target for a proper tube of it.

Which is why I knew it was my fault when my boy, bottom bleeding and unmedicated, began shaking with tears of rage as we, first, tried to sit him in the warm bath and, when that failed, tried to put a clean diaper on him. I should have known that he would need more antibiotic ointment. I should have known that he was suddenly rejecting his beloved baths because they hurt his bum. And -- for at least the past sixteen months -- I should have known the bleached, scented diapers we were using were bad for him.

And, because I felt I really did know all these things deep down but was too lazy to follow through, too distracted by my own needs to tend to my child's, I cried too. I cried, as well, because I had no choice but to put the painful diaper right back on his poor little bottom.

The Searing Need to Make Everything Okay

Mike took charge of putting Jake to bed and I dashed out to the local natural foods store in search of all the items we were so sorely lacking. As is my wont when things spin out of control, I berated myself the whole way there, both for my failings in the diaper area, and for whatever else came to mind.

Like (I might as well admit it all): not feeding Jake enough fruit because I can't find any that he likes and that doesn't kill songbirds in Mexico; running up the stairs with him in my arms while wearing my new flip flops from Discount Shoes and falling on the fourth step, banging his head only a little less violently than my knee; letting Jake play near his dad's bike so it fell on top of him (I know when Mike said, "I was going to tell you not to leave him alone near the bike" he was blaming himself, but I choose to take it as blaming me); not thinking to send cheese pizza to school in his lunch, a shortcoming I realized only when I was told the other kids who are lucky enough to have cheese pizza in their lunches love it; watching Grey's Anatomy yesterday afternoon while pretending to read Jake books; not fixing the brake on his stroller even though it's been broken for over two months and we live in a very hilly town; and, just now, running away when he woke up from nap at school and saw me there chatting with the other moms volunteering some of our time.

These are, I know, the little things that go wrong in everyone's day all the time. I am aware that I'm not the only one who is often remarkably stupid, but that is somehow of little comfort. True, I called every mother I knew the time I drove home from the pediatrician's office to find that Jake's howls were meant to to tell me I had forgotten to buckle him in and he fell over on the first left turn. I was, I'm sure, hoping that one day they would regale me with stories of equally glorious stupidity. And, for the most part, they have.

We're human. We spend a lot of time with beings whose sense of balance, danger, reasoning, cause and effect are only crudely developed at best. It may, in fact, be possible to watch them every moment, to cushion their every fall. But, frankly, it is also very possible to lose one's mind doing so.

A theme I frequently return to -- and one that came up as the other moms and I volunteered to watch the kids at Jake's school while the teachers had a Teacher Appreciation lunch -- is how to balance being good to my child with being good to myself. Because sometimes I want to watch Grey's Anatomy, as difficult as it may be to justify. And sometimes I will think my child will be fine without antibiotic ointment for a few days because I just don't have the time to go to Target right now. Yes, there is an element of self-indulgence in my decisions sometimes. But why is self-indulgence such a bad thing?

In some forms, doing what our gut tells us is lauded. Mother instinct, for example. Who hasn't had her child's pediatrician assure her that, ultimately, she knows best? If we know what's best for our children, shouldn't we also know -- somewhere, buried beneath the self-doubts and the misconception that we are supposed to offer ourselves up as sacrificial non-virgins once we become mothers -- what's best for ourselves? And if we know both of these things, why can't we trust the balance we strike?

The answer, I think, as I look back on the dressing down I gave myself on the way to Greenlife last night, is that we magnify life's little mishaps. So much easier to focus on what we've done wrong than all the things we do right. Okay, so one's attention is naturally drawn to the incident provoking one's child's red-faced screams. And when he is playing by himself, his perfect pink lips pursed in concentration as he tries to figure out what the knobs on the back of the patio heat lamp do, I just admire his beauty without taking any credit for what I've done right. (Not to worry -- I can't even manage to turn on the heat lamp, which I realize gives me the sort of false sense of security that is sure to pave the way for another one of life's little mishaps.)

It's funny. I want to say we aren't very good at looking at the big picture. But then I realize I often spend too much time looking at some vague big picture of how my future is supposed to be.

I suppose what I mean is that we spend too little time looking at the big picture of NOW. It's hard enough to be in the moment. Trying to take in the fullness of the moment -- the whole loaf of what good mothers we are instead of the crumbs of diaper rash and bruises from Daddy's bike -- can be kind of overwhelming. How do you focus on this moment without losing the import of what is happening in this moment?

In other words, last night, at the moment Jake was stiffening his little body and quivering like a diving board just after someone has done a back flip into the water in protest of my apologetic diapering, it was impossible for me to see beyond my child's distress and the causes of it: a) we had not been putting antibiotic ointment on his rash (my fault for not buying it); b) we were using scented diapers (my fault for not trying the other kind); c) he had some seriously dangerous poop (my fault for feeding him sweet potatoes and seven grain bread).

But that moment was only part of a bigger path. Once I got out of the car at Greenlife and found organic watermelon and organic cantaloupe, as well as something called "Wound Care" that sounds pretty scary but is really just calendula, and once I found the unbleached diapers, I felt like a good mom again. And when I came home to find Jake still awake and he smiled and kicked his legs as I changed his diaper on the bed and grinned in my face, the bigger picture came to me.

As I lay on the bed with my boy falling asleep in my arms, I rose above the pieces of the day that colored everything dark and saw the light that reflects off of those dark spots.

Plus, Jake seems to dig those unbleached diapers.

Opening Out and Opening In

Wow. Imagine me typing those last words, then hitting the wrong button on the computer. Picture me panicking as my words disappear from the screen. Then try, just try, to be with me as I struggle my way back to this screen and Every. Page. Takes. Forever. To. Load.

I got a chance to practice just what I was going to write about. (And maybe it helped just a little bit, because I don't seem to have lost anything I wrote.)

In those moments when the little "I'm working as fast as I can" circle was twirling and nothing else on my computer screen was changing, as I felt all I have been working on for the last hour dissolving into cyberspace, I closed my eyes and tried to open out.

Opening out is, broadly, simply recognizing the world outside ourselves. In yoga, we try to break the artificial barriers between this "I" we have created and the world around us. We forget that we get energy from outside of us. Food, for instance, enters our bodies, becomes a part of us, then becomes part of the earth again. When I teach an asana practice, I frequently remind my students to remember that they can find energy for a difficult pose outside themselves instead of struggling to generate it all alone. We breathe, we drink, we sometimes conceive babies from things outside of us.

So last night when I got stuck on all the things that "I" was responsible for, what I really needed to do was open out. I can't take all the credit for everything that went wrong, much as I'd like to. I have a son with allergies and sensitive skin. Not my fault. Not even solely my DNA.

And when I added to My faults a closed-in sense of the traumatic incident Jake was going through (though, actually, Mike tells me they had a lovely time lying on the bed together while I was crying in the car) I lost track of the fact that I was on my way to fix the problem and, in the long run, to maybe make things a little bit better. Sure, I'd love to have antibiotic ointment on hand all the time, but if I were focused on that, there's surely something else I'd be missing. The bigger point is I do what my son needs when I'm aware that he needs it.

If I had opened out, I would have gotten it. This moment is not as big as I'm making it. My culpability isn't as great as I think it is. This is just one small moment in an overwhelmingly bigger, always beautiful, frequently scary thing called motherhood.

Once we can open out -- go beyond our thoughts as if flying so far above them they become very, very small -- we can start to open in as well. Just as we draw energy from outside of us, that same energy remains boundless inside. If you believe, as I do (and, if I understand it correctly, as, at some level, scientists do as well) that we and everything around us are made up of the same energy, then we are as limitless inside as outside.

It's when you find that inner opening that you start to experience the peace within yourself.

An Opening Without/Within Meditation Practice

There are many things I wanted to do as I diapered my screaming child last night. Meditating was not at the top of the list.

This meditation, however, translates to other activities as well. While it is clearest when done sitting still and quiet, once you discover it you can bring it to whatever you absolutely need to do when you feel overly responsible: taking a walk, practicing a challenging yoga pose, driving to Greenlife for unbleached diapers and Wound Care.

There isn't a moment in the day when it ceases to be satisfying to open out and then open in.

Instructions for Opening Without/Within Meditation

1) Find a comfortable seat, preferably on the floor. I discourage chair-sitting if you can abandon it for a time because it's not great for our lower backs. Sitting on a bed or a couch is fine, but you are unlikely to find a solid foundation. Instead, try the floor and lots of blankets. Place one or two folded blankets under your sitting bones (not your thighs) as you sit cross-legged and see if you can maintain this position for several minutes. You can place folded blankets under your legs as well if they would like some extra support. Another lovely option is to lie back, perhaps with the blankets under your knees to release your lower back.

2) Wherever you are, turn your palms toward the sky, close your eyes, and focus on your breath. Be lulled by the gentle sound of your inhales and exhales as you breathe in and out through your nose. Let them grow longer and slower. Start to notice the pauses between the inhale and exhale, and between the exhale and the inhale.

3) Next time a thought comes into your head, don't try to chase it away. Instead, open out, leaving it behind and insignificant.

4) Start to explore this place you come into when you open out. As thoughts intrude, open out again. Remember, yoga is a practice, not a final resting place. Your thoughts will intrude, over and over, and you will gently continue to open out again.

5) When you feel you have reached a place where your thoughts are not intruding as rapidly, an outer opening with which you have become familiar, start to open in. There's no set way for doing this; it's about what opening in means to you. One way to start is to picture your heart as a lotus blossom with thousands of petals opening and opening.

6) Be in this place of opening out and opening in for as long as it feels good to you. When you are ready, return your attention to your breath. Take a few moments to breathe in and out deeply and consciously.

7) When you are ready, open your eyes. Maintain the feeling of opening out and opening in as you draw your hands to your heart in namaste mudra, prayer position, the position of offering. Bow to your heart to acknowledge all that is there, even as your hands in front of your heart represent the offering of what you have inside. In this moment, you may feel a deep connection to everything around you.

And you probably won't sweat the antibiotic ointment.

Fixing Everything, Even When You Can't, or How I Learned to Diffuse My Energy

2008-05-07T09:31:00.001-07:00

Today my acupuncturist spent a lot of time diffusing my energy. And it got me thinking.

I was probably not thinking what you are -- Acupuncture! Therapy! Yoga! This gal spends an inordinate amount of energy searching for the mindfulness in motherhood! And is maybe a little bit crazy to boot. But, see, it's what I do now -- search and share my results with you.

At any rate, what I was thinking, beyond how lucky I am to be able to do a little acupuncture sometimes, is how overly concentrated energy is probably a key component of motherhood. With so many competing tasks facing me every day, I wish I came equipped with a laser-like focus, a sort of Mama Ray Gun that I can blast at whatever needs doing NOW -- quality park time going down the slide with Jake; intricately researched, detailed, brilliant legal memos packed into the time between yoga class and the end of Jake's school day; prepping the veggies I bought last week before they are too wilted to eat in an effort to distract Mike from once again preparing his favorite meal of sticky rice and Chinese hot sauce while I'm putting Jake to bed.

Lacking the handy Mama Ray Gun, I compensate in the way I know many of us do. I multi-task with a heady burst of adrenaline until I find myself, at day's end, too spent to do anything but shovel a few spoonfuls of Stonyfield Farms Gotta Have Vanilla ice cream into my mouth before I fall into bed.

The only way I know how to have energy is in bursts. Diffuse? Full-bodied? Thick and spreading and viscous like warm honey?

I must FIND this healthy balance! Get me the ray gun, quick!

Going At Life in Bursts

Even before I became a mother, I was a Fixer. Anything that bothered me, threw me off balance, kept my life from being the perfect, RomCom-like romp I thought it was supposed to be had to be fixed. Quickly. This attitude may account for the fact that I have moved every two to four years for my entire adult life.

Imagine the rush I got when I realized, after Jake's arrival, that I now have a whole new life to fix.

It's not so crazy, I think, for a mother to want her child's life to be as perfect as she can make it. We all know that, sooner or later, people face sadness and pain and frustration. In fact, our toddlers make it clear to us that even at the tender age of, say, sixteen months, all these emotions are fully in play. Still, if we know our children are going to face a certain amount of the suffering that is part of life, why not shield them from as much as we can? Why, in other words, not give them a warm little kiddie pool of life's difficulties to play in instead of letting them plunge into the deep end of a swimming pool full of sorrows?

Hence, last night I felt it was vitally important that I figure out what caused Jake to wake up that second time demanding, once again, to be back in bed with Mommy when Mommy had just managed to rouse herself enough to put him back in his crib. Not that I could do anything about it, but if I just knew what was wrong I could plan for future nights; I could ease him back into staying in his crib with a minimum of crying on both our parts.

Jake has, recently, been exhibiting symptoms of a multitude of those toddler afflictions that can't be determined with any certainty but that do the trick for explaining sudden bouts of grumpiness. His digestion has been off -- or, rather, way on as if someone opened the poop spout too far and then way off as we went 24-hours poop-free. Could it be the cherry snack bars that showed up, fittingly cherry-like, on his cheeks? Or were we too enthusiastic about the black beans Mike fixed in a huge, fill-up-the-freezer pot? An examination of said poop suggested the latter.

But, wait, was it the poop causing his diaper rash so extreme he developed angry little sores on his bottom? Or was it the (I'm so ashamed to admit it) bleached, scented, chemical-laden Pampers that cut into the creases between baby butt cheeks and chubby legs? And is sixteen months too late to change to cloth diapers? (Even if Jake would tolerate it, the change is, I fear, too late for me. My sister-in-law threw me a baby shower in which she cleverly used cloth diapers as napkins and secured them with diaper pins. I needed assistance getting mine open, which is a sign of how very little I know about using cloth diapers.)

Of course, there's always the allergy worries to turn to. Figuring out what your baby is allergic to is a little bit like doing a puzzle that is all one color. One piece at a time, you search to see if that piece fits and then discard it to focus on another indistinguishable piece. What if, heaven forbid, we had inadvertently introduced TWO allergens at the same time? How would we ever figure out what was causing the rash-inducing poop?

Even my attempted solution to the black bean problem presented the possibility that it was causing problems of its own. If not black beans, I reasoned, then kidney beans. Jake chowed on them straight out of the slow cooker Monday night. And later proceeded to awaken, cry, and fart in close enough proximity to suggest that I not give him kidney beans for dinner in the future.

Finally, don't ever count out teething. Jake started fussing and drooling when he was three months old. "That's awfully young to be teething," his pediatrician said when I first told her about it; a few days later, in her office, she had to agree that's what he was doing. Which was fine, except he didn't get his first tooth for another four months. The remaining teeth have not proven much speedier at making their way into his mouth. As a result, he has just six teeth and at least that many breaking through his gums simultaneously. He has moved from concentrated thumb sucking to full-hand-in-the-mouth gum massage. Which, along with gas, diaper rash, diarrhea, constipation, and allergies, could wake a guy up in the middle of the night.

So what do I plan to do tonight to avoid that 5 a.m. anger when I have just barely shut my eyes after returning Jake to his crib and awaken to the belligerent cries of the unfairly ousted? How will I avoid that sickening feeling that takes hold of me when I grumpily set boundaries on an hour and a half of REM sleep and a desperate need for more?

Obviously, the concentrated energy, solve-a-problem-fast-so-I-can-go-solve-another-one approach isn't working for me. Zap! Zap! Zap! goes my Mama Ray Gun as I spin in circles shooting it ferociously at the evil gang of maladies torturing me by upsetting my child. It's the teething! No, the allergies! Wait, it's the diaper rash!

It is time, I believe, to try a little diffusion of energy.

The Line -- I Mean Zone -- Between Focus and Fanaticism

A twenty-something, a septuagenarian, and a mom walk into a yoga class. The twenty-something blithely does a hand stand in the middle of the room while straddling her legs in perfect splits, all while planning what outfit she will wear tonight to the party at the apartment downstairs from hers. The septuagenarian will barely bend herself into a slight triangle pose, but her mind will be quiet, her breathing deep, her heart at peace. The mom will be jealous of both, work furiously on hand stand at the wall in the belief that she will -- she must -- one day be able to balance without the wall, tell her mind to shut up over and over and over again, think about her child's smile, remind herself to do her child's laundry before she picks him up from school, wonder if it will be warm enough to wear a tank top since her arms feel pretty damn tight after all this hand stand work, remember that she has some work to do in the office before she picks him up, tell her mind to shut up again, and do it all with exactly what she believes to be the focus the yoga teacher described at the beginning of class.

Focus. It's the one part of yoga we moms figure we understand.

Focus, however, doesn't mean confining your energy to the one task you are, however briefly, tackling. It's not about the Zap! Zap! Zap! of the Mama Ray Gun. Yoga isn't about bursts, unless you are sending bursts of breath out of your body in an effort to cleanse your energy channels so you can avoid ragged energy that comes and goes in -- you guessed it -- bursts.

Focus means letting go of the things that don't matter at this moment. Yes, it entails doing one thing at a time, but it's about doing that one thing fully, without distractions. One of the teachers at the ashram where I did my teacher training described it perfectly for my generation: It's like there's a television on in the room, but you're not paying attention. We can't stop the chatter in our minds, because it's what the mind does. But we can learn how to keep it from distracting us.

So there's the difference. When we focus our energy, and not our attention, we simply display symptoms of ADD. We pounce on the first thing our mind offers with the eagerness of a hungry mountain lion spotting a plump neighborhood dog. A moment later, we whirl around at the suggestion of another thing we could -- should -- be doing right now and throw ourselves at it like my bloodhound mix Audrey going after a squirrel in our front yard, and probably with the same lack of grace. But, unlike Audrey, we don't stick to the scent when the squirrel eludes our jaws. We don't worry the base of the tree whence it escaped, seeing our quest through to its conclusion, however disappointingly squirrel-free. Instead, we run off toward the next distraction, Mama Ray Gun at the ready.

When we instead focus our attention, we don't run in circles from one distraction to the next because we're not distracted. And when we're not in such a hurry to accomplish something in the brief time remaining before we run after the next distraction, we don't have to throw so much frenzied energy at what we're doing now. Instead of rush-stop-rush-stop, our energy starts to spread out, to flow evenly. And, as we stay with it, it spreads, becoming diffuse and infusing our beings.

Acupuncture-Free Energy Diffusion: Trikonasana (Triangle Pose)

As wonderfully warm and peaceful and un-kinked as I felt leaving my acupuncturist's office today (and as much as I'd love to return for a weekly un-kinking), living and all the habits that come with it will immediately set about knocking off that balance. As will, of course, being a mom. Because you just know that I walked out of the office and into a string of errands and even now I'm realizing the things I forgot to get and wondering if I'll have time to go back and get them before it's time to pick Jake up from school.

So we all need a good asana to help diffuse our energy. And, it occurs to me, defuse the Mama Ray gun.

I truly love trikonasana because, once you settle into it, you send energy in all directions. I often think of a star as my heart opens in this pose. Energy moves out my arms, my legs, the crown of my head, my tailbone, my heart -- in every direction. And as it moves out, a bright, peaceful flow of energy effortlessly makes its way in and through my body. I feel as if I can walk off my mat and into my day glowing like a small bit of starlight.

Trikonasana Instructions

1) Stand at the front of your mat and step your left foot back, about a leg's distance. Allow your body to face the left side of your mat, but keep your right foot at the front of the mat, toes facing forward. (You may also enter this pose from Surya Namaskar A (sun salute A) or directly from adho mukha svanasana (downward facing dog) by stepping your right foot to the front of the mat and letting your straight left arm draw you up to standing by reaching it overhead.)

2) Turn your left foot so it is at about a 45-degree angle, facing toward the side of the mat and angled toward the top of the mat. Lift your arms out to a T and check to see that your wrists are above your ankles. If they are not, adjust your feet.

3) Place your hands on your hips and make sure they are square, with your navel facing directly toward the side of your mat. Your elbows should point out to the sides. Then draw your elbows toward each other and let your heart lift as your shoulder blades slide down your back.

4) Keeping your shoulder blades strongly down your back, draw your navel in toward your spine and up toward your heart and feel your lower back release slightly toward the floor. Think about the length and space in your spine; make it a conduit for energy to flow. Then lift your arms to a T and feel the energy flow from fingertip to fingertip.

5) Inhale and feel the energy travel through the crown of your head. Root strongly into your left foot, and as you exhale, let your right fingertips draw your torso to the right as far as it will go. Do this consciously, letting your left foot anchor you and letting your left hip pull strongly toward the left foot even as your fingertips draw your torso to the right.

6) Take an inhale here and see if you can lift your heart and lengthen the right side of your ribcage.

7) As you exhale, lower your right hand (but not your torso) to your shin (or, if you have very open hips, to the floor). Let your left fingertips point toward the ceiling.

8) Turn your head to look at the floor for a moment while you check your alignment. Your hips should remain square to the side of the mat, although your left hip will try to creep forward. Square your hips by allowing your inner thighs to rotate toward the side of the mat and up toward the ceiling.

9) Notice if the right side of your ribcage is crunched or curved. If it is, move your right hand further up your leg so you can draw the right ribcage straight and long and parallel to the floor to allow the free flow of energy. Concentrate on sending your hips toward the back of the mat and your heart toward the front of the mat to help with this spinal lengthening.

10) Finally, make sure your shoulder blades are still down your back, keeping your shoulders away from your ears. Allow your neck to be long, tuck your chin slightly, and allow your head to turn on your neck so you are gazing up at your left fingertips. If your neck feels uncomfortable in this position, continue to look at the floor or straight ahead.

11) As you breathe in this pose feel your heart start to lift and open. Follow the energy it sends out. Feel it traveling out your fingertips, your feet, the crown of your head, and your tailbone. Think of yourself as a star.

Come to think of it, no matter what energy you use to accomplish all you do, a star is what you are.

12) Come out of this pose by letting your left fingertips draw you up to standing with a long, straight spine. Turn your toes so your left toes face the back of your mat and your right foot is at a 45-degree angle with your right toes facing toward the side of the mat and up toward the bottom (now top) of the mat. (Or, from step 11, come through a vinyasa and step your left foot forward).

13) Repeat on the left side.

One more time because it bears repeating. You are a star.

Jake and My Heart Free Me From a Scary Rat's Maze

2008-05-05T07:46:00.000-07:00

I had one of those moments yesterday, the kind where suddenly everything feels completely wrong.

It begins with a weird sense of displacement -- in my case, sitting on the floor of my yoga room/office in the middle of my asana practice. "What am I doing here?" or something like it started the internal conversation. "Who made me a mother who doesn't have time for real friends? How did I end up on a quiet street full of kids in Asheville? Since when did I look at buying groceries as a social event?"

In the space of a breath, I have convinced myself that sometime during my life in -- I don't know, maybe Washington, D.C., someplace where I was single and young and knew how to drink a martini -- sometime in the midst of this young, hip, I-can-do-anything life I fell asleep and woke up . . . here.

That's when the moment hit. "Have I really been following my heart?" I started asking myself. "Or have I abandoned it for what everyone's supposed to want -- a loving partner and a kid and a house with a deck in the backyard?"

I'm not sure, I sniffed, tears coming to my eyes, that I'm where I'm supposed to be.

Funny, Where Your Heart Can Lead You

After a few minutes in child's pose, taking deep, calming breaths, I asked myself what had me so frightened.

Part of it was the fact that I am not only a mother, but I write about it. It's become my thing.

Five years ago, before I met Mike, I was pretty comfortable with the notion of mothering nothing more genetically connected to me than my basset hound Roxanne. I had spent some time in my early thirties planning how I would have a baby if I didn't manage to get married by thirty-five. (So very scary now how young that sounds.) The lawyer in me headed straight for an anonymous donor; the law professor at a Jesuit university timed it for after I got tenure and could flaunt my shame; the business person in me -- well, there isn't a hint of business sense in me so I didn't really spend much time figuring out how I was going to afford artificial insemination with a health plan handed down indirectly from the Pope.

Eventually, though, I let go of the idea that I had to have a child. I realized I was completely complete without one. I relished my single life. I dedicated myself more and more deeply to yoga. And then I met Mike and my heart led me in the direction we expect our hearts to lead us. It's almost embarrassing, finding myself one of those women I used to find sort of uninteresting. And now I write about those formerly uninteresting I'm-a-mom things.

But fretting about the stranger writing YogaMamaMe is something I do all the time, and it doesn't make me want to throw up like I did yesterday.

What was making me feel so Sliding Doors, I think, was the feeling that my life doesn't move any longer. I have no time, and little motivation, to break the comfortable pattern that allows me a decent amount of sleep and me-time when I live with a toddler. So much easier to hang out with my best friend, who also happens to be Jake's father, going to the Ramp Celebration in Waynesville (turns out it was Sunday instead of Saturday, so we never got to eat any ramps) or just playing on that deck while he mows the lawn. Go out? See a movie, go on a date, drink too much? That takes planning, and by the time the sitter is here I'm kind of tempted to kick off my heels and join her in front of the t.v.

My fear, then, seemed to stem from this perception that I've hit a dead end. I'm a rat in an evil scientist's maze. I was making my way through it just fine and then they threw this gorgeous baby in and I scrambled toward him, whiskers twitching, trapping myself in a cramped little cubby where there seems no choice but to curl up and sleep out the rest of the experiment. No rat treats for me.

I reminded myself that I live in a mighty beautiful rat maze -- a lovely craftsman on a street full of friendly neighbors, shared with a loving husband and an amazing, blue-eyed little boy just starting to show off his snippet of Irish heritage with the reddish cast his hair has lately acquired.

Yes, I whined. That's what makes me feel so TRAPPED. It's Jake's turn to change and grow, and I have to sit here and watch.

Following Means Following

Everywhere, it seems, we are pelted with images of parents suggesting that once you have a kid you cede the life changes to him. We are quintessentially at the sidelines of our kids' soccer games. You can catch us in the audience at the school play, providing transportation to music lessons and softball practice, sitting next to our child as he does his homework at the kitchen table. Our careers are no longer fulfilling, or if they are, we become bad, distracted parents. Our drive to succeed in business is now solely about filling that 529 account so we can send our little geniuses to college.

No wonder as Jake becomes more independent I become more certain I'm being left behind.

But the fault with my thinking yesterday was the notion that my heart has led me here as a final destination. As if it has hitched a ride with the child I love so much and is ditching me so it can carry on with him. When, after all, Jake has his own heart and is already starting to find his own path (which, at the moment, very much involves balls).

Sometimes life slows down. Sometimes an asana practice slows down too. It's a chance to take advantage of all the heat and energy we've generated. In asana practice that means stretching warmed muscles. In life maybe it means pouring all the goodness we've created into a beautiful start for our children.

But, in asana practice, after we've stretched for a while, we are ready to move into the intensity of back bends or a long inversion -- which require a different type of strength from the standing poses that began the practice, a deep opening and strength that come only after we have moved and stretched. So, too, in life we will move from the opening and stretching our new children offer us to deeper challenges that require us to move in new ways.

Jake is a mere sixteen months old. Seems like he's been around a whole lot longer, but sixteen months . . . less than half my time in college; less time than I managed to stick it out at the law firm; less time, even, than my prepubescent infatuation with Shaun Cassidy lasted. Jake will get older, he will spend less and less time with me, and I will find the strength to start moving again.

Not that I'm not moving now. I'm about to launch a website, for goodness sakes. Okay, so it's about being a mother, but it's about following my heart as well. And I sure don't think it ends here.

Setu Bandha Sarvangasana (Bridge Pose) to Urdvha Danurasana (Upward Facing Bow) -- You Wanna Move in a New Way?

Too often, when I'm in an intense backbend, I forget all about moving. Our instinct, when we're working so hard, is to see if we can stay in the pose until the teacher releases us. Which is not a bad thing because, next time you do it, you may notice that it's really, really hard to stay perfectly still.

The key to backbends, in my book, is to constantly lengthen your spine. It's not the sort of movement we're used to -- swinging our legs back and forth to walk, waving our arms around when we want attention, crouching down a million times a day to pick up a twenty-five pound toddler. Lengthening your spine is far more subtle. It's about exploration, going inside and finding more space and more ways to create it. When you're doing that while holding a pose that requires more than a little bit of strength, you realize just how far you've come in your practice. Most of us start yoga with pretty tight backs, and they open so beautifully.

Focusing on lengthening your spine in a back bend seems to me the loveliest way to appreciate the slowing of our lives when our children are young. It seems like we're not moving -- because we're not out at bars talking to not very interesting people made moderately more interesting by dint of the alcohol we're consuming. In fact, we are finding more intense, subtle, advanced ways of moving, ways made possible because our children have made us slow down and stretch in ways we didn't think possible.

And add this thought -- as you lengthen your spine you're also opening your heart. Just to remind you that it is still there for you to follow.

Setu Bandha Sarvangasana (Bridge Pose) Instructions

1) Lie on your mat with your knees bent and your feet on the floor. Reach down to see if you can brush your heels with your fingertips. This is the correct distance between your butt and your heels; if you don't have the flexibility to bring your heels this close, just bring them as close to your butt as you can without straining.

2) Let your arms fall to the floor by your sides and turn them palm up. Feel your shoulder blades move together. Consciously bring them closer together as if they are supporting your heart.

3) Make sure the back of your head is pressing to the floor but not your neck. If you have neck issues, you may place a small rolled up towel under your neck to ensure that it maintains its curve. Your nose should point straight at the ceiling.

4) Turn your hands palms down close to your hips, and on an inhale draw your navel in toward your spine and up toward your heart.

5) As you exhale, let your hips float off the floor as high as you can let them go. Use your palms pressing into the floor to help lift your hips. Make sure your nose is still pointing at the ceiling to protect your neck.

6) Take a moment to think of lengthening your spine, almost as if you are growing a tail. Let your inner thighs roll inward (without collapsing your legs together). Stay here if your back feels tight. Continue to breathe and lengthen.

7) The back bend is behind your heart (in your thoracic spine) NOT in your lower back (along the lumbar spine). Try to draw your lower back straight out toward your knees while using your shoulder blades to open your upper back, behind your heart.

8) If it is okay with your back to go on, draw your hands together under your back and interlace your fingers. Draw your palms toward each other and draw your hands toward your heels, bringing your shoulder blades with them. Feel your heart open.

9) Once again check in with your neck; it should remain lifted off the floor if your nose is pointed at the ceiling. Press your heels strongly into the floor and go inside, looking for ways to lengthen your spine, feeling your heart opening. Don't forget to breathe as deeply as this back bend allows you.

10) When you have fully explored the pose and found how dynamic it really is, gently release your hands and lower yourself slowly, starting at your shoulders and releasing one vertebrae at a time to the floor.

Rest here and feel how energized you are, even when you are completely still. If your back feels tight and you would like to release it, draw your knees in toward your chest and give yourself a hug. Roll to the side and push yourself up to come off the floor.

Urdhva Danurasana (Upward Facing Bow) Instructions

Attempt this deep back bend only if you are an experienced practitioner of asanas. Like any pose that requires this much strength, I recommend you try it for the first time under the direction of a yoga instructor.

1) Follow steps 1-4 above. (Do not place a towel under your neck, as you will be lifting your head off the floor.)

2) On an exhale, place your palms by your ears. Your elbows will be pointing toward the ceiling; your fingers will point toward your shoulders.

3) Take a moment here to draw your elbows toward each other. The biggest problem I have seen when people are unable to lift into urdhva danurasana is allowing their elbows to splay out to the sides. Drawing them in creates strength in the back by strongly bringing the shoulder blades together and engaging the muscles along the upper back.

4) Bearing in your mind's eye the correct opening of the back -- behind the heart in the thoracic region, not in the lumbar spine, start letting your heart lift you off the floor as you press strongly into your hands and feet until your head lifts.

5) I recommend pausing with your head on the floor to readjust your hands as necessary so your shoulder blades can draw together. Once again lift by allowing your heart to rise as you press into the space between your first finger and thumb. Don't forget to press equally into all four corners of your feet as well.

6) Straighten your arms as far as you can. If you can not straighten them, your shoulders are still a bit tight for this pose. In this case, tuck your chin toward your chest and lower yourself gently to the floor, doing bridge pose for a while instead.

7) With your arms straight, make sure your neck is long by looking away from your body (not toward your feet). Press into your big toes, let your thighs rotate toward each other, and start lengthening your spine. As it lengthens, notice your heart lifting and the pose requiring less pure muscle. Don't forget to breathe.

8) When you are done exploring, tuck your chin toward your chest as best you can and bend your elbows to gently lower to the back (not top) of your head and your upper back. Then lower your spine slowly, one vertebrae at a time.

Enjoy resting on the floor. Feel how much energy moves through you, even though you are still. Notice how open your heart is to what may come. If your back feels tight, you may hug your knees into toward your chest to release it. Be sure to roll to the side and push yourself up to come off the floor.

And use a bit of that open heart to give yourself a little love.

When You Absolutely Have No Choice But to Let Go

2008-05-02T07:54:00.000-07:00

I was walking under a dogwood tree on the way out of my therapist's office this morning when I noticed the blanket of pink flowers it had dropped on the brick sidewalk. The tree, I thought, was telling me to let go.

For a moment, I considered the prospect. I was already late for my yoga class and felt like I had spent all morning doing nothing but rushing around tangled and confused. The plans I had faced when I woke up were stacked up in front of me like the giant Leggo-like blocks Jake fashions into shaky towers. Get Jake to school with his usual array of food and drink. Add to the collection the sheets and blankets for nap time that I had run through the washing machine to rinse out his school's laundry detergent because it gives him a rash. Throw in the chamomillia for his teething and the good diaper cream for his rash. Wear yoga clothes that can double as a plausible outfit for therapy. Don't forget the checkbook. And the yoga mat. And, as Mike suggested too innocently for the choking sound I made in response, the checks that need to be deposited. And my drivers license because today's the last day of early voting in North Carolina and I am finally over my fear that the early votes will somehow be lost, sent into an empty room somewhere to wait out the primaries.

Everything either stuffed under the stroller or strapped to my back, Jake and I set out on our walk to school. Because why drive when I can strand myself between too-close appointments with nothing but my feet, my rushing heart, and damp underarms to get me to my destination?

We arrived at school with just ten minutes to go before my therapy appointment a quarter mile away. And, because I wasn't strung quite tightly enough yet, pandemonium greeted us. Uncharacteristic amounts of crying and pushing and running were taking place. Jake seemed pretty nonplussed by it all, but I knew there was no way I was going to sneak his beloved "home" Blankie away from him to be replaced by the second-rate blankie I had designated for school use. I muttered something incoherent about this arrangement to a very kind teacher, ending with, "Never mind. He's in charge," and dashed off to therapy.

Even my appointment felt a bit like a cartoon train wreck, where the back end is moving faster than the front so the cars all fold up on each other like an accordion. Words poured out of my mouth, shallow ideas lapped over each other without gathering momentum, and my eyes shifted restlessly to the clock. While it might have been wise to wind down a bit early to avoid, say, rushing to yoga class, I was just enjoying myself too much. "A few minutes won't matter," I thought, even though I knew they would.

And then I found myself under that tree with the pink flowers telling me to let go. And for a brief moment I felt calm and like I had space to slow down. I could just let go of yoga for the day.

NO! screeched something inside. I could practically see the yoga studio just over a rise in the road ahead. So close. All I had to do was walk a little faster. I'd only be ten minutes late.

The woman who checks people in was standing out front as I pulled around the corner. I opened my mouth to ask her if it was too late to go to class. Before any sound came out she said, "Ashtanga is canceled today. There's a workshop."

Ahhh.

Sometimes the Universe is going to make you let go whether you want to or not.

Why Spring Makes Your Forget to Let Go

As I took a lovely, slow walk home past houses adorned with spring flowers, thinking that Asheville must be home to more birds than anyplace else I've ever lived, I found it hard to believe I was having trouble letting go. When your skin is enjoying the gentleness of a warm spring morning and the air smells like sunshine, it seems impossible not to.

And yet, I thought, spring isn't about letting go. It's about birth and forward momentum and energy. It makes you think you've let go of the past because you are enamored with a feeling of youthful energy. Everything is new and bright and full.

But new and bright and full can make you forget the old crap that's still hanging around. They can convince you it's not there when really it's just lying dormant, like all those irises waving their purple heads at you were during the winter. "Look!" they call, distracting you from all the things you carry with you in life. "Everything's great and you can wear tank tops now and feel barefoot and free and shed all that winter apathy!"

I'd love to take them at their word. After four years in Southern California, I had forgotten the feeling of spring. I'm still a little bit sore about having to endure a long winter to get to it, so maybe I'm not quite as welcoming as I once was, when I was young and stupid and didn't mind being so cold my teeth hurt. But it's still a pretty nice thing.

Much as the irises beckoned, for better or worse, the Universe has done a great job lately at reminding me of the things I carry with me, things I should be letting go of but instead cling to as stubbornly as Jake clings to the Blankie to which he has suddenly developed an intense attachment.

There is, first and foremost, the fertility thing, the fear that I am having a recurrence of the condition that caused me to have several miscarriages before finally getting diagnosed, treated, and pregnant in short order. I'm not even sure I have the condition again, and yet my fears have wound around me, trapping me in a time two years ago, a time I thought I was over the moment the doctors told me they could see future-Jake's heartbeat and were releasing me to the care of the midwives. Turns out that pregnancy -- not coincidentally like spring -- can make you think you've let something go when in fact you've just buried it under a rich, loamy layer of fertile new soil.

So, too, Jake's burgeoning food allergies are awakening some mighty hard feelings from the months I struggled to breastfeed him. Just as we enter another round of "what did he eat right before raspberries blossomed on his cheeks and his butt turned a shade of red a baboon would envy?" I read yet another one of those New York Times articles which frequently make their way into my musings here. While the thrust of it was positive -- more women are breastfeeding than in the last decade or so -- it contained the usual litany of the evils of formula: increased risks of diabetes, obesity, asthma, and, you guessed it, allergies.

Okay, so Mike was exclusively breastfed and yet he is plainly the one who provided the genetic material for Jake's food allergies. I, on the other hand, never tasted anything better than formula and am rather disgustingly allergy-free. The fact remains that Jake had far more formula than breast milk in his first seven months (before I gave up altogether). So when his allergies flare up, so does my stuck sadness from the days when I felt like a failure because I couldn't feed my son.

I am, in other words, holding onto old sadnesses with the same intensity with which Jake holds onto his Blankie.

Why Is It So Hard to Just Let Go?

"Are we not making you feel secure enough?" Mike asked Jake half-jokingly a few days ago, when it was becoming apparent that the Blankie fixation was here to stay. Why, we both wondered, does he suddenly need a security blanket?

A toddler's security blanket, I think, is no different from the moments in our past we refuse to let go. Sure, it feels a lot better to hold a soft square of chenille against your cheek than it does to cry about old miscarriages and long-ago discarded Supplemental Nursing Systems. But I don't think Jake is as entranced by the physical feel of Blankie against his skin as he is by the desire to grab a hold of something knowable at this time when so many new things are opening themselves up to him.

Bad things that have happened to us in the past are knowable. We may not exactly like the way they make us feel when we revisit them, but we surely know what to expect. The emotions were so strong at the time we are unlikely -- seemingly unable -- to forget them. They come rushing back at the slightest hint that they're welcome. Because, even if we think we're not welcoming them, we often are. It's just comfortable to gravitate toward what we know, even if the unknown holds so much more possibility.

I'm conducting an experiment right now, telling myself to just forget about the past miscarriages. And my first reaction is resistance. I suffered, I think. It seems unfair to just discard it, to let that sad me be forgotten, what I've been through discounted.

Except, when I look at it, that's just ridiculous. I was sad once. I have no reason to be sad right now, in this moment, with spots of sunlight and shadow traipsing across the leaves of the tree outside my office window.

Ridiculous though it may be, when I try to pry those old feelings away, I respond in much the same manner as Jake does when I try to pry to Blankie out of his hands. I go primal, just like he does, forgetting everything except my need to hold on, hold on, hold on.

So how do I get Jake to let go of Blankie? I just tell him he can't eat his yogurt and hold Blankie at the same time. He gave this proposition some serious thought the first time I made it. Having a bit of his mother's determination running through his veins, he let his need for Blankie convince him he could subsist on dry cereal alone. But after a few minutes, he saw how it would be worth letting go of Blankie to eat some yogurt. And now he finds it very easy to let go. At least for yogurt. Letting go of Blankie to wash his hands is a whole different story. But we're both learning.

Practicing Letting Go

All of yoga is infused with the practice of letting go. We practice letting go of the thoughts that sail through our minds. Of the tightness in our muscles. Of our fear of turning upside down or our belief that we will never, ever sit in pigeon pose without blankets. We try to let go of the past and of any preconceptions about the future. We work on letting go of the need to control everything and of the belief that it's possible to do so. And we end every single asana practice with the gift of deeply letting go in savasana.

It sounds so simple and yet it must not be, or else why would we spend a lifetime practicing it? I think of Jake learning to let go of objects. When he first learned to grasp he hadn't a clue how to let go. Then he began shoving a ball toward me but still needed me to take it from him. After a while, he could let go of the ball at some indeterminate moment and glance around wildly wondering where it had gone. He's pretty good at throwing a ball right now, but he's still a long, long way from shooting hoops.

The best way to practice letting go of the past is to exhale. We all do it naturally when we're feeling frustrated or angry. We sigh. And it helps.

Being conscious of the release in an exhale helps us let go of what we're feeling at the moment. But, like the breath, it will continue. It's just a matter of reminding ourselves to exhale each time the old feelings reappear. No need to hunt them down and pry them away because, as anyone who's ever had a toddler knows, you're just running the risk of making that attachment stubbornly stronger. Instead, exhale when they come up and let them go in the moment. Just as -- who knows? -- Jake may one day be a champion basketball player, you may one day find yourself free. In the meantime, enjoy the distraction of a beautiful spring day.

Bhastrika (Bellows Breathing): Inviting It In and Sending It Out

I hesitated about offering bhastrika (bellows breathing) here because it involves a forceful inhale as well as a forceful exhale. But then it occurred to me that it's healthy to invite our old feelings in, to confront them, bid them farewell, and then consciously release them. I'm not saying they won't come back, but if they do, it will be on your terms -- you will be conscious, steady, and ready to send them away as many times as it takes.

I also like the idea of bhastrika as a way of welcoming in the freshness of spring. It's sort of a housecleaning. You open all the windows to let the fresh air surge in. And you shove all the dirt and dust and detritus you don't need back out again.

Finally, there's a very energetic, core-awakening aspect to this pranayama (breathing exercise). It requires you to use your abdominal muscles (which, after all, we all feel could use a little workout as summer approaches). Engaging your abdominal muscles heats your core and gives you energy. Stronger abdominal muscles also mean a well supported lower back, less back discomfort, and a longer, taller spine.

Altogether a lovely way to walk into a spring day.

Bhastrika Instructions

One caveat about this pranayama exercise -- it is strong and may make you feel dizzy. If you feel dizzy or out of breath in any way, stop immediately and just breathe until you feel better. I do not recommend attempting this one if you have respiratory issues or high blood pressure.

1) Sit in a comfortable cross-legged position. Unless you can sit comfortably in padmasana (full lotus) -- and who can? -- this is a great time to sit on the folded edge of a blanket. Just your sitting bones should rest on the blanket, not your thighs, to tilt your pelvis forward slightly and give you more space to breathe. Alternatively, you may kneel and sit on your heels or place a block between your heels and sit on the very edge of it. Either way, find a place where it is easy to breathe.

2) If you are in cross-legged position, rest your hands, palms facing up, on your knees. If you are kneeling, place your hands in your lap, palms up, one on top of the other, thumbs touching. Close your eyes and breathe in and out through your nose. Spend a few moments watching your breath, becoming conscious of it.

3) Slowly begin to lengthen your inhales and exhales, gently stretching your lungs. Feel yourself filling with the prana (energy) that comes from the air around you. Consciously exhale completely, feeling the stale air leave your lungs.

4) When you are ready, at the bottom of an exhale, pause for a moment and see if you can use your abdominal muscles to squeeze out just a little bit more air. Think of your navel moving in toward your spine and up toward your heart.

5) Inhale completely and continue to practice using your abdominals to squeeze out more air at the bottom of your exhales for a few more rounds.

6) When you feel like you have command of the abdominal push, take a deep, full breath in and then strongly pull your navel in and up for a quick blast of exhaling through your nose. Then just as strongly let your navel move away from your spine and fill the space with air, creating a sharp inhale through your nose. Exhale by pushing your navel in and up and sending the breath out your nose again.

7) Continue with these strong, short blasts of air in and out, working like a bellows. Count 10-25 rounds before resuming slow, deep, even breaths.

Make sure you breathe slowly for a while before you stand up. Then see if you don't feel a little bit like the spring day that awaits you.

When It Takes Effort to Experience Effortlessness

2008-04-30T06:30:00.000-07:00

"I made that," I marveled, not for the first time, as I watched Jake at school this morning. He was banging two farm animal puzzle pieces together, making a loud clacking noise appreciated by no one but himself. His eyes were clear and as blue as his shirt, which hung over the top of his baggy little jeans, which collapsed on top of his miniature cool shoes. His smile was as big and pure as only a toddler's smile can be. I was stunned by his beauty, unable to stand up and get on with my day.

Part of the reason Jake seems like a bit of a miracle to me is that he came so easily after so much anguish. I spent over a year having early miscarriages and being told by a well-regarded "specialist" that it was nothing more than a symptom of my age. Turns out when you trust your own sense of your body and see a doctor who actually -- get this -- listens to you you might be lucky enough to be diagnosed with a mild case of an easily treatable condition. One hysteroscopy later, I got pregnant. It was almost enough to forget how having difficulty conceiving infuses your entire life for the year, two years, five years you work at it.

Now I'm having the symptoms again, and even though I know I can be treated and I already have this crazy beautiful boy and one day we will have a crazy beautiful daughter from China, I can't help wishing that having a child could, just once, be effortless.

When You're Not in Control of Your Body

Control is a freaky thing. On the one hand, yoga tells us we're not in control, we need to surrender, we only make ourselves unhappy if we try to wrest control from the Universe.

On the other hand, we're mothers. We have to impose a little bit of order where it wouldn't otherwise exist. We have to maintain a touch of control over what our child eats, what soaps and lotions and sunblocks touch his skin, when he sleeps and where and on what kind of sheets. We spend inordinate amounts of time researching rugs that won't cause allergies and baby bottles that won't cause cancer. We don't control everything (and by "everything," I especially mean our little angels who refuse to eat the food we put in front of them and wriggle away when we try to douse them with sunblock), but damn it if we don't control an awful lot.

It's the same way with asanas. We have to surrender to our body's limitations. But we also take control over the mind that exaggerates them. The ability to bind in a twisting pose, for example, is largely a function of how long our arms are, something over which we surely have no control; but we do have control over the integrity of the pose and the way we approach it so that one day, if our arms are long enough, we might be able to bind.

Every day we have to figure out a way to get across the valley between the what-I-know-I-can't-control's and the what-I-know-I-can-control's. Most of the time we don't even notice we're doing it. But every so often, we hit a big, deep valley of Grand Canyon proportions. That is the terrain where fertility issues lie.

Here's what I can control: what I eat, how rested and cared-for my body is, my knowledge about my cycles and fertile periods, what doctors I trust and how much I will let them do. I also have some control over the things my limbs can do -- the strength and flexibility I build through my asana practice, the amount of walking I do, the number of times I embrace my husband and my child and even -- researchers have shown this to be beneficial -- my dogs.

What I can't control is what's going on internally. And that, as anyone who's experienced it knows, is a mighty frustrating thing.

Some of us turn to doctors who can get inside and give them the power to help us get pregnant. Others of us turn to acupuncturists, herbalists, ayurvedic practitioners. Many turn to their god. But the one thing we can't do is make those eggs viable, that uterus receptive, those sperm swim a little more strongly. We have to walk the line between what we can control and what we can't. And we have to learn to surrender to the things we can't control with grace.

Here's why that sounds a lot prettier than it is. Because it's hard to be graceful when you have a mess of hormones traipsing through your body like a bunch of eighth graders released by the bell on the last day of school before summer vacation. Because nothing feels less graceful than breaking down in tears at something as meaningless as a bathroom strewn with the detritus of a poopy diaper the dogs found. Because there's nothing graceful at all about blaming yourself. But when it's your own body that's tripping you up, it's pretty hard not to.

I realize I'm sounding a little dire right now. But why not introduce a really juicy challenge into the discussion every so often? I mean, how to feel like a young, sexy chick again when you have applesauce stains on all your clothes is important and everything. And yoga can help you come to terms with the applesauce. It's just that it can also help you wend your way through the big issues life throws at you.

Besides, a kind of dark posting every so often might help make the other things I write seem a whole lot more amusing by contrast. So if you're hating this discussion, go back and read something else I've written and see just how funny and light-hearted I can be.

Effort Begets Effortlessness

In yoga class yesterday, my teacher reminded us about effortlessness. She encouraged us -- a packed room of sweaty, determined practitioners -- to stop putting so much effort into every pose. She told us that there is a point at which you let the pose do its own work.

It was, I considered, a lovely metaphor for tackling the big issues. You work hard to get yourself into the right pose -- stretching, working, opening your heart, balancing -- and then, at some point, you surrender. Because -- need I say it again? -- you can't control everything.

What this means to me right now is that I am working hard so that I can surrender later. I'm researching doctors in our new home far away from the beloved doctor at UCLA who diagnosed and treated me when others wouldn't listen. I'm taking Chinese herbs and seeing an acupuncturist who makes me feel balanced and worthy and healthy. I'm trying not to share too much of my angst with Mike and to work out a plan with him.

At some point, though, I'm going to have to let go. I'm going to have to remind myself that there is a part of yoga that requires effortlessness, and what a beautiful concept that is. What a gift to know that your work pays off, no matter what. No need to second guess yourself as you do it. No worries that you are wasting your time. All that is required of you is to let go of attachment to any particular outcome.

We do it every day when we have children. Let go of your hope that you have found a way to make vegetables a tasty treat because chances are your angel will throw them across the table. Let go of your desire to keep Blankie soft and clean and pretty because it will be dragged through mud and leaves and many a messy dinner eaten by hand. Get too attached to any outcome, and you will only feel drained and impatient; let go and you will be able to laugh and buy fortified cereal or do an extra load of laundry.

So I pledge to do my best to let go of my attachment to any concept of what my family will look like in five years. Like Jake with his Blankie, I'll cling to what makes me feel good, give it up if that's what it takes to be given something else I want (say, a little vanilla yogurt), and let it go when I open my eyes to what is so wonderful right now, whether that is a bouncy ball to be thrown at the dogs or the sight of my beautiful child doing the throwing.

Active Effort and Effortlessness -- Virabhadrasana II (Warrior II)

There seem to be two ways to approach the Warrior poses. Either you're having a high energy day and you think, "Yah! Warrior! I am strong!" and you careen into the pose, every muscle aquiver, ready to leap across the room. Or your energy is not-so-much, and you lazily bend a knee a little bit, raise some noodly arms, and pray for the teacher to release you into a different asana.

The great thing about Virabhadrasana II is that it offers you a physical space to find the middle ground. The valley between too much effort and too little (which is not, by the way, the same thing as effortlessness) becomes a bridge. Approach it from the side of effort, and you ease into effortlessness. Approach it from the side of not really making an effort, and all you have to do is walk a little ways toward effort, and you'll find the right amount of effortlessness for even your low energy day.

Hence, for the purposes of experiencing effortlessness, I suggest approaching this Virabhadrasana II with a visual picture of what the pose looks like: arms and legs pointing in two different directions, body straight and proud with lifted heart right between them. You neither lean back, dragged down by past events, nor lean forward, thrusting yourself into a future that isn't happening yet. Once you undertake the effort that gets you planted firmly in the present, you can begin to practice effortlessness.

Virabhadrasana II Instructions

1) If you are familiar with Surya Namaskar A (sun salute A), come to the pose from there. If not, you can start in adho mukha svanasana (downward facing dog). If you are not familiar with this pose, start at the front of your mat and step your left foot back toward the back of the mat, then follow the directions below, starting with #3.

2) From adho mukha svanasana, step your right foot to the front of the mat with as much control as you can. Use your abdominal muscles rather than momentum, and your hand, if necessary, to physically pull your foot forward. Might as well be in control where you are able.

3) Drop your back (left) foot to the floor. It will rest at about a 45 degree angle, with the toes facing toward the side and top of the mat.

4) Rooting strongly into the back leg, swing your left arm toward your ear and up toward the ceiling. Let it lift you to standing with your front (right) knee bent to a 90 degree angle directly over your front (right) ankle. Your back (left) foot continues pressing into the floor as you support yourself with your strong back (left) leg.

5) Take a moment to find your alignment. Place your hands on your hips and physically urge them to face the side of your mat. Let your heart and shoulders do the same. Now draw your legs open -- with the inner thighs rotating up toward the ceiling to open your hips. Rotate even more strongly down the entire length of your back leg and, using this strength, let the front knee bend more deeply without drawing your torso forward. The intention is for the front knee to rest directly over the front ankle, with the leg bent to a 90 degree angle, but this position is difficult to achieve unless your hips are exceptionally open.

6) With your legs strong and your hands still on your hips, face the side of the mat and perform a shoulder loop -- toward the side of the mat, up to the ceiling, and down your back. Your heart lifts like a proud warrior.

7) With your legs strong and your heart lifting you, let your arms unfold to a "T." They are perpendicular to your body and parallel to the floor. Palms face down and everything is strong, down to your fingers. Feel the proud energy of your heart flowing from fingertip to fingertip.

8) Turn your head to gaze over your front fingertips. Feel the strength of the pose. Draw your navel in toward your spine and up toward your heart and feel how this opens your lower back and also gives you more energy to stand tall and proud in this pose.

9) Release any gripping in your jaw, inhale deeply, and on a long, slow, exhale, try to find effortlessness without losing the pose. Stay here for 5-10 long, deep breaths as you explore the relationship between effort and effortlessness. Then repeat on the other side.

As on any journey worth undertaking, you may not easily find your way to what you are searching for. I know I'm not having an easy time finding my effortlessness these days. But it's there if only you keep at it. A little effort, after all, can carry you a long way toward happiness.

Being Patient with Your Practice

2008-04-29T07:30:00.001-07:00

Yesterday, I wrote about how I had managed to stop moving for an afternoon and how being still showed me there was a lot more time than I thought.

When I finished, I gave a deep, happy sigh. It was just after noon. A whole afternoon stretched ahead of me, free of urgency or panic and full of time to run to Target for some greatly needed toilet paper so I would no longer have to resort to the box of tissues I keep in the bathroom to clean the hairs off the sink.

Enjoying my freedom from having too much to do in too little time, I sauntered downstairs and ate the piece of flourless chocolate cake I bought for Mike on Friday. We are, I reasoned, scheduled to have our insurance physicals in a week, and my cholesterol levels can much better handle the butter holding the chocolate and sugar together than his can. Then I called him to see if there was anything he needed from Target.

"There's a trimmer I want at Lowe's," he said. "But I don't want you to go out of your way."

"No problem," I assured him as I licked chocolate off the fork. "I've got plenty of time."

And then I was in the car and it was after 1:00 and my heart began beating a little bit faster, as if at the start of a race against the dashboard clock. My hand cramped up as I turned the key in the ignition, seemingly wanting to prevent me from leaving the house when there was still work I could be doing there. What had happened to all the free time? And how quickly could I make it to Lowe's and Target and back home again to do some of it before picking Jake up from school?

So much for the lesson I had just written about learning.

Peace Gone to Pieces

I flew into Lowe's and headed straight for the aisle Mike had described as the repository of his preferred trimmer. The first I grabbed had an open box; impatiently, I pushed it aside. Another had a big gash in the packaging. Wheezing slightly, I maneuvered an acceptable one around the rejects. The label described the trimmer as lightweight, but plainly something resting inside with it was not.

I wrestled the trimmer off the shelf and tucked the box awkwardly under my arm. Feeling rushed but still time-efficient, I headed past rows of gas grills and cheerful displays of patio vacuums toward the most promising of the three check-out lines.

Patiently, I waited, practicing a little bit of yoga by not staring at the checker with a glare of unwarranted annoyance. Finally, however, when several minutes had passed without anything resembling progress, I stole a look. There was the checker, watched over by an embarrassed customer struggling not to look embarrassed, painstakingly going through a notebook to figure out the scan code for a whole bunch of metal pipes the embarrassed woman was buying.

It got worse. Directly in front of me, I noticed a small child. The sight started the usual dance of guilt and primal need my heart taps out when I am somewhere that other people have children and I don't have Jake.

"Oh, Lord," the woman with him said at one point.

The child asked her why she had said, "Oh, Lord." I listened with interest to see how she handled it.

"Because Grandma always gets in the wrong line when she's in a hurry," Grandma answered. She hadn't really addressed what the Lord had to do with it, but she did instill in me a deep sense of being late for something, even though I wasn't.

Feeling jumpy -- I can't say whether from too much sugar and caffeine or from my habitual panic over being out among children without my child or from some ominous and totally illogical internal warning that if I wasted my afternoon running errands instead of working I would spontaneously combust -- I cut my losses and peeled away for another line.

"I can help you here," offered the man just opening up a lane. See? The Universe was telling me there is plenty of time, as long as you don't waste it watching a flustered checker page through a notebook full of bar codes.

I hit the Target just down the road brimming energy and efficiency. Until I heard a child cry and had one of those momentary spinning panic attacks: My child's crying! Where is my child?! Where am I and why am I here??!!

Once I recovered, I simply had to do a dash through the toddlers clothes to buy Jake a pair of shorts, even though it was about 50 degrees out. I suppose it made me feel closer to him, despite the unmistakable feeling of time suck that happens when you are in a big store with no windows and all sorts of distractions.

But I didn't completely crumble with time-fearing anxiety until I was in the mall.

I know the mall seems an unlikely place to head when you are already feeling prickles of panic in your fingers and toes and really just want to go back home to do some work, even in the absence of a pressing deadline. But it made sense, really. I knew I wanted a summer skirt, and I knew I couldn't shop for one with Jake in tow, and I knew I would never find the time and desire to make a special trip to the mall, so I figured the thing to do as I was driving by it anyhow was to hang a left and just plunge right in.

I did a hurried race-walk to the Gap, and grabbed at skirts indiscriminately. But where were the tank tops? I zigged and zagged past displays and then fell into the timeless zone of the sale racks. What were a few more minutes when there were bargains to be found?

Arms laden, I headed for the dressing rooms. As if being crammed too close to a full-length mirror under the world's most unflattering fluorescent lighting weren't enough to make me hurry, the insistent idea that I was WASTING TIME made me practically sweat with the effort of throwing clothes on and off. "It's fine," I told myself sternly before I could turn for one more profile. "Just go."

Not that I got too far, with Baby Gap next door and a cavewoman-like need to acknowledge that I do have a child, even if I had left him behind to shop. But what's the point of getting a miniature three dollar long-sleeved shirt when your brain is too addled with panic to consider whether Jake will get any mileage out of it? Besides, I realized with a jolt as electric as a cattle prod mistakenly grasped by a bargain-searching hand, I just didn't have the five minutes I would have to spend at the cash register to make the purchase. I flew out of the store in such a rush I feel certain a store detective would have stopped me if I weren't already protected by an oversized Gap shopping bag proving I know how to pay for my merchandise.

Which isn't to say I didn't have five minutes to pay for a few sale items at Banana Republic. But it was right in front of the escalators back to the parking lot, so I barely went out of my way.

I got home with plenty of time to tackle some legal work while my blood pressure slowly returned to normal. Because the truth of the matter is that my time crunch was entirely of my own making. It was, I suppose, the counterpunch to my peaceful morning salvo of centeredness, the disproof of my smug assertion that all you need to do is stop and breathe and you will see how much time there really is.

Which might explain why my shopping bag remains on the bedroom floor full of the purchases I just haven't found the time to put away.

Practicing Peacefulness

So, okay, I'm here to say it's not that easy. Sometimes you're able to practice yoga, and sometimes it just isn't happening. Although the isn't happening is practicing yoga too.

There is, I will go so far as to say, as much value in recognizing when it isn't happening for you, in being conscious of your unreasonable panic over time, for instance, as there is in successfully stopping and breathing. Simply recognizing the things we do that are human helps keep us from being controlled by them. Its a way of saying, "Hey, there, panic. I see you're around again. Just wanted you to know I'm on to you. And little by little I'm gonna run you out of town."

Sorry. I don't know what's up with the cowboy speak.

The point is, I have a tendency to panic about wasting time. I can't say where it comes from, but that doesn't really matter. Nor does it matter that after years of practicing yoga I still have it. Panic is just a part of my constitution, and all the willpower in the world won't change it.

What will change it is practice. "Practice," as the word implies, doesn't mean Identify and Eradicate. It means practice. Try again and again. Feel good when you make progress -- when, for example, I can feel calm and centered and able to write about being still on a Monday morning -- and give yourself a break when, say, you find yourself running along a carpeted mall hallway whimpering that you Must. Get. Out. Of. Here.

Practicing peacefulness is no different from practicing an asana. Push yourself too hard and the best you can hope for is an injury that maybe doesn't keep you from trying that pose again for six months. Put too little effort in and you don't make any progress and end up kind of out of alignment because you're no longer mindful about what you're doing.

But find your edge -- that realm of discomfort but not pain -- and you start to move forward.

So when I compare my peacefulness index today to what it was, say, ten years ago I feel mighty centered indeed. In 1998 I was studying for my comprehensive exams in an American Studies doctoral program, suffering panic attacks so severe I literally couldn't breathe, and crying a lot as I walked my basset hound Roxanne in the evening and looked into the warm, lit windows of my neighbors and their families. Compared to that woman, I'm practically Buddha-esque.

Does this mean that ten years from now I will be completely panic free -- able to sashay through the mall with nary a moment of fear that I will be late to pick Jake up from school? Highly doubtful. Because the point of practice isn't to reach some place where you don't have to practice any longer. Rather, it's to keep stretching yourself -- both figuratively and literally -- going beyond where you ever thought you could to face even bigger challenges that will, in turn, allow you to stretch even further.

Why keep doing it? Because it makes you stronger. And stronger in yoga means more centered, more energetically balanced, and, yes, more peaceful.

Testing Your Patience -- Virabhadrasana III (Warrior III)

I don't know. Maybe it's me. To be honest, I don't know anyone else who considers this perhaps the most frustrating of asanas. But I offer it here because I simply can't understand why it feels like I'm the only one falling over in class when we practice it. At any rate, if you already know how to do a strong Virabhadrasana III you are advanced enough to identify a different pose to remind you that practice often happens in baby steps.

There are many ways to enter this pose. I offer here one that I feel imparts the strongest sense of the energy and intention of the pose. If you know it, choose more challenging ways to work through it as you like.

Virabhadrasana III Instructions

1) Start in Virabhadrasana I (Warrior I): From standing at the front of the mat, place your hands on your hips and step your left foot far back. Drop your left foot to the floor with your toes pointing toward the front and side of your mat. Your left foot will be at about a 45 degree angle.

2) Rooting strongly into the outer edge of your back foot, let your front knee bend. Your legs should be far enough apart to allow you to bend your front knee to a 90 degree angle.

3) Still with your hands on your hips, strengthen the pose. Press strongly through your back leg to push the outer edge of your back foot even more firmly into the floor. Think of rotating your back thigh in toward your midline and back to the back of the room. At the same time, lift the toes of your front foot, spread them, and place them back down.

4) Take a moment to feel the fullness of your front foot on the floor. Do a shoulder loop -- toward the front, up toward your ears, and down your back -- to free your heart and lengthen your spine.

5) Look to a spot on the floor a few feet in front of you and lean forward, leading with your heart. Keep your hands on your hips and point your elbows toward the back of the room to help with your balance.

6) Start shifting your weight into your front foot. Keep your eyes fixed on the point on the floor you have chosen. Let your spine be long. As you are ready, let your back leg float off the floor, leading with the inner thigh.

7) Continue shifting your weight and balancing on your right(front) foot until your body is perpendicular to your standing leg. Keep everything strong and long. Try to keep your hips square; the hip of your back leg is going to want to creep up higher than the hip of the standing leg. Try to bring them even with each other.

8) If you are having trouble with balance, drop your fingertips to the floor and work on lengthening your spine and really strongly reaching toward the back of the room with your back/floating leg. You can raise one hand at a time back to your hips.

9) If you would like to move on, try different arm variations: a) bring your arms out to the sides like an airplane; b) bring your arms straight in front of you, palms facing each other, as if you are flying, in classic Virabhadrasana III; c) if you are feeling particularly comfortable with this pose, bring your arms behind your back and either grab hold of your elbows or place your hands in reverse namaste, or reverse prayer position, strongly opening your shoulders.

10) When you are ready, slowly bend your standing knee and lower your back leg so you find yourself in a high lunge position. Either with your hands at your heart or on the floor for balance, step your back leg up to meet the front. Rest for a moment in uttansana (forward fold).

11) Repeat on the other side.

When you fall, fall with grace. Work on not feeling frustrated. I can attest to the fact that nothing in your life will change depending on your facility with Virabhadrasana III. Sometimes, the flying feeling comes from finding the pose. And sometimes it just comes when you are free of the frustration.

Baby steps. Think of how quickly they got your baby moving.

How I'm Learning to Take More Naps

2008-04-28T07:50:00.000-07:00

I took a nap with Jake yesterday.

It was an overcast day, and a cool breeze with the smell of rain puffed through the open window. Jake and I were wrapped up together in my duvet. I'd had a lovely, strong home yoga practice that morning while Jake had pedaled about the park with his dad on his Radio Flyer tricycle, his knees knocking against the handlebars and impeding his progress. We were horizontal and warm, and I had squishy baby cheeks to kiss. Many people would find a nap a perfectly natural occurrence under these circumstances.

I would not be one of those people.

Why I Can't Nap

The last time I recall taking a nap with Jake was when he was three weeks old and I spent quite literally every minute of every day either feeding him, pumping in a futile attempt to increase my milk supply, or washing sundry pump and supplemental nursing paraphernalia. Beyond exhausted, I finally took the advice of a lactation consultant, stripped Jake to his diaper and myself to my underwear, cuddled him to my chest, and slept for a blessed forty-five minutes. The next day at breastfeeding clinic I regaled a woman who claimed not to have the time to take a nap with the importance of making yourself get a little extra sleep when you have a newborn. My mind goes fuzzy when I try to recall taking my own advice.

There are, I believe, two sets of people when it comes to napping. There are the ones who think naps are what Sunday afternoons were created for. And there are people like me who seize up at the very suggestion that we ignore all the other pressing matters in our lives -- the laundry we could be doing, the Sunday paper that must be read cover-to-cover, the car seat that should be disassembled and cleaned -- and sleep in the middle of the day.

I wasn't always like this. In college I developed the admirable skill of telling myself what time to awaken, dropping my head to the pillow in a complete blackout, and awakening alert and ready to go out drinking at exactly the hour I had designated. I don't know where I lost this impressive ability, but somewhere between my graduation processional and Jake's momentous first trip to the post office it disappeared completely.

I tell myself the time I spend playing with Jake is down time. It isn't. I scrupulously protect my evenings with Mike. But they are spent near catatonically swallowing dinner in front of a scant half hour of mindless television. I tell myself I will steal twenty minutes one afternoon while Jake is at school to curl up on the couch with my book. It hasn't happened yet.

What is it that renders me capable of rousing myself from an oh-so-comfortable drowsiness as I cuddle Jake to sleep every night? The call of things that still need doing. The desire to spend just a little bit of time with my husband, lest our marriage deteriorate like a cheap Target tee-shirt carelessly tossed in the dryer too many times. The thrilling importance of getting Jake's lunch ready for the next day. In other words, complete and utter neurosis.

Why I Was Able to Nap Yesterday -- A Piece of Peace

It was so easy napping yesterday. After a few minutes of confirming Jake's designation of my facial features -- "Mou!" "No!" "Aye!" -- he turned his attention to his thumb, and I grabbed the book on my bedside stand. (Shout out to "God's Middle Finger," by Richard Grant.) My eyelids started feeling kind of heavy, and I started to lose track of what the words on the page meant.

"You're just going to spend the time reading," I yawned to myself. "There's no reason you can't sleep too." So I did.

It wasn't that I was particularly tired yesterday. Or even that cloudy days make me feel like I have warm milk running through my veins. I've been plenty tireder and still rallied enough to take advantage of Jake's afternoon nap time. I can always, after all, write a blog entry. ("I thought you were blogging," Mike exclaimed in surprise when he came upstairs two hours later and found me in bed. I didn't even feel guilty that while I napped he had been planting basil in our garden.)

I think I was able to nap because I've been laying the groundwork for a few months now. For some time, I've been telling myself it's okay to take a break. You know, when I've been telling you the same thing. And somewhere along the way, it seems, I started to take my own advice.

So, in a moment of sanity on my busy and productive Friday I resolved to start taking days off from blogging. I decided the legal project I received that day did not have to take up any of my attention over the weekend. I wrote out the list of things that need doing and then put it aside. And two days later, as I lay next to my boy with the beautiful ragged eyelashes brushing against his cheeks, I was pleased to find myself able to do nothing.

Practicing How to Stop

Like anything in yoga, doing nothing takes practice.

We practice it at the end of every asana practice in savasana -- corpse pose, limp body, quiet mind, soaring heart. Except as soon as my heart starts to open I hear Jake's laugh and lose whatever minor ability I have to quiet my mind.

We practice doing nothing when we sit in meditation. Which I have given up on except when I am practicing my asanas. "Meditation in motion," I tell myself, making one of those excuses you give yourself even though you know it's just an excuse and no one else really cares, so why bother?

Hard as it is for most of us, hostile as the world we live in is to it, a few moments of nothing is exactly what we need to center ourselves. If you're constantly in motion, how are you supposed to remember where you are? And how can you get back to where you need to be?

How beautiful it is to just stop and sit for a few moments. To listen to silence or the sound of the wind in the trees or the high-pitched peep of a bird roosting somewhere beyond my sight line. To breathe deeply through my nose, tasting the fullness of the air, feeling my lungs open to it like my sister's Venus Flytrap used to open wide for the bugs we offered it. All the things I have stirred up in my whirl of dervishing settle down gently, give a little wobble, and then are still, waiting patiently until I have time to get to them. Because, I can finally see when I stand still, there actually is time.

It's no wonder so many of us have forgotten there is time to be still. From soon after birth to right around puberty, our children are constantly moving, and we are forced to move with them. When we are not moving with them, we're moving for them -- doing their laundry, picking them up from school, working so fast we start to sweat so we can get home in time to have dinner with our family. Everything, it seems, depends on our moving as fast as we can.

But, hard as it is to muster the courage to be selfish just a little bit when you have children, at some point you just have to be. When I first had Jake, I let all my natural, non-yogic inclinations take over. Who can take care of herself when she has a newborn to take care of? Who can breathe slowly and consciously when she's so tired she can barely breathe at all? Why slow down when you're using all your energy just to keep going? I could see my yoga practice slipping away into the distance, but I felt powerless to grab hold and pull myself back to it.

And then I found myself -- nine months, a year, sixteen months -- later feeling unsettled, uncentered, distant from myself. And I knew it was time to be selfish again. Much as I love Jake, if I love myself, I have to do it.

We all have to stop and rest some time. And I don't mean the six and a half hours we allot between checking one last time on our sleeping angel and the buzz of the alarm in the morning. I mean true rest, a break from the list of "must do's" flipping before us like an endless bridge of shuffled cards falling into place one after the other after the other. Either we tell our minds to be still occasionally, or our bodies will make us stop through illness and nervous exhaustion.

So why not practice right now? Just a few moments, a few breaths. Just so you're ready for that Sunday afternoon when you decide you'd like to take a nap.

A Buddhist Meditation

I love this meditation yet I rarely practice it because -- you guessed it -- it takes too much time. To be honest, you can probably do it in five minutes, although I'd try to give myself ten, just to fully enjoy it. I find it beautiful because of all it does: gives your mind something to focus on; gently guides you toward complete quiet; and moves your body through different types of energy so you feel refreshed at the end.

One you've tried it a few times, you can also do this meditation only part way. For example, if you're at work and just need to calm down, you can go part way toward total quiet but come back before you get there. If you're stuck in traffic, you can recall just the first step and immediately feel calm without spacing out in the car, which I emphatically do not recommend.

If it doesn't work for you, remember, meditation takes practice every bit as much as, say, headstand. So try it again when you feel like it. And maybe you'll start to feel like it more frequently.

Meditation Instructions

If, anywhere during this meditation exercise, you start to feel uncomfortable or nervous, stop where you are and make your way back through the steps you have taken to the beginning. When you're ready, you'll go further. After all, you don't need me to tell you it's about the journey, not the destination.

1) Either sit in a comfortable cross-legged position or lie comfortably on your back. If you are sitting up, sit on the folded edge of a blanket -- just your sitting bones, not your thighs -- to release your lower back and tilt your pelvis slightly forward.

2) From either position, let your palms face the sky in a gesture of reception. If you are sitting, the backs of your hands will rest on your thighs or knees. If you are lying down, the backs of your hands will rest on the floor about six inches from your body.

3) Close your eyes and take a few deep breaths in through your nose. Feel your body relax more and more deeply with each exhale.

4) As you continue slowly and steadily breathing through your nose, start to think about the earth. Feel, smell, be it -- rich and loamy and full of life. Feel yourself grounding. Let your body become the earth. Take your time.

5) Once you have fully experienced and melted into the earth, start to become the mist that rises from the ground in the early morning. Let that mist become water -- moving without effort, shapeless and yet not shapeless, cool and fresh. Be the water, feel it fill your mind so everything is the water. Take your time.

6) When you have fully become the water, start to feel the water heating and rising as steam. Let the steam become fire. Become the fire -- heat and ethereal form, dancing, ephemeral. Enjoy it for as long as you'd like.

7) When you have become the fire, start to become the pale hint of light at the very edges of the flame. Let it fill your mind, lose your edges as it is edgeless. Take as long as you need to find this space.

8) When you have fully experienced the light at the edge of the flame, let it go out and become complete blackness. Search in your mind for any hints of light and let them extinguish. Feel the silkiness, the inkiness of the blackness. Let it fill your mind; let whatever form is left to your body meld with it. Remain here for as long as you need.

9) When you have fully experienced the blackness, see if you can experience complete nothingness. No color, no form, no movement. Just emptiness.

10) When you are ready, from the nothingness, return to the blackness. Notice the familiarity of it as you return. From the blackness, move toward the light at the edge of the flame. Then, taking your time, to the fire itself. As you move through the fire, become the mist that travels down to the water. Flow with the water as it runs into the earth. Take a moment to be the earth before you start to return to your form.

Take your time returning to the present moment before you open your eyes. Let your body be still as you come back to yourself. When you move, move consciously, aware of the space, quiet, time, energy you have created in your day.

How Losing a Little Bit of What's Central to You Can Be Kind of Centering

2008-04-26T10:00:00.000-07:00

It hit me somewhere around the time I was half-heartedly kicking my right foot up toward a handstand in the middle of the room. Something had radically changed in my life.

Part of it was that I wasn't trying very hard. I had resigned myself to never, ever having the courage to attempt a handstand without a wall very close by. And while many years of thinking I might one day have such courage had not brought me much closer to it, I had at least at one point in my life been willing to challenge myself.

My response to challenging asanas these days is far more subdued than it was before, say, Jake was born. In the pre-Jake era, yoga class was a time of supreme focus, a serious matter even when I was laughing, a place to challenge my mind as much as my body. The days I felt "off" were few enough that I could let them be lessons; on those rare occasions when I had to admit that I really, truly did not have the strength to make it into headstand at the end of class I serenely told myself to honor my limitations.

Now it's the rare yoga class when I don't guiltily give a mental shrug and tell myself that, gee, I have to honor those pesky limitations. Even if what's really limiting me not having the energy to try.

The Challenge of Finding the Energy

What I think was creeping its way into my mind during class yesterday was that I will never again have the yoga practice I once did. As I sheepishly drag my mat over to a wall for nearly every inversion (upside down pose), I feel both ashamed (even though I know I shouldn't be) and resigned to be relegated to the part of the class that is just not, you know, the strongest.

When I returned in earnest to my yoga practice last December, I was able to be cheerful about my position. I had, I eagerly explained to all my new teachers, given birth just a year before and was just finding my practice again. And, sure enough, my body got stronger and more flexible -- and did it pretty darned quickly. Sometimes, I even thought I might one day be as strong and as flexible as I was when I had the time to spend two hours nearly every day in a sweaty yoga practice that squeezed every last ounce of energy out of me.

But now I see that it's the rare class when I feel that good. Most of the time I'm just not focused enough to progress in the way to which I'm accustomed. I don't want to put in the extra oomph it takes to get that back leg really flying in eka pada koundiyanasana. I don't really pay much attention to my breathing. And, biggest of all, I don't bother to chase thoughts of Jake out of my mind. "My heart is opening," I tell myself laconically. "So of course I think of him." Never mind that in failing to quiet my mind and focus on my breathing I'm turning my practice into one big session of aerobics -- after all, I could use some postpartum toning.

The bottom line is that my yoga practice, dear as it is to me, just doesn't hold the same place in my life that it did before I became a mother.

Which, really, is my point, since I don't exactly expect any of you to shed a tear for my diminished ability to perform ridiculous, gravity-defying arm balances. What I do think is worth sharing is the way our energy gets dispersed when we are mothers. How whatever it is that was central to us before we had children necessarily has to take a place in the wings.

The thing is, if yoga has lost its place on my center stage, what does that mean for me? It was once the thing that defined me -- and, in many ways still does. If yoga is what makes me feel most complete, have I sacrificed completeness for motherhood?

Life Is Change

There isn't a one of us who hasn't remarked, on some particularly satisfying day when everything felt right, under control, happy, "I wish things would never change."

Of course, they did.

Change is a constant. The Universe is made up of energy, and energy is movement. Movement begets change. You can't stand still, no matter how much you might think you want to. And, chances are, you really don't or you'd still be wearing that bad perm from the early '90's. ("Nice 'fro," a friend of mine commented a little while back when I proudly showed him the picture of me in a "Women at Columbia Law School" pamphlet I had unearthed.)

Thinking we can make things stand still -- and make them do so right where we want them -- is a manifestation of the belief that we can control the world around us. Only if you could stop the seasons, the lives of your co-workers, and, yes, your own body aging, could you hope to keep things right where they are right at that moment that suits you.

The more we accept the truth that we have no control, that things are constantly changing around us, the more apt we are to tap into the great things that change will bring us. Logically, our minds will tell us to cling to what we have in this moment rather than gamble that if we let it go something even better will come our way. But logic doesn't make it so.

For me and my yoga, this truth is pretty hard to deny. My body, sadly, oh so sadly, is past forty. Thanks to yoga, it's a young past-forty. But it is not, as it once was, a yoga-fortified pre-forty. Much less a yoga fortified pre-forty that had never had its rectus abdominus split apart by a small human being carried in a basketball-sized uterus. Don't even get me started on the permanent changes wrought by a vacuum-assisted delivery.

And it's not only my body that's changed. Quite obviously, my circumstance have, in the biggest way possible. "Your whole life is going to change," people told me ominously when I was pregnant.

Well, duh. That's why I was having a child. Because I wanted a big change.

But what's hard to fathom is that even the parts of life that are central to who you are change after you have a child. There isn't the space for them to be central, but as they shift to the side, so does a piece of yourself. And it seems like you will never be yourself again because you will never have the time and the energy to do what made you feel so good about yourself before you had a kid.

Here's where the lesson of change comes in. Acceptance. I need to accept that, yes, my life has changed, and that means I have changed too. It means accepting that I will never be the person I was when my asana practice was a huge part of my daily life. And it means accepting that without that asana practice -- and with the normal passage of time -- I will indeed enter the dreaded middle-age, when I finally have to admit -- for real this time -- that I'm not the one turning the cute young guys' heads when I walk down the street in a short skirt. If, indeed, I have the courage to leave the house in one.

But this change would have happened even if I had never had Jake. I'm fooling myself if I think he's the only reason I'm no longer the crazy astanga woman with the relaxed take on life and the killer triceps. And if I'm doomed to droopy upper arms anyhow, aren't I lucky to have Jake to distract me from them?

A Pose of Transformation -- Bhujangasana (Cobra Pose)

It's sort of disingenuous of me to suggest that there is one asana that brings about transformation. It's the asana practice that does the trick. Or, more broadly, a yoga practice, that daily attempt to be conscious, to let go, to open our hearts. All of this is part of the process of change.

But bhujangasana feels like blossoming to me. I focus on lengthening my spine and my heart opens. I press my feet into the floor and my shoulders release their tension. One small change in one part of the pose begets positive, beautiful change in another part. And that's a lovely way to embrace how change happens.

Bhujangasana (Cobra Pose) Instructions

1) Lie on your mat on your belly. If you'd like to warm up by coming to the mat through surya namaskar (sun salute), it's a lovely way to warm up your spine. If you are not warm coming into this pose -- as with any pose -- back off and let it come slowly so you don't injure yourself.

2) Place the tops of your feel firmly on the floor with your feet touching. (If having your feet touch makes your lower back feel tight or painful, move them a comfortable distance apart.) Take a moment to feel as if your inner thighs are rotating toward the ceiling. Release your buttocks and note how these three actions create more space for your lower back to lengthen.

3) Place your palms on the floor directly under your shoulders. Spread your fingers and make sure your first fingers are facing toward the front of the mat. Perform a shoulder loop -- toward the front, up toward the ceiling, and down your back -- and then draw your elbows strongly toward your sides. It is important that they stay close to your ribs throughout the pose to provide the best support.

4) Keeping your arms and legs (but not buttocks) strong, draw your navel in toward your spine and up toward your heart. Keep this strong engagement to protect your lower back.

5) When you are ready, inhale and concentrate on lengthening your spine so much that your heart begins to lift and your upper body rises off the floor.

6) As you exhale, let your upper back bend, as if your shoulder blades are supporting your heart. Keep your pelvis and (unless you are exceptionally open and warm) your navel pressed firmly into the floor and your legs strong, with the tops of your feet pressing firmly into the floor as well.

7) On your next inhale, focus on pressing into the space between your first fingers and thumbs and notice how this lifts your heart even more. Your arms will move toward straight, but do not try to straighten them. When you simply straighten your arms, you risk bringing the backbend into your lower back, where you may injure yourself. Instead, use the energy of pressing your hands into the floor to lengthen your heart forward and up.

8) Take a moment to look down at the floor to release your cervical spine (neck). On your next inhale, feel the breath travel from the base of your spine all the way out the crown of your head. As the breath moves through your cervical spine, let your head lift. Your neck should not be compressed.

9) Remain here, breathing deeply, for 5-8 long, slow, deep breaths. Check in with the energy you are generating, and see how it changes the pose -- how pressing into your hands lifts your heart, pressing the tops of your feet into the floor lengthens your spine, drawing your elbows in to your ribs deepens your back bend. Play with these changes.

10) When you are ready, exhale as you slowly lower your chest to the floor. Rest in balansana (child's pose) by drawing your buttocks back to rest on your heels and draping your body over your thighs (your knees will be bent). Rest your forehead on the floor and your arms at your sides.

Next time you feel like you want to keep things from changing, let your shoulder blades tickle your heart as they do in bhujangasana, and see if that doesn't remind you of how good it feels to be open to change.

Respecting Your Body (and, of course, your child's) in a World That Doesn't

2008-04-24T06:56:00.001-07:00

Boy, you think you're a careful, concerned parent doing everything anyone could to ensure that your child will never contract autism or cancer or any of the other scary diseases that seem to lurk everywhere in our toxic world, and along come abundant assurances that you could be doing so very much more. It's enough to make a tired mom collapse in a puddle of tears and resignation.

Trying to Feed My Child

First, on Tuesday the New York Times (my source of all that happens outside my teeny, tiny world of mothering a toddler) reported that bisphenol-A, or BPA, a chemical used in polycarbonate plastic, is increasingly being shown to leach into food and liquids. When ingested by rat pups (the article called them "rat pups," which sounds a little bit too cute for me to handle, even if their torture is helping my child's health) in amounts apparently proportionate to what, say, our children would ingest from drinking their milk out of polycarbonate bottles, BPA caused changes in the mammary and prostate tissues of the pups, suggesting an increased risk of cancer. It also caused some of the female pups to experience accelerated puberty. (The full piece is available on the New York Times website and is called "A Hard Plastic is Raising Hard Questions." I'm not able to put the direct link here.)

Mike heard about the BPA risk in baby bottles a few months ago, and we immediately switched to a brand called Born Free, which is BPA-free. I try not to think about the fact that for over a year of Jake's life he drank out of Aveda bottles, which are supposedly some of the worst BPA-offenders. (Almost all baby bottles, by the way, contain BPA.)

Yesterday's Times article, however, warned that BPA is also present in the epoxy lining of almost all canned foods. The organic canned peas I've been regularly putting in Jake's lunch are apparently some of the most BPA-infused because they are cooked in the can, and the heat releases more of the chemical.

"What am I going to feed him?" I wailed. It's already hard enough negotiating Jake's allergies, likes and dislikes, propensity to grow bored with any food he is served too often no matter how tasty it once was, and belligerent insistence that he feed himself (meaning his food must be thick enough to make it from bowl to mouth in a wobbly spoon or served in pieces big enough for him to pick up and small enough for him to fit in his mouth). I believe deeply in the importance of eating food that isn't overly processed, too salty, or laden with high fructose corn syrup. And I gave up on buying non-organic produce when Mike asked me where the cantaloupe and yummy seedless watermelon I recently bought came from (Guatemala and Mexico, respectively). The pesticides used in these countries, he informed me, are greatly harming the health of both the agricultural workers and local songbirds.

Maybe we should just stop reading the New York Times. But of course as parents our instinct is just the opposite -- to hunt down every bit of scientific information that might bear on our child's health. We are particularly suspicious of chemical compounds that haven't been sufficiently tested. Hence, Jake weathered the last flu season without a flu shot because by the time I was out of excuses for not giving him one the only doses left in town were not thimerosol-free.

Just to drive home the point that feeding him is going to get harder rather than easier, at nine o'clock last night -- soon after I had successfully cobbled together a lunch for school today that fit within the increasingly constrained diet guidelines we have set -- Jake had a bad reaction to the local, all-natural sausage we bought for him at Saturday's farmer's market. I had been counting on that sausage to be a staple of his meals for the next week. But his evil-smelling diaper; sore, red bottom; and angrily splotchy cheeks disabused me of that notion.

It's a good thing we had a bag of organic peas in the freezer. So far, I haven't read anything dangerous about them.

Caring for My Child's Cough

Although I carried a healthy, organic, highly edible, and -- as far as I know -- carcinogen-free lunch to Jake's school today, I got a dose of you're-not-doing-enough from another quarter.

"I sure wish he'd get over his cough," one of Jake's teachers said to me. Just by way of conversation, of course. "He's had it for three months already."

Jake's cough is a bit of a sore point with me and Mike. We have wrangled with various members of the daycare staff over its source, severity, and contagiousness. On all three fronts, our pediatrician has assured us there is nothing to worry about. As far as we can tell, he basically has post-nasal drip. Every time it gets better, he contracts another daycare cold, and it starts again. Short of giving him steroids, there's not much to be done.

I explained the outlines of this diagnosis to Jake's teacher.

"It's down here," she insisted, pointing to her upper chest. "When he goes down for nap, you can hear him trying to clear it."

I promised her I had recently seen Jake's pediatrician three times in the space of a little over a week. The first time had been to secure the doctor's note telling Jake's daycare that the rash on his face was not contagious. (It was, in fact, the result of the new laundry detergent they had begun using to wash the sheets on which Jake slept at nap time.) A few days later, he returned for his fifteen-month physical. The third time, I merely called the doctor to make sure that if his lungs were clear the first two times she listened to them, there was no reason to have her listen to them again.

"Well," said his teacher, shaking her head as if to simultaneously indicate how wrong I was and how sorry she felt for Jake, "it just can't be good for him."

"It just can't be good for him." The phrase haunted me on my walk home, driving my feet faster against the pavement as if stomping out the tears threatening in the corners of my eyes. You'd think by now I'd be impervious to other people's prescriptions for how to care for my own child; you'd think we all would be after over a year of hearing them, as we all do. But coming on the heels of the BPA news and the belief taking root that my sixteen-month-old boy would soon contract prostate cancer, it was all a little too much to bear.

We could, I have concluded, spend our entire lives trying to protect our kids. Some people do. And none of us will ever be completely successful.

Living Healthy but Living in this World

Increasingly over the years I have been practicing yoga, I have come to see how what I eat affects me. Some of the effects are immediately apparent. Caffeine makes me crazy. Too much cow's milk on an empty stomach makes me unbearably sleepy. More than a "Melissa sized" glass of wine tends to make me headachey and dehydrated. And, just in case you don't already think I'm a little bit crazy, I swear that wheat makes me irritable. (Even more irritable than not being able to eat so many foods.)

Other effects of what I eat are more distant but equally important to me. I worry deeply about pesticides and chemically engineered food, especially as I look at the frightening number of people I or my friends have known who have contracted brain cancer before their fortieth birthdays. I can't help but care about the agricultural workers who grow my food, the animals and habitats affected by agriculture and overfishing, and the people all over the world who are starving right now in part because of U.S. politics. And I care, as well, about the animals raised to be eaten, and how inhumanely the vast majority are treated during their short lifetimes.

And so I eat carefully. I am, for example, one of those people who will pay more for the word "organic" on the label even when Consumer Reports tells me it's probably not necessary. If you play the odds, they are probably right, but I rejected statistics a long time ago. Who cares if there's a ninety percent chance eating nonorganic bananas is as safe as eating organic ones? (In case you're wondering, I did not read that statistic in the New York Times. I made it up.) Just because what we know right now suggests the chemicals those bananas have absorbed aren't harmful, there's nothing to say we won't find out differently one day.

More to the point, I don't care. I don't want those chemicals in my body. And I surely don't want them in my son's.

But here's the thing: There are chemicals in my body. I ingest them every day, not only in food, but in the air I breathe, the clothes I wear, the things my body touches. Because I live in the world.

Jake lives in the same world. His sixteen-month-old baby body is no longer clean and pure. It probably never was. After all, I lived out my pregnancy within a few miles of the Port of Long Beach, within the circumference of what one map Mike saw called "the circle of death." Did I cry about this fact more than once? Sure I did. But we didn't move.

Practicing yoga extends far off the mat where we practice asanas. It extends to what we eat, how mindfully we eat it, what other substances we put in our bodies, and how we try to practice ahimsa, or non-harming, toward other living creatures as well.

But, as the Buddha preached, we can't all live the sort of ascetic lives that can lead to enlightenment. Even at the end of the 6th century B.C.E., when the Buddha lived, it wasn't possible. Imagine what he'd have to say about life in the 21st century.

As important to yoga as treating our bodies with respect is treating ourselves respectfully. To me, this means I can only do what I can do. Probably because my natural tendency is to do a whole lot more than I can do and to chastise myself when I can't do it.

Sometimes I have a day like today when it becomes clear to me that I simply can't. I can't make sure Jake never eats something bad for him. Not if I want to enjoy watching him eat food at a restaurant sometimes. Or, one day soon, to go to birthday parties to eat non-organic ice cream and cake frosted with high fructose corn syrup. Not if I want him to live in this world as a happy, free, interested little boy.

There's no sense in feeling guilty over something you can't control. And there is, in a way, even less sense in beating yourself up for giving yourself a break.

Give Yourself a Break by Giving Yourself Something to Break From (Eating Yoga)

Rather than offering an asana today, I invite you to practice yoga in another way -- through what you eat.

I'm not suggesting there is a list of things you shouldn't eat, or that you should do the diet thing of restricting any food that falls in certain categories. Instead, I'm suggesting that you spend a day or two or a while being conscious of what you ingest and of how it makes you feel.

That's it. Be aware of how you feel after eating a bowl of organic greens and whether that feels different from eating a pint of Ben & Jerry's. Okay, you don't have to eat the whole pint, but the amounts you eat fall into the equation as well. How does it feel to eat when you are stressed? Hungry? Bored? Don't put a ton of energy into suddenly "behaving." Just be aware.

Yoga, really, is about awareness. Not about everyone practicing in the same way, but about everyone honoring the fact that our bodies are all different. We all need and want different foods, so there's no formula for what you should or shouldn't eat, or when you should or shouldn't eat it. Just see what rhythm makes your body happy.

If it feels good, stick with it. But don't forget to give yourself a break sometimes. If for no other reason than to appreciate how good your own rhythm feels. And to acknowledge that there are some fun things -- ice cream and pizza and a good mojito or three -- about living in this world too.

Surrendering When You Can't Decide How to Put Your Child to Sleep (or How to Make Some Other Important Parenting Decision)

2008-04-23T06:49:00.000-07:00

The worst part of lying awake in bed at 4:30 this morning listening to Mike's deep sleep breaths was not knowing if I'd done the right thing.

I'll bet we all have that one area of parenting that refuses to yield a clear course of action. No matter what we decide, we find ourselves wondering if we should have decided differently.

For me -- and this is not going to be a surprise to anyone who's read much about my parenting neuroses -- it's whether and how to sleep train. In particular, at 4:30 a.m. today it was whether I had made the right decision at 4:00 a.m. to practice a little Ferberizing.

Four o'clock in the morning is not the optimal time to be making decisions. It is, however, an excellent time to engage me in a battle of wills. If you want to lose. Not that Jake was the loser, of course. He is developing the important skill of being able to sleep alone. Even if he is also developing, the irrational part of me cries, a crushed sense of self.

Why It Was Time for a Sleep Showdown

I really wish Jake hadn't awakened this morning with a diaper full of poo. Because of that poo, his delighted grin and arms reaching for his mother did little to alleviate my fear that I had just perpetrated the grossest of abuses in letting him cry himself to sleep last night.

Bear in mind that the phrase "letting him cry himself to sleep" tells only the barest four minutes of the story. You don't go from the easy clockwork of baby cry, adults out of bed, Daddy to daybed, and Jake to bed with Mommy to stoically letting your little one cry without budging from your warm spot under the duvet.

No, last night began in typical fashion, with me lying on my bed with Jake at bedtime to help him fall asleep. The New York Times recently reported on a study concluding that if you hold your child to help him fall asleep, you are dooming him to a life spent tossing and turning at night. If so, it's already too late for Jake, and hopefully by the time he's a full blown insomniac he'll be too old to want to take it out on me.

Increasingly, bedtime in our home is a forty minute ordeal. I put on the baby sleep CD. It lulls me to drowsiness, with the unfortunate effect of leaving me even more unprepared for the sudden poke in my mouth. "Mou. Mou," Jake announces with a smile as I open my eyes.

"Yes, mouth," I say with a small smile of confirmation. "Now, go to sleep."

Jake is a cooperative guy, eager to get along. He sticks his thumb in his mouth and works at it diligently, his eyes open so wide I can see all the pristine baby white around each blue iris. He clambers on top of me and snuggles. He slides to the side and burrows into a pillow. He climbs back on me. He rolls to the other side and nearly off the bed. The sleep music CD plays on, unheeded.

"Jake, you need to sleep," I say firmly after ten minutes of increasingly enthusiastic tossing and turning. I sit up to drive the point home. This is not play with Mommy time. This is serious please, please let Mommy and Daddy have just a couple quiet hours together while you sleep time.

Jake sits up too, a big baby grin greeting the prospect of perhaps reading another book. I can see him looking around for one in the shadows.

"No, lie down," I say with a defeated sigh. I flop down to let him crawl over me again, telling myself that at any moment his breathing will slow and slur, and his thumb will gently fall from his open mouth.

And as I do so, I think long and hard about that New York Times article.

The Decision Is Made

I did not find it surprising, or even terribly disappointing, when Jake's cry awakened me at some undetermined hour of the night. He's had a cough that requires nighttime ministrations. Which, in our drug-averse household, means a bottle of juice and Mommy's arms.

Tired as I've been the past few days, I didn't even mind forcing myself awake some time later to take him back to his crib, a limp, beautiful being in my arms. Generally, this approach has worked for us. He wakes up perfectly happy in his crib in the morning and, once he's over his cough/cold/teething/pneumonia it doesn't much occur to him to disturb us in the middle of the night any more.

Except during the border nights like this one, when he's pretty much over the ailment that requires our attention and is mostly waking up because he's downright pissed to find himself banished yet again from the comfort of our bed.

Hence, the wail that awakened me at 3:30 last night was one of anger, not distress.

I heaved a sigh against my frustration and went to his room.

"I want you to sleep here," I said as gently as I could.

Jake jumped up and down and wailed to show me he understood but strongly disagreed.

"Fine," I barked. I picked him up and held him, bewildered, away from my body as I carried him across the hall and dropped him on the bed. "Good night," I fumed, and turned my back to him.

This is why I know my child is a genius. He has figured out that when I angrily turn my back on him in the middle of the night the best course of action is to settle for oh-so-gently touching Mommy's back with a lonely need for reassurance and sadly deal with what is no doubt a deflated triumph of the beds. It's hard, I'm sure, but better than crying for Mommy to hold you when it only makes her hiss at you to Go To Sleep Already!

Our real trouble came half an hour later, when I roused myself for the fourth time that night to carry him back to bed. And the thing I always fear happened -- he woke up the minute I lowered him into the crib.

This was when I decided it was time to sleep train. I spoke to him gently and explained why this was a good bed for him. I rubbed his back until he fell asleep. I told myself there were parents all over the world doing exactly the same thing right now, that I was not the only person leaning over a dark crib in my underwear at 4:00 in the morning. And, finally, I settled into my bed for two minutes before he woke up and we repeated the reassurances.

After a few rounds, I started letting him cry for a minute or two before going to him. Which I figured wasn't the worst thing in the world when I was spending at least five minutes each trip murmuring assurances to help him sleep.

Mike was back in our bed telling me I was doing the right thing when I let the cries go for three very, very, very long minutes. I started to head back to his room. Silence. I got back into bed. A wail. Silence. A whimper. Then . . . silence.

And there I lay, wide awake, wondering whether Jake was warm enough and if his throat hurt and whether he was dreaming about being orphaned on a cold mountaintop where mommies don't exist.

Surrender to Not Knowing

Jake's exceeding good cheer this morning was certainly a godsend, as was waking to a sunny room and a still sleeping child at 7:30. But surviving last night is far from the end of the story.

Now I have to decide whether to do it again. And at what point in the night -- when he first awakens, asking for juice? Only if he demands to come back to bed a second time? Should I change our bedtime ritual so he learns to start his night out without the comforting arms of Mommy or Daddy to lull him to sleep? And how do I figure out what's best for him, not just me, when there are new episodes of The Colbert Report to watch if only Mike and I could sit down to dinner before 9:00 for a change?

I like having a course of action. I've learned enough from my yoga practice to be prepared to change it as circumstances require. But I want to know what the plan is at this moment in time. It's like keeping a shopping list so I know I won't wander the aisles of the grocery store making impulse buys like ginger goat cheese and forgetting the oatmeal, leaving the three of us to forage for less satisfying breakfast choices.

Most of the time, having an idea of how I want to approach something lets me let it go. But if I'm not certain -- if, for example, I have no idea what I'm going to do when it comes time to put my boy to bed tonight -- it's pretty difficult to ignore my mind's chatter. Something as out of my hands as whether Jake will sleep through the night tonight is destroying my mindfulness.

This is the point where I need to surrender.

We all have our coping mechanisms, our ways of dealing with the fact that raising a child is hard, uncertain work and that it's not always easy to know what your heart is telling you to do. Of simply navigating the overwhelming demands of bills and 529 plans and remembering to pick up the dog poop before mowing the lawn. Our minds naturally chatter, we develop our own personal unreasonable fears as we grow, but every day we find ways to deal.

Eventually, though, your coping mechanisms reveal themselves to be just that -- a way of coping. You can't change the underlying circumstances -- what it is that gives rise to your fears, that causes your anger or sorrow, and that, yes, makes you lose sleep at night. The more you think "coping" means "changing," the less able to cope you will be. Because you'll keep doing what you do and expecting the change to happen outside of yourself. In the end, you won't change because you won't see the need to, and circumstances won't change because you don't have that power.

Surrender is the act of accepting that we can't change anything but ourselves -- and even changing ourselves happens only with surrender.

Western society places so much value on action that it's often really hard to resist the feeling that we should be doing something to ail what bugs us. Like it's all up to us. And like we can create a world in which we can live bugged free.

Surrender requires nothing more than letting go. It's a whole lot easier to let go when you acknowledge that holding on isn't going to make a difference -- except, possibly, in your sanity. In fact, you'll be the only one who knows you're letting go. Because the circumstances had no idea you were trying to change them. It was all in your head. So get your head out of it.

My work for today, then, is to accept that I can't render Jake's life trauma-free. Because that's really my goal when I obsess about sleep training or any other choices I make as his mother. I want to make the perfect choices because, in my mind, if I do so Jake will have a perfect life.

It's hard for me to say it, but Jake's life will not be perfect. Because life isn't. Either he will feel sad and angry because I am making him stay in his bed at night or he will he will feel sad and angry because I lose my patience when he is making it hard for me to sleep. Sometimes he will have a sore throat or a poopy diaper and I will let him cry because I just didn't know. Some day Jake will learn that his parents' relationship with each other is as important as their relationship with him, and that means that they need to sleep with each other and he needs to sleep alone.

Sad, yes. But, sad, or not, it's the truth. And when we surrender to the truth -- when we don't tell ourselves we can avoid sadness by manipulating the world around us -- we are free to focus on the happy things. Like Jake's smile for me this morning. Or what a good mood he's in when he sleeps through the night. Or how very, very deeply his mother loves him. So deeply that she spends too much time trying to make the right choices, even if there is no such thing.

Letting Go Even When It's Hard: Upavista Konasana (Seated Wide-Legged Forward Fold)

I've chosen a stretching asana that I found really difficult for a long time. It irked me that I could barely sit up straight with my legs in a wide straddle, much less fold forward. My inclination, of course, was to change this situation by folding forward even though it compromised the pose. Progress was not made.

The only way I was finally able to reach the floor in upavista konasana was by first surrendering to the fact that I couldn't. It works this way in every pose, just like in life. Surrender, let go of goals and courses of action, acknowledge what you can change and what you can't, and you may be surprised to find yourself where you wanted to be all along. Or maybe not, but somewhere that's probably just as good.

If there's another asana that fits the bill for you -- the one that makes you cringe every time the teacher utters it -- use it for the main purpose here. To surrender.

Upavista Konasana (Seated Wide-Legged Forward Fold) Instructions

1) Sit on your mat with your legs spread at about a 45 degree angle. Even if you can spread them wider, you will better avoid injury by sticking to 45 degrees. If you can not spread them that wide, accept your body's limitation and spread them as wide as you can without experiencing pain.

2) Place your hands next to your hips and perform a shoulder loop: to the front, up toward your ears, and down your back. Think of your shoulder blades as supporting your heart. Then draw your navel in toward your spine and up toward your heart, helping it lift further.

3) If you find that you must lean back to support this position, or if you are still collapsing in your lower back and belly, sit on the very edge of a folded blanket (just your sitting bones, not your thighs, will rest on the blanket). This will help lengthen your lower back so you don't end up compressing it instead.

4) Point your toes strongly toward the ceiling. You will probably find yourself rotating your inner thighs subtly toward the floor to keep your toes pointing directly up instead of out to the side.

5) Stay here for 5-8 slow, long, deep breaths. You may even challenge yourself by lifting your heels off the floor. The rest of your legs remain on the floor.

6) If you feel able to do so without compromising your long spine or causing yourself pain, place your hands in front of you, about shoulder distance apart. Perform a shoulder loop and let your tailbone lengthen as your heart reaches forward.

7) You may stay here and breathe or slowly, consciously make your way closer to the floor. Each time you move, take a moment to inhale and draw your heart forward before lowering a few more inches with your exhale.

8) Don't try to change the outcome of this pose by losing the flex in your foot, collapsing your heart inward, letting your shoulders creep up toward your ears, or letting your belly pooch out. The only way you will change your shape in this pose is by surrendering to what your shape is in this moment.

Once you find your edge -- in upavista konasana or some other pose of your choosing -- see if you can maintain the position for 8-10 long, slow, deep breaths. Work on surrendering to the pose -- accepting it, letting your body open as it chooses, acknowledging that it is, yes, uncomfortable. Because sometimes being a mother, or just a person, is.

Sometimes It's in Your Nature to Take Your Toddler to Play at the Mall

2008-04-22T06:33:00.000-07:00

A good friend told me yesterday how difficult she finds it to spend a whole day entertaining her twenty-month-old alone. That, she realized, is what those weekly Target outings are about.

"Target?" I thought to myself. "Target? Honey, you haven't sunk to the depths of toddler entertainment desperation until you become a regular at the play area in the food court of the Asheville Mall."

Since I had visited the Asheville Mall food court that very morning, I found her confession most reassuring. Not because I blame myself for my inability to single-handedly entertain a toddler without the aid of TiVo or Entertainment Weekly. But because there's comfort in knowing that I'm not alone.

How I Found Myself Returning to the Mall to Play

Yesterday's food court visit wasn't even a move borne of panic and frustration. Mike had watched Jake all morning while I took a shower in preparation for a day of meetings. What a lovely way to start your day -- with an actual shower while your toddler is awake in the house. As I said when Mike commented on my transformation from my usual frumpy morning appearance, "I don't get out much."

Nor was I facing all that many hours alone with Jake. He would be attending my 11:00 meeting -- the unfortunate coincidence of scheduling the meeting before realizing that Jake's school was closed yesterday in observance of Passover. This meant that I really had to worry about entertaining him for only an hour at home before taking him downtown with me.

Still, he had played out most of the first-floor options in our house by the time I came downstairs with my make-up applied and my hair blow-dried straight. He had: verbally identified and thrown every one of the wide variety of balls strewn about the house (one to two throws per ball maxes out his attention span); tired of dropping blocks down the chute of his plastic parking garage; paged through Goodnight Gorilla so many times even he was sick of it; and even come close to wearing out his fascination with the dogs next door, regularly studied through the yogurt-smeared panes of our dining room windows.

Having endured another night interrupted by his persistent cough, I simply did not feel up to the task of figuring out new and creative pursuits for the two of us.

Indeed, my options were limited if I wished to retain some semblance of neatness in my black skirt and tights. It was too chilly out to let him play in the yard while I read the first section of the New York Times, which I had sacrificed to my shower. The adventures to be found in my office getting into boxes of paper clips and an old ink pad from China (I shudder to think of the toxic possibilities) usually don't last him ten minutes, much less an hour. There was no choice.

I felt, I must report, not an ounce of guilt as I loaded him into the car for a trip to the mall.

We arrived a little after 10:00 to a parking lot empty except for a few clusters of cars huddled together by the escalators as if gossiping about their owners. I wondered what my CRV would say about me. Luckily, I had vacuumed several boxes worth of cracker crumbs off its floor on Saturday.

Jake and I descended directly into the food court, quiet and clean and ordered before the lunchtime onslaught. And, I noted as I discovered the full length windows at one end, surprisingly sunny.

The play area was deserted, save for the cubbyholes containing the weekend's left-behind sweaters, and ringed by a few tables of subdued folks meeting for breakfast. Even the television screens serving up E! News-like tidbits and infomercials had the volume turned down low.

To be honest, it was downright pleasant playing here with my child, surrounded by the breakfast grease smells of Chik-Fil-A and Panda Express. I applauded him as he slid face-first down the little slide, helped him scale the slippery bridge over the beaver dam, and thrilled at his uncharacteristic dare-devilishness when he climbed through the windows of the play fort.

And then I did something that still sort of amazes me, even though it was really fun. I took my son on a walk through the mall. I have tended, in the past five years or so, to find strolling through any mall more or less excruciating. So you can see why I am still sort of stunned at my decision. And at how much I enjoyed myself.

Like the other mall walkers, Jake climbed up the steps and ran down the ramps. He socialized with the senior citizens cooling down from their circuits. He even did a little window shopping. He was particularly entranced by the chalk-white, headless mannequins lounging near the front of the Banana Republic store.

"Wow," I thought, now one of those moms who takes her toddler to play -- not in the park, not in a sunny yard, not even at a kids museum -- at the mall. "I wish I had thought of this a long time ago."

We drove downtown to the 11:00 appointment listening to a podcast of Meg Wolitzer talking about her new novel about a group of women who give up their careers to be full-time mothers. I felt neither desperate to identify nor alienated from such women who can do what I plainly can not. Somewhere over the past sixteen months, I realized, I have given up feeling like I shouldn't need to bring my child to the mall, if that's what it takes to keep us both entertained.

Still, it was awfully nice hearing that evening from my friend who was thinking pretty much the same thing. Because we can all use a little reassurance.

Being True to Your Nature

My yoga teacher said something really lovely at the end of class today. She reminded us that it is the nature of our minds to think. Hence, in yoga, when we talk about "quieting" the mind, we don't expect ourselves to stop the thoughts flying about; we can't, because it's what our minds do. What we seek is simply the distance to observe the chatter so that we can separate from it and feel calm and centered.

This lesson explained why I have finally been able to surrender to taking Jake to the mall. I have accepted that it is just not in my nature to spend full days playing alone with my child. I'm even past wishing I could. Because, the part of me that can separate myself from my expectations of myself sees, it doesn't make me love him any less. It doesn't even make me any less of a mother.

We all know someone who is really great at playing with her kids. It's not necessarily that she's more creative than we are, or smarter, or even more playful. The thing that makes her so good at it is she loves it.

Bad movies about girls who want to be ballerinas aside, when we really love something, we tend to be good at it. If you're anything like me -- and I suspect most people are -- there's always room to doubt your abilities. But if you let yourself be absorbed in the enjoyment, it just doesn't matter. Time passes without your noticing, your mood improves, you feel happy to be alive.

This is not how I would describe myself when I was staying home full-time with Jake.

Who says the women who stay home are better mothers? Mostly, those of us who don't. When the truth is, they're just different mothers. We're all at our best -- as mothers and as people -- when we do what is true to our nature.

So next time you feel a rush of excitement as you head off to your office on Monday morning, don't get dragged down by guilt. Consider yourself an even better mother for doing what you love and bringing your balance and good cheer home to your child at the end of the day.

Play a Little: Parshvakakasana (sideways crow)

I'd better come clean here: I find arm balances fun. I love the floating and the falling, the craziness of rearranging my legs in the air while my hands hold me up and my face hovers inches from the floor. I guess it's just in my nature.

Of course, it was a very different story when I hadn't figured out how to do them. Bakasana, crow pose -- the foundation of all arm balances -- was mostly just a cause for frustration and fear. But then my practice changed -- my openness, my strength, my sense of balance -- and I got it. And I played.

So I offer parshvakakasana here for the sense of play it brings, as well as for the reminder that we all change, and that doors we didn't even notice open to us because of it. Many people find sideways crow more manageable than traditional crow, and even if you don't find yourself flying, you do get a nice twist and some arm strengthening. Both of which might come in handy next time you're home alone -- or at the mall -- playing with your child.

Parshvakakasana (sideways crow) instructions

1) Squat on your mat with your knees together and your hands on the floor in front of you for support. If you have never tried this pose before, you might want to place a folded blanket in front of you to calm any fears you might find of falling forward. Your heels should be off the floor as you rest on the balls of your feet.

2) Spend some time with your hand position, for this is the foundation of the pose and the key to all arm balances. Consciously place your hands in front of you on the mat. Make sure your hands are shoulder distance apart. Spread your fingers strongly. Your first fingers should point toward the front of the mat. Press into the space between your first fingers and thumbs. Then, keeping the strength in your hands, perform a shoulder loop: forward, up toward your ears, and really strongly down your back. As you do so, draw your elbows in toward your sides.

3) Keeping your hands and elbows strongly in place, turn your knees to the left, so the right side of your body is perpendicular to your arms.

4) When you are ready, lift your hips up so they are slightly higher than your arms. Your feet are still on the floor, with your knees slightly bent. If you are drawing your neck in like a turtle, consciously lengthen it. Think of your head as the top of a triangle, with your hands the base points. It may help to perform another strong shoulder loop here.

5) Draw your navel so strongly in toward your spine and up toward your heart that you feel your hips begin to lift of their own accord. Think of sending the energy into your kidney area -- the middle of your lower back -- as you shuffle your right knee onto your left tricep and rest your right hip on your right tricep.

(Advanced students will work toward performing the pose without resting the right hip on the right tricep.)

6) Feeling the sense of play, slowly let one or both feet lift off the floor. Although it seems counterintuitive, the best way to find your balance is to let your head and heart reach strongly in front of you as you keep your elbows in and your shoulders down your back.

Laugh whether you fall or fly, and repeat on the other side. If your kids are old enough, invite them to try parshvakakasana with you. Or maybe just to say it.

And when you're done, bow -- either physically or mentally -- to your true nature, whether it is to fly in ridiculous yoga poses or to stay a little closer to the ground.

Taking Some Time on Sunday Morning to Honor My Heart

2008-04-20T06:51:00.000-07:00

I woke up in a cranky mood this morning.

"Great," Mike said when I informed him of this fact, and I don't blame him, even though I sort of did at the time. One of the hardest things about being cranky for me is knowing that I am taking it out on him. (I was going to say "taking it out on others," but the truth of the matter is I can pretty much hide it from anyone else. Mike, I don't try so hard. That's part of the satisfaction of being cranky, isn't it? Making the person who chose to spend his life with you maybe regret it a little bit?)

The way I chose to display my crankiness this morning was with a simple act of selfishness. I didn't take Jake downstairs when he woke up and began yelling. Mike did as much for me yesterday for a blessed hour of extra sleep. But I just couldn't muster any enthusiasm for getting out of bed and fixing the yogurt and organic imitation Cheerios that Jake loves to eat for breakfast.

Instead, pretending the wall between our bedroom and the office where Mike was trying to sleep had any significant noise-muffling properties, I looked for things Jake could play with on the bed while Mommy's eyes were closed. The battery operated noise machine probably wasn't the wisest choice, but I was trying to distract him from even more dangerous objects stored in the drawer we plainly need to baby-proof but haven't yet.

Jake proved that even a battery operated noise machine can be pretty dangerous by dropping it on his toe.

At this point, I really did want to take Jake somewhere his Daddy wouldn't hear his wails, if for no other reason than to avoid recriminations. But he needed to be held for a very long time before I could finally take him to the bathroom and run cold water over his toe. Even then, he didn't appreciate it much.

We were all ready for breakfast by now. Because, really, there isn't a parent alive would could sleep through all that commotion. This is when I reported my crankiness to Mike and he made the appropriate response.

So I sent the two of them off to Lowe's and unrolled my yoga mat. And just to lighten the mood, I decided to play random songs off my computer while I was practicing. I guess it was my way of acknowledging that I wasn't in much of a mood to focus and be spiritual. I just needed to smile a little bit.

And I did. My spine creaked, my quads burned, my nose remained too stuffy for the breathing that is really what an asana practice is about. But I enjoyed myself.

And then "Hey Jealousy" started playing. You remember. 1993. Goo Goo Dolls. Surely I wasn't the only one listening.

These were my days of practicing law and running 10 miles on a Sunday morning trying to outdistance a panic attack. Of living alone and feeling even lonelier. And of bellowing the words to "Hey Jealousy" with a mix of regret and soaring hope: "If I hadn't blown the whole thing years ago, I might be here with you."

The "you" of my bellowing was the guy I dated through most of law school. Until some kernel of fear lodged its way into my throat during my third year, and I just knew I was in the wrong place. Marry him, I understood, and I would be content and bored, and something trying to stretch inside me would be forever stuck, lost, muffled under a thick layer of security.

A year after the end of the relationship, listening to "Hey Jealousy," I hadn't found my way to what it was that kept me from marrying my law school boyfriend. But I've found my way now, and the song filled me with joy even as writing about those days is making me cry a little bit right now.

Honoring Your Heart

It overwhelms me sometimes, how much my heart has done for me. It led me to leave a person I loved because I didn't love myself when I was with him. It gave me the courage to leave a safe profession, a series of safe homes, a safe and easy place in the world. It led me to the person I chose to spend my life with, who makes me stronger and better. And, of course, it brought me the living piece of my heart who is my son.

I need to say here that those of us who don't have children are being rewarded by our hearts in other ways. I went through so much sorrow to have Jake -- miscarriages and indifferent doctors, pity from people who didn't understand and dismissal from others who didn't care. I don't think I was any less deserving of motherhood than anyone else. Or any more. I was just lucky.

Before I had Jake, my heart rewarded me for following it by leading me to Mike (in a yoga class, no less). Before I found Mike, my heart rewarded me by finding my first child, a velvet-eared basset hound named Roxanne. And it brought me other gifts: acting in community theater, writing, and, yes, yoga.

In whatever form, your heart will bring you great love, if you let it. It might not come in the form you would have chosen for yourself, the life you thought you wanted to live. But if you honor your heart with trust, love will come.

Acknowledging Your Peace and Beauty

Our hearts are, of course, ourselves. Maybe that's why it's sometimes so hard for us to listen to them. It seems like the height of egoism to honor ourselves. When, in fact, honoring your heart is just the opposite. Because your ego, don't you know, resides firmly in your head. Your heart, by contrast, doesn't have self-promotion on its agenda.

Consider this yogic belief: The same energy that flows through the Universe flows through each and every person's heart.

It's not as crazy as it sounds. When you breathe, you breathe in energy from outside your body; this breath keeps you alive, awake, alert. The breath physically passes through your heart -- as oxygen carried in the blood. If you can breathe in the dirt of our modern world -- car exhaust and the oily smell of the gas station by your house and off-gassing chemicals from your neighbor's newly painted fence -- why wouldn't you be able to breathe in more desirable elements as well?

If the energy from around us passes through our hearts with every breath, then when we honor our hearts we are honoring everything in the world around us. We are giving up our egos and their need to control, and we are trusting to something larger, in whatever way you define it.

How beautiful, to have your soul bound up with something bigger than you. Your heart is you -- all the love you personally have to give. But it also contains the peace and beauty of the world. When you honor your heart, then, you honor your ability to become a part of that peace and beauty.

And if your child is a piece of your heart, you are also honoring his peace and beauty, which are surely undeniable. Next time you're feeling down on yourself, consider what you have brought to the world in this one small being.

I would describe myself this morning as neither peaceful nor beautiful. But hearing a song from a lost time in my life sparked a deep surge of gratitude. And feeling gratitude to myself -- that's a thing of the rarest peace and beauty. That's what yoga is about.

An Asana of Gratitude

1) Sit on the floor in a comfortable cross-legged position (or in half-lotus or lotus (padmasana) if one of these is truly comfortable for you). Unless you can sit comfortably in full padmasana, it is recommended that you sit on the edge of a blanket (just your sitting bones will rest on the blanket, not your thighs). This helps tilt your pelvis forward to lengthen your spine and create more space for breathing.

2) Close your eyes and place your hands on your knees, palms up. Perform a shoulder loop -- forward, up toward your ears, and down your back so your heart lifts. Breathe, through your nose, into this space. Feel open to the energy around you, symbolizing this act with your open palms.

3) When you feel ready, inhale deeply and, as you do so, circle your arms overhead, as if you are gathering all the beautiful energy around you. Let your palms meet at the top.

4) Exhale slowly as you draw your hands, palms still pressed firmly together, to your heart.

5) Use the pressure of your hands pressing into your heart to lift your elbows and bring your shoulder blades together. Draw your navel in toward your spine and up toward your heart and allow your heart to lift. On its upward journey, it passes your shoulder blades on their downward one.

6) Sit peacefully for several long, slow, deep breaths through your nose, letting your sternum lift into your hands.

7) Maintaining this length in your spine and strength in your torso, bow your head toward your hands. Remain here, breathing slowly and deeply through your nose, consciously, wordlessly, feeling gratitude to your heart.

8) When you find this gratitude and experience it, carefully lean forward slightly to place your hands on the floor in front of you, shoulder distance apart. Spread your fingers, with first fingers facing the front of your mat, and press down into the space between your first finger and thumb.

9) Perform a shoulder loop to lengthen you spine and let your heart leap forward. Exhale any tightness in your hips. You may stay here if this is your edge.

10) If you feel comfortable, exhale a little more deeply into your forward fold, perhaps resting your forearms on the floor. Perform a shoulder loop to free your heart and bow your head. Breathe deeply in and out and decide if this is your edge.

11) If your hips are very open, you may exhale your way to the floor. Do not compromise the integrity of the pose to do so -- make sure your shoulders remain down your back so your spine is long, your navel is tucked toward your spine, and your heart is free.

12) If you are not on the floor, place a bolster or several blankets under you so your body has something to rest into. Bow your head until your forehead touches either the blankets or the floor. Be in a position of deep gratitude as you breathe slowly and deeply.

13) When you are ready, slowly make your way up to seated and switch the cross of your legs. Repeat steps 8-12.

This sequence is a lovely way to start a more active asana practice or simply to start your day. It's just about taking a moment to acknowledge your own peace and beauty. And that, I feel certain, is worth a few minutes of your day.

What Not Being a Real Buddhist Has Taught Me About Motherhood

2008-04-19T10:58:00.000-07:00

Last night as I was washing the day's sippy cups I listened to a podcast of Fresh Air featuring Pico Iyer, who has known the Dalai Lama for 33 years and recently wrote a book about him.

The only one awake in the still house on a soft spring night, fresh from dinner out at Marco's, a family friendly pizza place where Jake joyfully played peek-a-boo with the two-year-old at the table across from us, I felt peaceful listening to stories of this man I so admire. But at the same time I felt a small rasp of unease, like an emery board being softly drawn across my Buddhist convictions.

I was, I think, confronting the fact that nearly everything I know about Buddhism comes from places like Fresh Air interviews -- easily packaged bits of information for Type-A westerners like myself who clothe their humanism in a shallow understanding of some basic, and attractive, Buddhist precepts: show compassion for all living things; god exists in all of us; suffering can be alleviated by giving in to our hearts.

Okay, sure, good points all, but how much of my life do I really devote to these ideas I find so important? And do I live by them when it's not easy, like when I find a sluggish wasp in my child's bedroom and think it's pretty big of me to apologize before I crush it with a rolled up issue of the New Yorker?

And then Pico Iyer said something that gave me permission to be the Buddhist dilettante I am without apology. The Dalai Lama, he said, doesn't want westerners to convert to Buddhism. He feels there is too much of a cultural divide for people like us to live fully by it.

Wow, I thought. I'm doing exactly what the Dalai Lama would do. If the Dalai Lama were a fairly dedicated but easily distracted yogini with a beautiful little boy she loves so much it sometimes makes her cry, a decidedly un-yoga-like meat-eating husband, and a deep aversion to wearing flowing clothes made of hemp.

I saw myself as the Dalai Lama might -- with generosity and kindness and acceptance. I saw a woman with a joyful love for her family, a true well of compassion for others, but --sorry -- a strong need to live in the world of comfort and possessions and attachment to things that a good Buddhist would renounce as unnecessary. For example, my perfectly fitted $120 Lucky jeans aren't strictly necessary. But they do make me feel really, really good.

Here, I realized, was a lesson about motherhood. About why I have owned at least four baby books and followed the advice in none of them (going so far as to toss What to Expect During the First Year in the trash when it made me doubt my conviction that Jake did not need sleep training at the tender age of four months). About why trying to emulate shining examples of the sort of mother I think I should be always ends up making me feel crappy about myself. About why, no matter what anyone else tells me, I always have to find my own way to doing what I think is right for my child.

There is a vast cultural divide, it turns out, between the mothers we are and all of the advice, information, exhortations thrown at us by people who aren't us and don't know our children as well as we do.

We mothers are all, in a way, Buddhist Lite. We take what speaks to our hearts, hold it close, teach it to our children, and we quietly, sometimes somewhat guiltily, but very wisely let the rest fall away.

Finding Your Own Path

Just as growing up in a western culture makes it nearly impossible for one to fully understand and embrace Buddhism, so each and every one of our individual children makes it impossible for us to fully understand and embrace any one school of child rearing.

Nearly every time I stroll the aisles of Target, I see a tiny infant, head lolling to the side, blinking against the fluorescent lights, and I think, "I would never take a baby so young to Target." No, actually, I didn't take Jake to a Target until he was about four months old because my mother instinct told me that he needed a lot of peace and quiet in his early months. There's nothing to say I won't be carting some future infant through the toy department to buy a ball for his big brother Jake, if he seems like the kind of baby who would be okay with it.

Or there are those millions of things our mothers say they did when we were babies that we swear we will never, ever do ourselves. (Formula feed, use disposable diapers, leave the baby on the floor for the dog to lick.) And then we end up doing ninety percent of them, or forty percent, or some other proportion, because it turns out that's just what our child needs.

So, much as I admire, say, the concept of attachment parenting -- of wearing your baby everywhere and never using a stroller and starting early toilet training as a way of deeply bonding to your baby's rhythms -- I just can't do it. It didn't seem to be what worked for Jake -- and, just as importantly, it wasn't what worked for me.

The Dalai Lama, I hear, thinks that's perfectly okay. And so do I.

Being True to Your Path

Here's the other thing I heard in the Dalai Lama's ideas, and it's something I've actually been saying for a long time: I'm not ready for enlightenment. I get the concept, I think it would be lovely to finally get it after (if you believe this) all these lives on earth. But, much as I'm not anxious to do this whole life thing over again, I'm just not ready to do what it takes to avoid it. I know this because I know that I am as unprepared to give up my Lucky jeans as I am to give up my beautiful family to live in silence in a Buddhist monastery. It's just not my path in this life.

You'd think following one's path would be pretty simple, since it is, to my mind, what life is about. If you're not following your path, what are you doing?

Following the paths others have laid out for you, it seems. Doing what you think you're supposed to do (go to law school, have a safe and secure life) rather than what you feel you should be doing (quit your job, sell your house, spend years writing without getting paid for it). Reading fifteen baby books when preparing for your first child because someone has to tell you how to do it. Having the right job, home, car, living room furniture.

No doubt about it, it's easier to follow a path someone else has laid out for you. The people writing the baby books are experts, after all. Your mother has a lot more experience with motherhood than you do. So do your friends whose kids are older, or so they constantly seem to be telling you. "Just wait!" they tell you with a gleam in their eye every time you venture that the stage your child is in isn't nearly as bad as you'd been led to believe it would be. All of these people have information, and information is something you can grasp. It is knowable, certain, a guide to spelunking through the underground caves of motherhood.

Following your heart, on the other hand -- now that's just plain scary. You have no idea where your heart will lead you because no one else has been there before. You can't ask anyone else for assistance because they don't know what's in your heart. You can't plan ahead if the path is always this moment unfolding before you.

Then again, most of us are lucky if we know what school our child is going to next fall. We sure don't know what sport they'll be playing (if any), what dreams they'll have, what truly ugly pair of athletic shoes they will die if you don't buy for them. But we love them so much we don't care that we don't know. We love them so much we trust that wherever they lead us we will willingly follow. And it will be all right.

In this way, motherhood is itself a type of faith. So, it occurs to me, while the Dalai Lama can use his faith to teach me something about motherhood, my experience of motherhood could probably teach him something about faith.

And that, at least according to Pico Iyer, is a lesson the Dalai Lama, with all his compassion and love and wisdom, would embrace with pleasure.

Janu Sirsansana (Head to Knee Pose)

Truthfully, I should probably offer a meditation exercise here, since the best way to hear your heart is to quiet your mind, and that's what meditation is all about. But few of us are prepared to sit and meditate without a whole lot of practice. And, frankly, even after years of practicing yoga, meditation is hardly my strong suit. I told you I'm just not that close to enlightenment.

Janu sirsansana, often misleadingly called head-t0-knee pose, offers both the chance to meditate and the assistance we need to get a tiny bit closer to being able to do so effectively. In it, we work on opening both our hips -- home to stuck emotions -- and our hamstrings -- sites of rigidity as well as a constant reminder that we spend a good portion of our lives sitting in chairs doing things very, very far from our basic nature as human beings.

As in any yoga pose, find a balance between focusing on your body opening and the space that opening creates for your heart to start speaking to you.

Janu Sirsana Instructions

1) Sit on your mat with your legs stretched out in front of you. If it is difficult for you to do this with a straight spine (you seem to sink down and curve your back), sit on the very edge of a folded blanket. (Your sitting bones, not the backs of your thighs, will rest on the blanket.)

2) Place your hands by your hips for support and perform a shoulder loop -- forward, up toward your ears, and down your back. Let your heart lift. Bend your knees slightly if you need to to allow your spine to lengthen. Flex your feet, let your inner thighs rotate subtly toward the floor, and let your strong legs support your pose more than your hands.

3) Bend your right knee out to the side and place the sole of your right foot against the inside of your left thigh. The tighter your hips are the closer you should place your right foot to your left knee.

4) If your right knee is more than a few inches from the ground, place a rolled up blanket under it for support.

5) Place your hands by your hips again and perform another shoulder loop. Draw your navel in toward your spine and up toward your heart to maintain the length in your spine. Continue flexing your left foot and drawing your left inner thigh subtly toward the floor. Think about rotating your right thigh toward the ceiling and out to the right.

6) Inhale, lifting your heart even more. As you exhale, lead with your heart as you fold forward and reach with your right hand for the outside of your left leg.

7) Pause here, then inhale and lengthen your spine again, trying to draw your navel even with your left (straight) leg and squaring your shoulders toward the front of your mat.

8) Exhale and let your heart reach toward your left foot.

9) When you find your edge -- the place where you experience some tightness but not pain, stay where you are. Place your left hand on the outside of your left leg (or foot if you have very flexible hamstrings) and move your right hand to the inside of your left leg (or foot).

10) Remain here as you breathe slowly and deeply. Spend 5-8 long, slow, deep breaths focusing on the areas where you feel tight. Let each inhale send the breath to these tight spots; let each exhale release them.

11) For the next 5-8 long, slow, deep breaths, see if you can quiet your mind. Observe how each inhale draws energy from the sole of your left foot to your sitting bones. Watch as each exhale moves energy from your sitting bones out the crown of your head. Let any other thoughts drift away, as if you were ignoring a television on in the room where you are engaged in something much more interesting.

12) When you are ready, gently release the pose. Support your right knee with your hands as you draw it out of its hip opening position. Then repeat on the other side.

Most importantly, accept that this is your pose. If something I suggest doesn't work for you, trust that it is not what your body needs. If you discover something else in this pose, follow it. Make this a pose, above all, of trust.

Then, as always, carry that trust into the rest of your life. You are somewhere on your path. The challenge is to follow where it leads you.

Why I Can't Take a Compliment (Even of My Kid)

2008-04-18T06:41:00.001-07:00

When I picked Jake up from school yesterday, one of his caregivers told me he'd been "doing much better lately."

Since I thought he'd been doing just fine for some time now, I found this cheery message about as welcome as one of Jake's epic morning poops.

"Better?" I asked, carefully modulating my voice to sound like someone merely expressing mild interest in a discussion of, say, the melting polar icecap. Involved, yes, impacted by the news, okay, but not in any way that directly affected me.

"Yeah," she answered, warming to the subject. "He's playing with his friends a lot more. And he's not having tantrums like he used to."

This was all new to me. I tried to recalibrate my picture of Jake at school from the, of course, sweetest kid in the group -- uncomplaining, friendly, laughing -- to this strange child being described to me. Could I have given birth to a tantrum-throwing, belligerent, antisocial being? I just couldn't make the switch.

"He's doing really well," the caregiver concluded with a friendly smile.

This repeated phrase was of little comfort to me. Maybe, I thought weakly, she has Jake confused with someone else.

I tried to let it go, but I was mildly devastated. My child throwing tantrums? Sure, he throws them regularly at home these days, but the good kind that signal developmental progress. Not the kind the other kids throw at school, which are merely symptoms of future delinquency.

And antisocial? The whole reason we sent Jake to school was because of his intense interest in other kids. I had witnessed him and his girlfriend clucking quietly to each other. I'd warmed at the sight of him turning to his friends with a huge smile as they looked out the window at a squirrel attacking a bird feeder.

Was the caregiver suggesting that the minute I disappeared he hid between the sink and the changing table rejecting offerings of friendships from his classmates? Or, worse, had he become one of those kids who pushes other kids and steals their toys, even though he doesn't have a big brother to blame for this sorry behavior?

I felt a little bit ashamed as I repeated the story to Mike that night. Because I knew -- and I acknowledged as much -- that I was missing the point. The caregiver was trying to give Jake a compliment of the sort designed to placate nervous mothers like me. But all I heard was its underbelly.

And this troubled me greatly. It's one thing if I can't take a compliment myself. It's something else when I can't even take one intended for my son.

Our Hearts Open in Both Directions

Most of the time, when I think about opening my heart to others, I concentrate on giving. I give kindness, encouragement, love. And, yes, compliments. I can give a compliment; I just can't take one.

But opening your heart also means allowing other people in. And this, I fear is far more difficult for many of us.

I think about my reaction the other day when my mother-in-law said, "You're doing a wonderful job, both as a mother and as a wife."

What were the first words that came to my mind? Something along the lines of, "Oh, I'm okay" or "I do my best" or "Well, my child and my husband make it easy." Subtly self-deprecating assertions designed to soften the tribute. It was as if I was allowing this volley of praise to make it only as far as the lobby of my heart. If it was allowed past the security guard and onto the elevator to the executive suite, it might take my soul hostage and force it to actually believe that others really mean the kind things they say about me.

Instead of saying any of these things, however, I said only, "Thank you."

Because, don't you know, I've trained myself to greet a compliment with a simple "thank you." I am painfully aware that it is merely a defensive salvo necessary to ward off the self-defeat I really want to put into play.

This is, I feel pretty certain, a widespread reaction many women have to a compliment. "Oh, not really," we say when a friend tells us we look good. "I've still got a few more pounds to go," we murmur if someone ventures that we've lost weight. "It could be better," we say tightly when a supervisor compliments us on a job well done.

We are -- or at least I am, as are a lot of other people I know -- really good at opening our hearts out, giving, nurturing, caring for others. But the doors seem to open in one direction only. And we inadvertently end up locking out those very people to whom we give.

Why Do Our Hearts Open in One Direction Only?

Why is it so difficult to take a compliment? To ask for help? To let our partner put the baby to sleep in the middle of the night?

I know that when I send Mike to sleep on the daybed while I sit up with the sick baby all night I think I'm doing it to be kind. "I can manage," I tell myself. "Might as well let Mike get some rest."

But, really, I'm afraid to let him do me the favor. Because when I'm really, really tired, or kind of sick, or recovering from surgery, I sleep on the daybed just fine. And now, as I trot out that list, I realize I have slept on the daybed exactly once for each of those occurrences. Three times out of all the nights Jake has needed some company in the middle of the night.

It's like we think that opening our hearts means taking care of our loved ones, and if we let them take care of us we're somehow falling down on the job. But, of course, we're not. There's not a finite amount of giving to be done in a relationship; we don't become less loving because someone else is doing some of the loving too.

Maybe, it occurs to me, it's a matter of what we think we deserve. If you think you have to work to be loved, then the only way to earn your family's love is to do things for them. To have them do things for you -- well, that's no way to get them to love you. What have you done to deserve it? Besides the laundry, the grocery shopping, and the emptying of the diaper pail.

Love, we all know in some logical, underperforming part of our brains, doesn't work that way. It's not something we have to earn, from our partners, our children, or even our friends. It's something that comes back to us when we open our hearts and give love. We just have to keep our hearts open enough to receive it.

When your heart opens in both directions, it is an acknowledgment that you deserve unconditional love. It is a recognition of your own beauty, as well as your vulnerability. Let someone in, and they will see exactly who you are. But if you believe in your own beauty, that shouldn't be so scary.

So that, in the end, must be what taking a compliment is really about. It's about truly, deeply believing in your own beauty. It's about waking up from savasana at the end of a yoga practice with a clear eye to your own inner peace and not leaving it on your yoga mat. It's about not being ashamed or afraid or reluctant to let your unique, beautiful self shine.

Isn't this the sort of lesson we want to teach our children?

Yoga Heart Openers: The Smile, the Heart Breathing, the Cow

I was thinking I was about to offer the easiest yoga pose I'll probably ever suggest in YogaMamaMe. But I just realized it's not all that easy to smile.

It should be. But hold a camera in front of my face, and my cheeks start to hurt with the insincerity of this teeth-baring expression I'm wearing. Plop me at a bus stop on a cold, rainy day as I'm late for work, and it's likely I've forgotten the corners of my mouth have the ability to turn up. And just try smiling at someone you're feeling angry with. I'll bet it turns into a frightening display of clenched teeth, not unlike the grin of a crocodile just before it strikes.

So here's your practice. Smile at someone. Anyone. Okay, maybe not your child because that smile will come naturally. But when it does, observe how it feels so you can remember what a real smile is.

Then put your heart into it and smile at someone else. Your spouse. A friend. Or, if you're feeling bold, a complete stranger. Put your heart into it, open up, and don't look away. Be
prepared to receive whatever you get back. It'll probably be a smile, and if it is, work on taking it in. Believe it. Believe that you make that person feel good.

Even if it's a cold stare, you'll discover that's not so bad. Because if you keep trying you will find someone who will smile back. And all the cold stares will melt away.

Two-Way Heart Opening Pranayama (Heart Breathing)

1) As for all pranayama breathing exercises, find a comfortable seat on the floor with your legs crossed or, if it is comfortable for you, sit in lotus or half lotus. If your lower back feels constricted, sit on the very edge of a folded blanket. (Only your sitting bones should rest on the blanket, not the backs of your thighs.)

2) Take a moment to let your shoulders loop forward, up toward your ears, and down your back. As your shoulder blades melt down your back, let your heart lift up. Support your singing heart by drawing your navel in toward your spine and up toward your heart, feeding it with fire.

3) Place your palms on your thighs or knees, (You may place first finger and thumb together in yoga mudra to focus your attention.) Take a few deep breaths, feeling the air fill your lungs.

4) As you continue to breath slowly and deeply, draw your attention to your heart. Feel the prana, or energy of the breath, enter your heart.

5) Then start to open your heart out as you exhale. Observe what comes out of your heart. It may have a physical appearance to you -- mist or lights or something soft. Or it may just be a feeling. Enjoy it as you draw your exhales out. Inhale deeply into your heart to support it.

6) Now let the energy flow in as well. Start to breathe directly into your heart. Feel yourself absorbing the beautiful energy you have been putting out. And see what is mingled with that energy. The lingering laughter of your child who was playing in this room earlier? The absentminded caress of your partner as he passed you in front of the refrigerator this morning? Something more distant, some life you have touched, some happiness from a neighbor's home?

7) Take your time feeling both the beauty and the rhythm of this two-way heart breathing. Then take the feeling with you as you move into your day.

Gomukasana (Cow-Faced Pose)

I can't say I find gomukasana the most beautiful of the heart-opening asanas. But I offer it here because it provides a challenge in keeping with this discussion. So much is going on with your body, so much opening is required, that it's difficult to remember to keep your heart open. So don't expect anything of your body but what it can do, and see what this acceptance of your own love does for you.

1) Sit on your mat and place your right leg over your left, bending both knees so your right knee rests on top of your left knee. Your right foot will sit somewhere near your left hip, and your left foot will be somewhere near your right hip.

2) Take a moment to find the supports you might need for this pose. If your right foot doesn't touch the floor, place a blanket under it. If your right knee is more than 5-6 inches above your left knee, place a block or rolled up blanket between them to give your right knee support. If your knees hurt, flex your feet to engage the muscles around your knees. If you need to place a blanket under your buttocks to sit comfortably, feel free to do that.

3) Sit here for a few breaths, resting your fingers on the floor next to your hips to help keep your spine long. Send the inhales into the places your feel tight and release from those places as you exhale.

4) When you start to surrender to the pose and feel ready, let your shoulders loop forward, up toward your ears, and down your back so your heart can lift. Start sending your breath into your heart and trust your hips to the earth.

5) You may remain here if your hips are tight. If you would like to move on and can comfortably remove your hands from the floor, raise your right hand directly overhead. Bend at the elbow, reaching your hand toward the space between your shoulder blades. Your palm will face in toward your body and your fingers will point toward the floor. Try to keep your right elbow facing directly toward the sky as you let your heart lift while keeping your right shoulder down.

6) Reach your left arm straight out in front of you, then loop it -- still straight -- around to the left side. When it has gone as far is it comfortably goes, turn your left palm toward the back of the room, bend your elbow, and bring the back of your hand toward your back.

7) Take a moment to find your heart and breathe into it. As you exhale, let your shoulders relax into the pose.

8) You may stay here or move your arms more deeply into the pose to see if you can grasp your fingers together. If this is too much, you can grab onto your shirt with each hand for support in the deepest position that doesn't cause you pain. Or you can hold onto a strap or belt with each hand, working them as close to each other as you can without feeling pain.

9) Your hips are opening deeply to release stuck emotions, and your shoulders are opening to release things from your past that close your heart. This makes it both more difficult and more healing to let your heart start to rise toward the ceiling as you bravely breathe into it and release its beauty into your areas of tightness.

10) Take 5-8 deep, slow breaths, then carefully release the pose. Make sure your joints are released by moving in any way that feels good before you try it on the other side.

It may feel awkward, but gomukasana is a huge gift. If you can send the energy of your heart to the places you feel tight, you are allowing your own love to heal those past wounds stored in your hips and shoulders.

And if you can receive love from yourself, surely you can receive it from others as well.

A Temper Tatrum Teaches Me to Be in the Moment

2008-04-17T06:39:00.000-07:00

I am feeling deep gratitude for Jake's* latest temper tantrum.

[*Upon a well reasoned request, I am adopting pseudonyms for those discussed in my stories. Because you never know when I will become a celebrity YogaMamaMe, and we have all read about the need to protect the privacy of celebrities' family members.]

I can't say I felt particularly grateful at the moment Jake was stiffening his little body to avoid my touch and stretching his mouth into a wail of baby teeth and spit. I tried to correct my grievous mistake of taking the nipple portion of his sippy cup out of his mouth to -- oh, cruel mother -- place it on his cup so he could drink his bedtime milk. But too late. Jake's desire for warm milk evaporated into a furor that brooked no easy apologies, and he violently rejected the taint of what used to be a comforting drink.

I remained admirably even-toned during this tirade, continuing to murmur futilely, "I understand. I took the nipple. You want the nipple. I understand." At least it seemed to have some soothing effect on me.

Then I asked him if he wanted to lie on the bed with me. And, with this new, beloved activity to look forward to, he forgot all about the sippy cup nipple injustice and happily crooned "bye bye" to the dog.

I, too, was coming off my own emotional see-saw, so I could completely understand how Jake moved in a breath from end-of-the-world anger to contented everything's-right-with-the-world happiness. And in that understanding, I found a lesson.

The Present Is Like a Temper Tantrum

My day yesterday contained greater hills and valleys than a normal day. ("Hills and valleys," my law school days boyfriend once told me. "You're hills and valleys." Obviously, I had yet to discover yoga. And, equally obviously, yoga doesn't keep me from still having hills and valleys days.)

I started low from lack of sleep and making my boy cry with my refusal to cuddle him after he kicked me in bed all night. (He slept through last night just fine, by the way, and was rewarded with deeply felt hugs and kisses in the morning.) I spent a little bit of my yoga practice crying over past injuries because, I think, I just needed to cry. Then I got to work and in the afternoon found someone who is going to -- I still get bouncing-in-my-seat excited about this -- design the YogaMamaMe website! Cue the reggae-tinged, sunshine-y music. For the first time since having a baby, I knew what I wanted to do besides having a baby. I walked to pick Jake up from school with the bounce of a woman who has a YogaMamaMe website. I played with him happily, fed him dinner happily, greeted Mike* when he came home from work happily.

And then Mike mentioned that my YogaMamaMe entries are, um, too long. And I crashed.

I'm not going to get into the psychology of crashing over so constructive a criticism (because that would feed my propensity for long-winded blog entries). But I am going to point out that even without the mechanics of a proper tantrum -- kicking feet, clenched eeee sound in the throat, clear transmission of the deep unfairness of the world -- I was reacting much as Jake did when I put the nipple of his sippy cup on the cup.

I observed this phenomenon, letting myself feel assaulted, exhausted, unable to comprehend making my missives any shorter. I acknowledged what I was feeling in the present moment.

And then I knew, from watching how Jake moves in an instant from tantrum to smile, that at some near future present moment I wouldn't feel so bad.

Appreciate the Present and Happiness Will Come

Here's the thing about the present moment: We hardly ever appreciate it.

Not much to appreciate in those moments when your child is screaming unreasonably at your unreasonableness? Oh, but there is if you remind yourself that a split second earlier that same child was smiling at you with oceans of love. And if you realize that in a few more seconds he will turn on a dime and throw you another one of those looks that zaps you into a paralysis of adoration.

The art of distraction that we all learn so very quickly as parents is nothing more than a way of bringing our children into the present moment. Left to feed themselves, tantrums continue well after the perceived injustice, just as an adult exceptionally talented at brooding can spin one minor mishap into days of darkness. Remind your child that, hey, the sippy cup is no longer an issue because we can read your favorite dog book in bed, and life is happy again.

What we adults need to work on is the happy again part. Because most of us aren't great at distracting ourselves, at least when the credit cards are already too dangerously overloaded to let us buy something expensive and totally useless.

Rather than finding a distraction for myself last night, I just rode it out. I had learned from Jake's tantrum that I would, at some point, feel better. All I had to do was let go of the moment when Mike's comment jabbed a big, fat Bic pen into the helium balloon of my website-induced happiness.

It's not unlike holding an uncomfortable asana. Spend your time dwelling on how much you hate it and wondering when it's going to be over, and I guarantee you it won't be over soon enough. But lean back, observe your discomfort, and know that you will flow into a different pose at any moment, and where you are in the present doesn't seem quite so terrible.

Practicing yoga as I reacted to Mike's comment last night, I observed how frustrated I was feeling. I acknowledged the frustration, resisted the urge to overanalyze it -- what did my mother do to me to cause me such a problem with criticism? what other pivotal person in my life has hurtfully accused me of being long-winded? -- and moved on. I didn't feed it. I didn't let it distract me from the present moment. I just waited for the present moment to bring me something that would make me smile.

So this morning when Jake grabbed at me with screams of protest because I committed the unforgivable act of trying to get him to sit down on his diaper table so I could put his shirt on, I released him to the freedom of the floor, drew a deep breath, and joined him in toddlerhood.

Sure enough, within seconds, we were both running across the room laughing.

Adho Mukha Vrksasana (Handstand)

Nothing imitates the split-second change in mood of a toddler better than adho mukha vrksasana, or handstand. I love that the sanskrit name translates to downward facing tree. We learn to balance on one foot in tree pose, to shift with the changes around us. And handstand tells that even when we get turned completely upside down, we can find it in us to exhibit the same balance and flexibility as we do when right side up.

I'll be the first to admit that handstand still scares me. Your head isn't that far from the floor, you're not that likely to hurt yourself badly when you fall, but . . . your head's so close to the floor.

(The more uncertain you feel attempting this pose, the greater your chance of injury. I recommend trying it for the first time under the guidance of a trained yoga instructor. If, for any reason, you feel uncertain, try the handstand prep following the instructions for handstand.)

I performed my first unassisted handstand five years ago on the day I decided to quit my job as a law professor, sell my house in St. Louis, and move to Los Angeles to be a writer. Talk about turning your life upside down. But once I recognized I was facing just so immediate and impactful a change, I found the courage to turn myself upside down physically as well.

Adho Mukha Vrksasana Instructions

1) Kneel on your hands and knees on the floor. If you are not strong in your handstand balance, place your hands about six inches from the wall.

2) Take your time setting up, in both body and mind. First, set up your body: Make sure your hands are shoulder distance apart with your fingers spread and first fingers pointing toward the wall. Press strongly into the space between your first finger and thumb. Bend your elbows slightly and perform a shoulder loop: toward the front, up to your ears, and down your back. Feel the strength of your shoulder blades as they move strongly down your back.

3) Lift your hips and move into adho mukha svanasana (downward facing dog) without losing the strength in your strong shoulders and back. Keep your knees bent and your attention on your arms and back. Gaze at the point where the floor and wall meet.

4) Walk your feet in closer to your hands without losing your strong shoulders and back.

5) Prepare your mind: All you are doing is moving from the familiar adho muka svanasana (downward facing dog) to the similar adho mukha vrksasana (handstand).

6) Lift your dominant leg (the one you kick with) off the ground, bend your knee, and think of that leg going all the way to the wall. Slightly bend the leg on the floor and prepare to push the floor away with your foot.

7) Press into your hands, kick confidently with your dominant leg, and keep your eyes on the point where the floor and wall meet as you swing your dominant leg to the wall and your other leg follows. Do not bend your elbows; instead, strongly maintain your arm strength. Believe in it.

8) Be ready to let yourself go. This is a pose you set in motion. That motion is what carries you upside down. Trust that you will be upside down and you will be fine.

9) When you are upside down, appreciate the present moment. Don't think about releasing down until you are ready.

10) Instead, let the rest of your body help lift you. Engage your abdominals, tuck your tailbone, and let your inner thighs move toward the wall as you press your legs strongly together.

11) When you are ready, release one leg at a time with as much control as you can. Rest in either uttanasana (standing forward fold) or balasana (child's pose) before standing right side up again.

Not Ready for Handstand Prep

If you can't bring yourself to kick up with any enthusiasm, or if you are kicking enthusiastically but just don't have the strength yet for full handstand, try this variation.

1) Stand facing a wall from a few feet away. Lift one leg straight out in front of you. Adjust your position so the sole of the foot on that leg rests against the wall. You are measuring your distance from the wall as one of your legs.

2) Noting where your standing foot is, lower your leg, turn around, and place your hands where your feet were.

3) Set up your arms as in step 2 above: Make sure your hands are shoulder distance apart with your fingers spread and first fingers pointing toward the wall. Press strongly into the space between your first finger and thumb. Bend your elbows slightly and perform a shoulder loop: toward the front, up to your ears, and down your back. Feel the strength of your shoulder blades as they move strongly down your back.

4) Lift your hips into adho muka svavasana (downward facing dog) without losing the strength of your arms and back. This will be a rather short dog. Your heels will rest against the wall.

5) Pressing your hands into the floor and keeping your shoulder blades moving strongly down your back, start to walk your feet up the wall. You want them to rest at the point where your body is in a right angle -- legs parallel to the floor, arms and torso perpendicular to the floor.

6) Remain here, pressing your hands strongly into the floor. Use your abdominals and your legs -- rotating inner thighs toward the ceiling -- to help support you.

7) Be upside down. Be in the present moment. Don't think about coming down until you are ready to do so -- in at least 5-10 deep, long breaths.

Carry into your day the knowledge that you have the strength to turn upside down. And that in no time you will find yourself right side up again.

How Being Kicked in the Face by a Baby Reminded Me that Energy Is All Around Us

2008-04-16T07:23:00.001-07:00

I'm really tired right now. And not just because I spent most of the night being hit in the face by my baby.

Usually, when Jake wakes up crying at night, the family engages in a practiced shuffle. Mike and I drag ourselves out of bed. He heads for the daybed in the office while I gather up Jake, who snuggles against me, warm and almost worth the interruption in REM sleep. We tumble into my bed together and fall asleep. At some point, I rouse myself one more time and return him to his crib. And I end up with a great expanse of warm duvet and pillows all to myself. Which can be nice, but often not as nice as sleeping deeply for a full night next to my husband.

The concept, as much as Mike and I have rationalized it, is that we don't have the heart to let Jake cry himself back to sleep, and we both lack the fortitude to comfort him back to sleep in any position but horizontal on our bed. Who can blame the guy for wanting to be held if something awakens him at night? we tell each other. As long as I put him back in his crib again once he's back asleep, he doesn't get the idea that our bed is his bed, at least in theory.

We should know better than to try to outsmart a 15-month-old.

Jake's plan last night was clear, and it made me pretty angry, I have to admit. He was plainly fighting deep sleep because he knew with it would come a return to his crib. Hence, just as we were both drifting off, a flung arm would smack across my face. Or a chubby foot would find purchase in my gut. Or I'd slowly lift myself up, preparing to remove him from the bed, and his thumb would shoot into his mouth for a frenzied round of self-comfort that warned against any attempts to move him.

I tried to give him the message that it's not so great spending all night with Mommy by rebuffing his attempts at cuddling this morning, assisting him into a dry diaper without a touch of sympathy for the howls of unfairness this activity generates, and withholding his juice bottle until after we were out of the warmth of our shared bed. Perhaps I was not employing the clearest logic, but I was a bit sleep-deprived. Which is not the optimal state for dealing with a toddler sent into hysterics by his mother's refusal to give him a morning cuddle.

All was well by the time we went to school. One yogurt-smeared breakfast smile and I had to give him the hug we both needed. Still, I'm tired.

Okay, so one night of sleeplessness I can deal with. What I'm really tired of is revisiting this sleep issue over and over and over again.

Find More Energy by Inviting It In

I stare with red-rimmed eyes into a future of children piling into our bed at night until they're old enough to pile into someone else's. And I find myself despairing. I don't want to spend years and years and years getting just a week or two of uninterrupted sleep with my husband before finding myself yet again dealing with the sleeplessness of motherhood.

And with such thoughts, my mind spins out one sleepless night into a lifetime of them, and I'm feeling my body react with panic. I feel even more tired, unable to cope, pushed over the edge by forgetting to put the sheets in the wash before starting my yoga practice this morning. (How will I ever get all the laundry done today? And what crisis awaits if I don't?)

Panic, without a doubt, is a kind of self-generated energy. I imagine some kind of perpetual motion spinning top that spins faster as it generates more and more of its own energy. (I have been unable to locate an example of such an object on the internet, which surely means it doesn't exist, but you get the idea.) The more I panic, the more I feed the panicked energy, and the greater my panic becomes. Sleepless nights!!! A whole lifetime of them!!! Children that are your responsibility FOREVER!!!!! It gets scarier and scarier.

Needless to say, if all this panicked energy is self-generated, it's depleting my energy for other tasks like, say, getting on with my day.

And it's not just panic. It could be anger, hurt, any kind of emotional energy. If we feed it, it grows. But since it's self-generated, it all comes from inside. And if we think of ourselves as separate beings, completely reliant on our own energy, it becomes a zero-sum game. Whatever energy is feeding our panic/anger/hurt, it's taking away from the energy we need to conduct the rest of our lives.

The best way out of this cycle is to recognize that we are not self-contained machines. There is energy all around us -- the same energy that is inside us. Think, for a moment, about food. It's not just about pleasure; at bottom, it is energy. Energy that comes from other living matter. We eat it, our bodies burn it as calories, we are able to live.

So, too, there are more subtle forms of energy surrounding us, according to yoga teachings. In an asana practice, we try to dissolve the feeling of separation between ourselves and the world around us. And in doing so, we often find we have more energy to carry us through the practice than we brought to class.

So, too, as tired as I am, if I redirect my thoughts toward the energy around me, I bear less of a burden. I no longer deplete some finite reserve of energy through my panic. I find myself able to sit down and write about what I'm feeling semi-coherently. And, as a consequence, the wheel of panic starts to slow, wobble, and, eventually, come to a rest.

Ah, rest. What I wouldn't give for some. But in the meantime, a gentle yet energizing yoga sequence really helps.

A Sequence to Invite the Prana

Prana is energy. As simple and as complex as any western scientific concept of energy.

Only in yoga there's an easy way to appreciate prana. You breathe.

That's it. If energy is all around us waiting for us to notice it, one way to get it into our bodies is to breathe.

Wait, you say. I breathe all the time and I'm hardly a bundle of energy.

Ah, answers yoga, that's because you don't breathe consciously. Spend a few moments appreciating the air as it enters your nostrils. Feel it fill your lungs. Breathe deeply, as if you are drinking. You will, without a doubt, feel clearer, more awake, and, yes, energized.

Then try the following sequence. It is designed for low energy days -- and frequently leaves me ready to continue into a higher energy asana practice. But it is delicious all on its own. It works out the kinks of a tired body, gives you a little massage, and introduces a little extra energy into the rest of your day.

The Sequence

1) Begin in balasana (child's pose). Your knees are bent and your body is draped over your thighs as you sit on your heels with your forehead pressed against the floor. If you can, leave your arms at your side for a few breaths, and let the slight pressure of the floor against your forehead quiet your mind. If this pose is uncomfortable or painful, do not hold it. Move on to the next step.

2) On an inhale, stretch your arms as far as they will reach overhead, spread your fingers wide, and thoughtfully place your palms on the mat with your pointer fingers pointing toward the top of the mat, shoulder distance apart. If your knees or the tops of your feet hurt in balasana, you can lift your buttocks off your heels to alleviate the pressure.

3) Firmly pressing your palms into the mat, exhale and strongly draw your shoulder blades down your back. At the same time, you might wiggle your heart toward the front of the mat, finding space between your vertebrae to lengthen your spine.

4) On your next inhale, draw your elbows in close to your side ribs and draw your heart forward toward your hands as you lift your torso off the floor. You will find yourself momentarily on your hands and knees.

5) Exhale and -- once again drawing your elbows close to your side ribs -- let your chest and chin move to the floor. Your butt stays in the air. You will feel a lovely, gentle massage for your spine.

6) As you inhale, slide into bhujangasana (cobra pose). Keep your elbows in close to your side ribs, draw your heart forward, and let you pelvis, thighs, and the tops of your feet come to the floor. (Your shins are already there.) The point of bhujangasana is not to straighten your arms, but to lengthen your spine. To do so, be sure to keep your elbows in close and your shoulder blades down your back as your heart lifts. Try not to clench your buttocks, as this may tighten your lower back. Instead, keep your legs strong and draw your navel in toward your spine and up toward your heart.

7) Exhale and let your buttocks draw you back to balasana (child's pose). Feel the shape force all the stale air out of your lungs.

8) Inhale and creep your hands a little further toward the front of your mat and begin the sequence again.

Try to continue this sequence several times until you move naturally with each inhale and exhale and don't have to think about the next pose. Instead, let the energy move through you -- with your breath, in the opening of your heart, in the work of your muscles.

When you are done, rest in balasana (child's pose) and observe how your body feels. Maintain this honesty of feeling as you move into the rest of your day.

I hope you find more beautiful energy awaiting you there.

Learning to Let Go of Frustration While Walking Through the Mall with Jake

2008-04-15T09:40:00.001-07:00

It's amazing how our children can teach us things even in a place so little conducive to spiritual enlightenment as the Asheville Mall.

The lesson that needed learning began yesterday morning, when Mike more or less demanded I see a doctor. I didn't put up much of a fight, probably because I was too busy coughing in a high pitched wheeze of tears every time my swollen glands brushed up against the little bumps decorating my throat. I've spent nearly three weeks now shining a flashlight into my mouth every night before going to bed, as if just knowing how scary it looks will make much of a difference in my recovery.

I knew the road to a doctor's appointment would be bumpy. It's bad enough trying to contact my primary care folks. But just imagine trying to get in to see an internist when your primary care physicians are a bunch of midwives. Who, for some reason, didn't strike me as the most qualified people to look at my throat, even though I'm all too happy to trust them with the far more harrowing experience childbirth.

Still, I gamely called the office and asked to speak to the desk nurse, figuring she could provide me the necessary referral.

"I'll have her call you back," the receptionist said when I made my request.

Now, call me dense, but isn't a desk nurse's job to sit at a desk and field questions from patients? I just can't imagine what else she was doing during the hour and a half it took for her to return my call.

"We don't work with any internists," she informed me when she finally did.

"BOOWH!" Jake yelled in my ear as he tried to settle into my lap with said book. He was staying home to play with his grandmother on her last day in town and was plenty bored with us both already.

"And most internists won't see a new patient for several weeks, or even months," the desk nurse informed me helpfully.

Jake hit me in the face with his book and grabbed at the phone. I considered letting him hang up on her. Instead, I managed to ascertain that if I could find an internist willing to see me, she could provide me with the referral.

Jake's grandmother and I settled him at the table with a cup of blueberry yogurt while I set about the task of finding an internist willing to see me. As soon as I lowered him into his high chair he curled into a recalcitrant back bend reminiscent of an inside-out slipper lobster and turned a shade of red reminiscent of the same creature after spending a few minutes in a pot of boiling water. With a sigh, I settled him into my lap and avoided the flying gobs of blueberry yogurt as I called our neighbors who have raved about their GP and left a message asking for his name.

Rachel called me back as Jake was scooping the last of his yogurt into his mouth with his hands. His grandmother seems hopeful that the right encouragement might convince him to use his spoon more consistently, and even to do so without turning it upside down on its way to his mouth. I passed that stage of wishful thinking weeks ago.

After I spent several minutes on hold with Rachel's doctor while fending off Jake's attempts to decorate my shirt with blueberry yogurt I was informed the doctor was not accepting new patients.

Feeling personally rejected, I wiped Jake's hands, sent him off to play with Grandma, and got the number of a family practice near our home.

Jake wandered toward the living room and then noticed I wasn't following. "MAMA!" he insisted as he clawed at my lap.

There is nothing so frustrating as being caught in an unclear phone tree when your throat is killing you and you just want to see a doctor and the doctor's office is plainly doing its best to thwart the efforts of anyone to hoping to become a new patient. Except doing so when there is a toddler in your lap yelling in your ear as his grandmother just as loudly tries to engage him in a game of coloring on today's newspaper.

Eventually, with the relief of a first-time marathoner limping across the finish line, I managed to get a person. I explained my situation.

"We're not taking new patients," she said, not unexpectedly. "The only way we're taking new patients is if they're referred."

I was hoping all it would take was one call back to the desk nurse, but of course the receptionist told me they'd already put my file away so, naturally, I'd have to wait for her to call me back. She eventually did and promised I'd have a referral . . . tomorrow. Which was better than quietly dying of throat cancer, as I had stubbornly decided I would do out of spite.

None of this, of course, brings us to the Asheville Mall.

It's Only Frustrating if You Rush It

Much has changed in my life since the days when I owned a leather mini skirt and drank beverages served in martini glasses late into the night. Now you can spot me in the middle of the food court, surrounded by the smell of french fries and a land of soft vinyl playthings.

What brought us to the mall was crappy weather. I've been shouting about it being spring much the way Jake shouts about all the balls he is spotting -- most notably in the produce section of EarthFare yesterday afternoon, where every orange, tomato, and onion suggested its resemblance to the bouncy rubber things he loves to play with.

Yesterday's crappy weather was proof that I am crazy to have ever left California. Not only was it cold and overcast and gloomy. Not only did it start to rain while Jake was taking his nap. But it actually hailed for several deeply depressing minutes. Given the elements, there was nothing to do for afternoon entertainment but take Jake and Grandma to the play area at the food court in the mall.

It was on our way out that Jake slowed us down and I found spirituality at the mall.

Mall-walks generally make me tense -- all that useless merchandise screaming at you, an eerie lack of sunlight or any suggestion of a world outside retail hell, corridors going on and on in an endless trek of piped-in music and fluorescent lighting. Now I was forging through it with a twenty-five pound toddler in my arms, and he was not being cooperative.

Tantrums are a new talent of Jake's. Just in the past three days, it seems, he has realized how much he has a mind of his own, and he seems determined to express it, even if he lacks the words to do so. Belatedly, I think of the baby sign language book I optimistically purchased six months ago. I can still recall how to say "dog" and "cat" and "fish," but gave up on teaching them to Jake because he seemed to be geared up to get language before he hit the Terrible Two's. That may be his plan, but he has compensated for it by developing his belligerence at a mere fifteen months.

In this instance, Jake decided he was going to walk through the mall. Furthermore, he was going to do so without holding Mommy's hand. Nor with any thought of following Mommy. Not when there were so many opportunities to walk the wrong way, stare at himself in plate glass windows, and grab at the sunglasses foolishly displayed at toddler level.

My frustration level could easily have been as high as it had been earlier in the day when I was caught in the maze of the doctors' office phone trees so much like the maze of the mall. Progress was no more within my control now than it had been then. The distractions were far less pleasant than blueberry yogurt-covered hands and baby yells. And my desperation to get out into fresh air and sanity was much, much stronger than my determination to see a doctor.

But none of this mattered because Jake was being so darned cute.

How can you not smile when your toddler is throwing a big, earnest smile at some stranger, getting her to slow down and break into a smile even wider? Why not choose to laugh when your boy points at the candy machines and bellows "BAHW!" with an insistence that suggests he wishes every person within earshot to praise him on recognizing a ball when he sees one? Far better to find creative ways to coax him forward than to end up hurt at how vociferously he rejects any assistance in moving more quickly, even though you really should know better than to take it personally.

And there, in our walk through the mall, I learned a lesson in finding beauty in unlikely places.

Beauty Exists Everywhere

Everything, I was recently reminded, shares the same energy. Put it in yogic terms or scientific ones, whichever you believe, but they both amount to the same thing. We are all made up of the same energy (atoms, molecules, whatever -- I dropped out of AP chemistry in eleventh grade and never looked back).

This means many things, but for present purposes, it suggests that the same beauty I find looking out my window at the budding trees exists somewhere in the stale, dim artificiality of the Asheville Mall.

I'm not suggesting that the physical pieces of the mall hold the beauty of a tree in spring. Artificial is artificial, and the mall per se can no more soothe my senses than Diet Coke can nourish my body.

But the energy is there nonetheless, squeezing its way past the revolving doors, beating in the hearts of the other mallgoers, bursting out in the joy of my boy discovering that he can walk on his own past The Gap and Stride Rite and the Complete Laser Clinic of Asheville. The beauty is there, waiting to be found, if you can bring yourself to open to it. Which, admittedly, is a lot more difficult in the mall on a cold, rainy day than it is in the park on a beautiful, sunny one.

And there's the lesson. It is up to us to find the beauty in our lives. Sometimes the Universe makes a gift of it -- like in the faces of our children. Sometimes, though, we have to make the choice to find it ourselves. We can react to the frustration of a doctors' office phone tree by becoming angry and shut-in and by poutily deciding to just be sick because no one is willing to help us get better. Or we can refuse to let the frustration be anything more than what it is -- an annoyance, a discomfort, but nothing that should blind us to all the beauty that is in our lives regardless.

Children, I figure, offer a constant refresher course in this concept. At least twenty times a day, you will have the opportunity to give in to frustration and exhaustion and a weepy sense that you will never get to do anything you want and need (more, I imagine, if you have a teenager). And each of those times, you get the chance to blink your eyes and see past the red, bunched-up face winding up for a tantrum because you do not wish to be hit in the head with a picture book. You get to pull up the corners of your mouth just a little bit and exercise your ability to smile at this precious little person whose very recalcitrance is, if you think about it, pretty charming.

Do I necessarily want to be hit over the head with this lesson twenty times a day? Not any more than I want to be hit in the face with Jake's picture book. But it's one of the complicated, twisty parts of being a parent -- all the joy and the frustration and the figuring out life in a new way bound together like strands of the DNA of our souls that have been altered by the bits of our DNA running around the living room spilling juice out of a waved sippy cup.

Eka Pada Raja Kapotasana (King Pigeon Pose)

Nothing is as beautiful in the yoga asanas as a full back bend, and few poses are as difficult to open to. Eka Pada Raja Kapotasana adds a further challenge because it requires open hips as well. But it is also a lovely way to find the beauty in whatever version of the pose your body embraces. And remember, as difficult as you may find it, it's a lot more fun than being stuck in the mall.

Kapotasana (pigeon preparation)

1) From adho mukha svanasana (downward facing dog), step your right foot forward. Bend at the knee and bring your right ankle toward your left wrist as you lower onto your back (left) knee. The intention is for your shin to run between your hands, parallel to the front of your mat, but few of us have hips open enough to support this version of the pose. Instead, bring your right ankle down toward your left hip, bending your right knee, until you find a comfortable position.

2) Take a moment to see if your body is tipping toward your right hip, lifting your left hip off the floor. If it is, place a folded blanket under your right hip to elevate it so it is even with your left hip. Many practitioners continue with this pose with their hips out of alignment, risking lower back pain. I strongly recommend taking the time to use a blanket instead.

3) Place your hands by your hips with your fingertips on the floor. Perform a shoulder loop -- forward, up toward your ears, and down your back. Draw your navel in toward your spine and up toward your heart and let your heart sing.

4) Stay here for several long, deep breaths, strongly engaging your abdominal muscles, as you feel your lower back and hips release.

5) As you are ready, slowly start to fold forward. First, place your hands in front of you, inhale and lengthen your spine, then exhale and fold a bit. If you can place your forearms on the floor, stop here, inhale and lengthen your spine, then exhale your way a bit closer to the floor. Stop wherever you feel tight, placing blankets or a bolster under your body if you would like to have something to rest your body on. Some people will be able to rest their bodies on the floor.

6) Wherever you find your edge, stay and breathe, stretching your left leg strongly behind you to maintain your alignment, letting your weight fall evenly between your hips, and keeping your shoulders from creeping up to your ears. Bow your head and look inside for the beauty of this pose.

7) When you are ready, slowly walk your body up.

Eka Pada Raja Kapotasana

1) Still sitting with your right knee bent in front of you and your left leg extended behind you, bend your left knee.

2) See if you can grasp your left foot with your left hand. If you can't, use a strap looped around your foot. Flex your left foot strongly to protect your knee.

3) Remain here and breathe until you feel your left hip tendon relax. Try to square your shoulders to the front of your mat.

4) This may be your pose. If so, remain here, breathing, and let your heart open into a bit of a back bend. Find your beauty.

5) If you would like to move on, swing your left fingers around the sole and to the outside of your left foot and continue circling them around to the front. Your left elbow will bend toward the ceiling, your palm will rest on the ball of your foot, and your fingers will face the front. Push your foot strongly into your hand and you push your hand strongly into your foot as your knee bends more deeply with your opening quadricep. If you feel any knee pain, release the pose. If you are at your edge, stay here, breathe deeply, and let your heart open into a back bend. Find your beauty.

6) If you would like to move on, hook your left toes in the crook of your left elbow as you bend your left arm and reach your left hand toward the front. Reach your right hand toward the front then up toward the ceiling. Bend your right elbow and see if you can grasp your left fingers with your right fingers. Breathe deeply, and let your heart open into a back bend. Find your beauty.

7) If you are exceptionally open, release your right hand back to the ground for balance and let your left foot slide out of your left elbow toward your wrist. Stick out your left thumb (like a hitchhiker) and grasp the outer edge of your left foot between your thumb and fingers. Rotate your left elbow overhead as your hand shifts to hold your left toes with your fingers on the top of your foot and your thumb on the sole. You may keep your right hand on the floor or circle it overhead to join your left hand on your left foot in the full pose. Breathe deeply, and let your heart open into a back bend. Find your beauty.

Repeat on the other side.

We all will have different versions of this pose, just as we all have very different children. But just as each of our children is beautiful in his or her own way, so are each of our poses, which come from us just as our children do. The best part of the eka pada raja kapotasana, just like the best part of motherhood -- and of life -- comes from finding the beauty.

Making the Little Choices

2008-04-14T09:03:00.000-07:00

I'm on my way to the Carl Sandburg house, and wondering if I learned anything at all yesterday.

It was Saturday, I'd been cutting into my work time entertaining relatives, and I really just wanted to stay home and get some work done. Still, there's a difference between deciding to get some work done and deciding to let Mike and his mother take Jake off for the afternoon without me.

I'm not suggesting anything dramatic here, just a depressing inertia when it came to choosing between staying at home or joining the rest of the family on their outing to the Cradle of Forestry.

I haven't exactly been wanting to visit the Cradle of Forestry since moving to Asheville eight months ago. In fact, I haven't a particularly clear idea of what it is. Mike has this special gift for finding strange little things to do on the weekends that generally involve driving long distances while twisted around in the passenger seat trying to entertain Jake, who is no fan of the long car ride himself.

No, the crux of my indecision had nothing to do with the particular destination. It was the fact that the rest of the family had a destination and I didn't.

For some reason, it's always been difficult for me to reject a planned activity, no matter how uninteresting, for time spent alone. Analyze it if you will, but bear in mind that now Jake has been introduced into the equation. At this point, it has as much to do with giving up time with my boy as with my own issues about being left alone.

So, hoping to have learned from the yoga lessons I've offered here, I carefully considered my options and waited to hear what my heart had to say about it.

And here is where I imagined someone reading this blog, taking my advice, and throwing up her hands in disgust.

What I realized as I meandered about the house watching Mike pack Jake's diaper bag and mumbling something incoherent when he asked if I was coming was that the choices we make are sometimes of little consequence to our hearts. My heart, apparently, was busy with bigger questions than whether to leave my house for a few hours or stay home. It simply had no answer for me.

It's Not Always a Question of Heart Versus Head

The lesson here, I think, is that yoga, like anything that seems to make life easier, can become a bit of a crutch. I spend my days grabbing at bits of yogic philosophy -- like learning to follow your heart instead of your head -- and somewhere along the line I become convinced that there is a simple solution to every neurotic hiccough of my mind.

So yesterday, as the adrenaline started to buzz up from my ankles toward my brain at the prospect of choosing between a Saturday afternoon alone or on an outing, I grasped for something to ward off the panic.

"Do what your heart tells you," I reminded myself. The adrenaline buzz tapered off to a slight humming in my fingertips. "Don't get caught up in what you think you should do."

Ah, relief was on its way. I didn't have to be beholden to what I thought I was supposed to do as a good daughter-in-law. One trip to the Cradle of Forestry simply wasn't going to appreciably affect my mother-in-law's estimation of me. Nor did I have to stay home because I had set some artificial deadlines about getting work done. So few people read this blog to begin with that I sincerely doubt anyone will really notice if I go a day or two without posting anything.

"Well," my mind said, giving up with nary a struggle as it turned to my heart. "What do you say?"

My heart responded quite clearly. It really wanted to spend time with my baby boy and the husband I see so little of during the week and the mother-in-law I don't see for months at a time. But it also really, really wanted some uninterrupted writing time, some time to be alone and quiet after all the noise of family gatherings.

In other words, my heart wasn't going to give me an easy answer.

What a beautiful gift. Of course I wanted yoga to make all of my life easier, especially the bits spent trying to figure out how to be a good mother and a happy person. But part of figuring these things out -- part of anything important, really -- is engaging in a struggle. Life just isn't always easy, answers rarely are when you're a grow-up, and having several equally good options is, when you think about it, a blessing.

Put another way, do I want my asana practice to be a challenge or do I prefer to drift through it without testing my limits?

Discomfort Versus Pain

It still kind of bugs me when I mention doing yoga to someone who doesn't and they smile kindly and say, "Oh, yoga," in a way that conjures up images of a bunch of people lying around on the floor being mellow. The point of a yoga practice isn't merely to relax, though it's a lovely benefit. It's also important that we challenge ourselves.

One of the essential elements of an asana practice is learning to face discomfort with calm. And the whole reason we challenge ourselves to experience discomfort is to help us face the discomforts that are a part of life.

It's kind of uncomfortable just acknowledging that life isn't always comfortable, isn't it? I think about the stories I hear of women who schedule Caesarean births without a medical reason. I don't mean to judge them, because they may have perfectly legitimate reasons for doing so. But they are also recognizing that the miracle of birth (and, cheesy as it sounds, it is a miracle) comes from the supreme discomfort (for both parties) of a vaginal birth.

[Wow, just re-read this a few hours after posting and realized it sounds like I'm saying the miracle of birth somehow doesn't come from a Caesarean section, and boy would I be offended if I had had one and read that. Thank goodness for the Caesarean -- and thank goodness for the vacuum-delivery I had. But most of us do -- again, unless we have medical reasons -- get to experience just a little bit of the discomfort that was, until modern medicine starting saving many a woman's life, the precursor to a vaginal birth. And really all I meant was to point out that the Universe often demands we move through discomfort to find joy.]

Pretty much everything does, when you think about it. (I mean, pretty much everything good comes from discomfort, not, specifically, the discomfort of a vaginal birth.) No one floats through life in a cheery bubble of ease. And all the efforts of those who think it's possible are just giving them a false sense of control. After all, what is it that people most often turn to to avoid discomfort? Money? Possessions? Drugs? We all know by now that they don't make you happy; they just distract you enough from real life to make you think you are.

So I was pretty off-base yesterday when I was hoping I could avoid the discomfort of deciding to spend some time all for myself by using a bit of yogic philosophy. Because why would yoga help me avoid discomfort when it's all about helping me face it?

Then there's the other piece of discomfort that reminds me I should feel gratitude for experiencing it.

In every asana practice, we have a chance to experience discomfort. But we also have the power to experience pain. Take any pose, push yourself too hard, and pain can result. Pulled muscles, a broken toe or two, a sore neck. So not only do we get to learn to face discomfort, but we have to learn to face it without causing ourselves pain.

Of course, the difference between an asana practice and real life is that on a yoga mat, in the safety of a yoga class, we get to choose between discomfort and pain. In life, we don't.

So, in the end, wasn't I lucky all I had to deal with on Saturday was a little bit of discomfort? In the big scheme, the decision I had to make was beyond minor. Having it be difficult let me practice experiencing discomfort with grace. And, if I chose to take the lesson to heart, it was also an opportunity to feel grateful that there was nothing painful involved.

Aren't we all lucky if we're living in a moment without pain? And, if so, what's a little bit of discomfort but a reminder of how lucky we are?

Experiencing the Joys of Discomfort

I ended up having a perfectly lovely Saturday afternoon -- so lovely that I had intended for it to be the centerpiece of this essay. Instead, I have wandered off to discover more important things to discuss and, in the process, have inadvertently deleted the paragraph I wrote about just how lovely it was.

My afternoon went something like this: A ringing loneliness in the house as I found myself alone with the dogs, who rarely accompany me to my office as cozy hounds should, but sulk in the living room all day waiting for someone to rub their bellies or take them for a walk.

This feeling was something akin to that first moment you start to stretch a tight muscle. Not so great.

But rather than dwell on the loneliness, I sat down at my computer to do the writing that was the point of my staying home -- much as stretching a muscle is the point of undertaking the asana that starts out making us so uncomfortable.

As I wrote, I forgot all about the loneliness. I was absorbed, satisfied, following my heart. I had found my edge -- that point of discomfort in a pose -- and stayed with it until the discomfort melted away.

As I continued to stretch, I finished my writing and felt so much energy that I installed the long overdue gate at the top of the stairs. For the past eight months, I have merely cautioned Jack to stay away from the stairs, often with a worried yell from the bedroom when he wanders out as I'm getting dressed. Naturally, the reason he has not fallen down the stairs is because he was listening to me, not because I am really lucky.

And then I was done working and got to experience the joy of sitting outside reading a book on a Saturday afternoon. I'd like to repeat that because it's not something I ever thought I'd be writing about for the next ten years or so. I got to sit and read a book, and it wasn't the ten minutes in bed at the end of the day before my eyes clunk closed with the utter exhaustion of entertaining a toddler.

The point is, I experienced joy in a way I just don't think I would have if I hadn't come to it through discomfort. And, believe it or not, I have experienced joy in stretching asanas as well, even if they start out mighty uncomfortable indeed.

Pascimottansana (seated forward fold)

Pascimottanasana is so simple and yet so often not fun. It involves stretching hamstrings, which we rarely do and therefore allow to get really tight. It also requires an open lower back and strong abdominals -- both sabotaged by years of sitting in chairs. And it just isn't a very sexy pose, so it's hard to get excited about embracing it in search of joy.

It is also, however, a wonderful way to meditate on discomfort and to find how quickly the discomfort dissolves if we just stay with it.

1) Sit on the floor with your legs out in front of you. Place your hands next to your hips for support. If you can not sit this way without bending your knees, try sitting on the very edge of a blanket -- just your sitting bones should be on the blanket, not the backs of your thighs.

2) Flex your feet so your toes point toward the ceiling. At the same time, let your inner thighs roll toward the floor.

3) Very gently pressing your hands into the floor, let your shoulder blades slide down your back while your heart lifts. Pull your navel in toward your spine and up toward your heart. Your lower back should lengthen.

4) Sit here for five deep, long breaths as you gaze at your toes. Observe where you are tight. Don't back away from it. Instead, breathe into it, seeing if it releases on the exhale.

5) Inhale again, consciously lifting your heart and drawing your navel in. As you exhale, let your heart lengthen toward your feet as you lean forward. Let your hands move down the sides of your legs to support you.

6) Stop when you start to feel discomfort/tightness. Place your hands on your thighs or shins (or, if your are very open, your big toes or the outsides of your feet).

7) Check in to make sure you haven't backed off by flexing your feet, straightening your knees, and letting your sitting bones subtly move toward the back of the room.

8) Inhale and lift your heart again as you lengthen your spine.

9) Keeping this length, exhale and fold forward until you find your edge -- the place where you feel discomfort but not pain.

10) Be here, breathing, observing. Try not to let your mind wander -- instead, let it check in with the integrity of the pose. Feel each inhale travel from the soles of your feet out your sitting bones. Let each exhale move from the base of your spine out the crown of your head.

11) Notice when the discomfort dissolves and decide if you want to move a little deeper into the pose.

12) Hold for anywhere from 10 long, slow breaths to several minutes.

13) Release slowly, letting your heart lift your torso. Bounce your legs around in any way that feels good to release them

A simple pose for a simple choice. Who can believe I'd write so much about not going to the Cradle of Forestry?

Facing Life's Daily Detours Like Bamboo

2008-04-12T06:34:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I planned on writing a YogaMamaMe entry even though I really didn't have time for it.

As a result, I found myself with 10 minutes to go before yoga class began as I threw myself into the car and marveled yet again at how it always seems to be 5 minutes later by the car clock than I could swear it was a moment ago by the clock in the kitchen. Suddenly, I had just 5 short minutes to drive to the studio, perform a quick but respectable parallel park, throw my shoes into a cubby and my name onto the sign-in sheet, and set up my mat while pretending I was really calm and unhurried.

Already I was learning a lesson. I hate rushing. And yet I often am in a rush. Perhaps, I considered as I cruised past the Montessori School at a speed I hoped was appropriate both for the setting and my current predicament, I should resist stubbornly sticking to my plan to write a YogaMamaMe entry when I really don't have enough time. Perhaps instead of writing about surrendering, I should actually surrender to the fact that sometimes we just don't get to do what we had in mind. Or we insist that we do and we end up rushing around in a sweat, swearing like a sailor in a tsunami-sized storm when we accidentally hit the lock button on the car keys instead of the unlock button and are momentarily stymied in our attempts to take a panicked leap into the car while late for yoga class.

The only thing to do when you're late, by the way, is to accept that you're late and do your best not to be any later. This is easiest done when you are on your way to an astanga class that you know will begin with several minutes of sun salutes so you can unroll your mat and jump right in after class begins without too much stress.

Except when you open the door to a class fuller than you have ever seen it. So full, in fact, that there is no easy place to quietly unroll your mat and blend in with the sun salutes. So full that the teacher instructs you to place your mat in front of hers -- in the dead center of the room with all the other mats facing you from each side.

Hey, okay, I've taught enough yoga classes to be comfortable with being on stage. In fact, I took this awkward opportunity as a gift. Practicing where another student momentarily confused about which mat belongs to the teacher might look to you for an example of dwi pada sirsasana (look it up; it's scary) helps one maintain a certain amount of focus.

I quickly unrolled my mat where the teacher had indicated and joined the class in downward facing dog. It was as I jumped forward to the front of my mat that a wiggle of doubt made its way into my brain. I was face-to-face with the teacher, maybe a foot away. And as we swept up to standing I couldn't help cringing as our heads narrowly missed each other in their flight toward the ceiling.

Then we were sweeping back down, heads flying toward each other, and I began to wonder if maybe I should be facing the other way. I wouldn't be able to see the teacher, it was true, but I could probably muddle through anyhow. And, of course, I wouldn't have to swerve each time I feared a head-on collision.

Swish. Our heads greeted each other as we stood, and swish, they waved goodbye on their way down again. I was beginning to feel mightily distracted. I was pretty certain it was traditional to face the teacher's mat and equally pretty certain the teacher didn't mind. At least, she wasn't giving me any pointed looks suggesting I'd made some sort of horrible mistake.

I checked out my options during my next downward facing dog. No go. Inches beyond the back end of my mat was woman whose perpendicularly-facing mat was pulled way out so that it nearly intersected mine. If I were to turn around, I'd end up folding forward right around the vicinity of her ribcage, probably with spectacular results. Best to avoid collisions with the trained professional in front of me instead.

So once again I embraced the unexpected. This was not punishment for trying to do too much and running late, I am sure. It was merely an opportunity to practice, to let my choices be my choices and to enjoy what came of them. And, lucky me, to enjoy a great yoga class as well.

Sometimes the Reward for Facing Chaos with Calm Is . . . More Chaos

Think I got a big, fat reward for embracing this lesson?

I sure thought so, as I crept out of the yoga studio a few minutes early to make my noon therapy appointment. I noted that I would like to avoid future appointments that backed up to a sweaty class, since it was pretty uncomfortable heading out in drenched yoga pants and matted hair. But therapists are trained to ignore such unpleasantness and act as if someone like me immediately after a sweaty yoga class is not, in fact, distinctly off-putting.

I skipped stickily toward my car and then noticed a familiar blue stroller on the lawn of the church across the street. In fact, that guy sitting next to it looked an awful lot like my husband. And damned if the child asleep in the stroller wasn't my son.

"I had to pick him up from school," Mike said grimly as I approached. "I wanted you to at least get your yoga class in."

Seems nothing in particular was wrong with Jake, but the director of his school -- who pops in to his class once or twice a month to make the regular teachers edgy and nervous -- thought he seemed unhappy.

He wasn't playing with his friends, she told Mike. He suggested that 15-month-olds rarely do, being a little short of that stage of development.

He had mucous pouring out of every orifice, she continued. I haughtily informed Mike that I had brought his nasal spray to school for exactly this eventuality.

The workers, the director claimed, said he had been this bad all week and coughing forever. We should probably take him to a doctor. This, Mike allowed, was where he had lost his patience, as he doesn't much like being accused of neglecting his child.

Mike called Grandma as I drove him back to his car. I prayed that she could come watch Jake very soon, since a shower was becoming an increasingly urgent need.

Then my phone rang. "Hi," my therapist said expectantly.

I told her we were having a child care crisis. I told her I was just getting ready to call her. I told her I'd pay for the session. She didn't sound happy. But, hey, I was generously offering her her very own lesson in rolling with the unexpected punches of life.

Grandma went to lunch with my brother-in-law before coming to the house, so the sweat had a chance to dry on me in white, salty patches. But Jake did consent to play with her while I showered and didn't start howling for me until I was toweling off, so we avoided the embarrassment that results from your mother-in-law almost seeing you naked. Most importantly, he didn't seem particularly sick or miserable to me. And the three of us had a lovely afternoon together.

In case you were worried, I did smooth things over with the daycare people. They are, after all, trying to take care of all the children, even if they get a little bit hysterical about a cough inspired by post-nasal drip. And, although they aren't aware of it, they are providing me valuable lessons in surrendering to life and motherhood.

Be Bamboo -- Vrksasana (Tree Pose)

In Chinese medicine, my acupuncturist informs me, the wood element is fundamentally important. If it is strong, we too become strong, yet flexible, able to bend to the events around us without breaking.

It made more sense when he explained that the wood of the wood element is bamboo. Much easier to see bamboo as flexible than, say, a redwood tree.

It also makes sense when you practice vrksasana, tree pose. Like a tree, you must be willing to sway in this pose, to bend without crashing to the ground. Practicing vrksasana, it seems, should strengthen the wood element. And, depending on the variation, it offers a lovely opportunity to open your heart to whatever the Universe brings. Which means not only can you survive unexpected changes, not only can you actively surrender to them, but you eventually welcome them and trust that something beautiful is coming your way.

Vrksasana Instructions

1) Stand in tadasana (mountain pose). Take a few moments to feel deeply rooted in the earth. Lift and spread your toes and feel them settle back down. Let your inner thighs release toward the back of the room so your tailbone has space to tuck, causing your navel to draw in toward your spine and up toward your heart. Let this core strength travel back down your legs into the earth.

2) If you are still new to balance, place your hands on your hips. (Otherwise, you may place them in front of your heart in angeli mudra, prayer position.) Check in to see that you are still engaging your core by tucking your tailbone and drawing your navel in and up.

3) Actively draw energy from the soles of your feet to the crown of your head. Feel how the energy fills the space between your vertebrae. Let the energy surge into your heart so your sternum lifts and your shoulder blades slide down your back.

4) Find a point on the floor several feet in front of you to gaze at. With your eyes thus occupied it will be easier to quiet your mind.

5) As you are ready, with either an inhale or an exhale -- whichever works best for your energy -- lift your right foot off the floor, bending the knee. Do it slowly, so you don't introduce energy that might knock you off balance. Instead, try to tap into the energy around you, becoming a tree, or a bamboo reed.

6) Turn your knee out to the right side as you lift your leg and place the sole of your right foot on the inside of your left leg. It may rest anywhere that is comfortable except on your left knee, as this will create too much stress on the knee joint. If you feel steady, you may reach your hands for your right leg to help draw it further up along the inside of your left leg.

7) Try to find the balance between pressing the sole of your right foot into the inside of your left leg and pressing the sole of your left foot into the floor. Press too hard and you start stirring up your own energy without regard to the energy around you. (Just like making your own plans for life without accounting for the fact that other forces are at work.) Maintain your gaze on the floor to stay calm and let your heart lift you.

8) If your hands are not already in angeli mudra (prayer position), place them in front of your heart. Remember, this is your center, both physically and energetically. Let your heart sing with trust as you let your right knee continue to open to the wall behind you.

9) Be the flexible tree as you open your heart, open your right hip (the site of emotional energy), and experience the subtle energy around you. Welcome it, work with it, and honor it.

And, remember, the key to balance isn't maintaining the balance. It's maintaining your sense of calm when you fall. Think of that when something more important than a yoga pose makes you lose your equilibrium.

Vrksasana Variations

If you feel steady in the pose and would like to hold it for a longer time, you can work on these variations. Each one opens your heart even more strongly as it challenges your balance.

1) From full vrksasana, above, press your palms together (not too strongly, as this will create too much energy and knock you off balance) and draw them overhead.

2) Gently let your arms separate so you are holding them in a V, welcoming energy, letting it funnel into your heart. Don't let your shoulder blades creep up with your hands; keep them strongly down your back for balance and heart opening.

3) If you feel steady, you may let your gaze travel up in the direction of your hands. Welcome all life has to give and trust that it will not knock you down.

4) When you are ready, you may bring your palms back together and draw them down to your heart.

Or you may continue with the following variation.

1) From the pose above with your hands raised and your arms in a V, carefully draw your arms in a big circle behind you. Hold onto your elbows with your hands or, if you are able, press your palms together behind your back in reverse namaste, or a prayer position. Your pinky fingers will rest against your spine and all your fingers will point toward the top of your head while your shoulders must open strongly. If your palms do not come together, I do not recommend reverse namaste, as it will place too much stress on your wrists.

2) Remain here with your gaze at a point on the floor. Or let your heart lift, drawing you into a backbend. Your eyes may travel upwards with your heart as well.

3) Enjoy the unique sensation of grounding and opening simultaneously and marvel at all the different ways your body can bend simultaneously. Supple as bamboo indeed.

For The Balance-Challenged (both on and off your yoga mat)

I feel like I ought to add one note here as a balance-challenged person. It took a lot of practice for me to get the balance thing.

For a while I blamed my feet (high arches), my eyes (too nearsighted to focus), and the other students (all their falling near me sent me toppling right over). But honestly, I think I was trying too hard. I'd press too strongly into the earth and bring all my energy down, and me with it. I'd lift my heart too strongly and lose my roots. And, of course, the more frustrated I got, the more I fell.

It's sounding like life all over again, isn't it? Push too hard for what you think your goal is and you are going to be knocked off balance. Maintain your calm when you do fall, work more gently to find your pose again, and you are more likely to find your way back. Work with the larger-than-us energy that throws things your way, and you will find your balance, your trust, the beauty of an open heart.

What the Friday Morning Bothered Blues Can Teach You About Time

2008-04-11T06:35:00.000-07:00

"Is this the kind of day I'm going to have?" I whined as I pinched my fingers in the buckle of Jake's stroller while rushing to get him to school.

YES! boomed something much bigger than me a few minutes later, when Jake dropped the windshield scraper he so loves to carry to school on my toe.

Of course, I wouldn't bother being bothered by such minor annoyances if I weren't already agitated. Especially on a beautiful morning like this one, when I awakened to the sounds of birds calling and the gentle shuff of the breeze slipping under the blinds. It's Friday, and it's spring, and I should be suffused in a melty vacationy feeling.

But agitated I am, and perhaps a bit more so for knowing I am going to spend most of this beautiful morning inside and will emerge from yoga class into a predicted thunderstorm, another appointment, and an afternoon entertaining my mother-in-law instead of hunching over my computer getting work done now instead of, harmlessly, a little bit later. Not that the thunderstorm is anything more than yet another minor annoyance brought to ringing life by the bigger things nibbling at my composure.

The first, and biggest, is that I don't have time to finish a proper post. Or, more globally, every time I seem to settle into a regular work life with a big sigh of now my life can have a modicum of order I am interrupted for . . . visits to the pediatrician. . . . visits to the vet. . . . grocery shopping. . . . entertaining guests. . . . or, just as I was typing this, calls from the CPA's office informing me that we somehow missed a message last week that our returns are ready and we must pick them up immediately, or at least before Tuesday. I am tempted to pull the old blood pressure monitor that Mike bought a few years ago out of the closet. He never used it much, but I enjoyed seeing how low I could register. This was before I had a child.

Then I arrived at Jake's school and started trying to list all the instructions for dealing with his allergies on the three lines allotted on his daily form intended more for comments like, "Didn't eat breakfast," than details about which sheets to put on my child's cot for his nap and which kids he can't sit next to at snack time because they sometimes have peanutbutter. I crammed it all in with as many exclamation marks and smiley faces as I could to lighten the tone, but I know for a fact no one is going to bother to read yet another one of my tomes on how to care for my kid when they have so many others to tend to as well.

I walked home practically in tears, certain that Jake is going to grab his friend's peanutbutter crackers and end up in the emergency room because I was being too polite. And then I started to hyperventilate because I really would like to write about this issue, but I knew I had just an hour before yoga class and therapy and meeting my mother-in-law downtown to spend the afternoon because I'm the only one of her sons and daughters-in-law here in Asheville who doesn't absolutely have to be at work on this particular Friday afternoon. And then I began to wonder what happened to that marvelous ability I developed earlier in the week to let life intrude on the things we think make up life, like our work weeks, and why I couldn't just enjoy my melty vacationy Friday afternoon.

Giving up my yoga class, by the way, is not a solution. Sometimes it is -- like last Tuesday when my relatives were arriving. But sometimes yoga is exactly what you need, especially on days like this one when I feel like obligations are encroaching when they're really not. An hour and a half spent not spinning out mythical deadlines will be very much more beneficial than spending that hour and a half resenting the fact that I am doing things that can wait instead of going to yoga class.

So, with just 15 minutes left before my day takes me somewhere other than my computer, I offer my solution -- which perhaps will translate to your next Friday Morning Bothered Blues day:

There Is More Time Than You Think

First, I let go of the rigid deadlines I had set for myself and allowed that maybe things will take a little bit longer than I'd like -- getting the YogaMamaMe website set up, finishing the YogaMamaMe book proposal, using the spa certificate gathering dust on my dresser because I am saving it for when I have finished the YogaMamaMe book proposal.

Once I surrendered to the fact that life sometimes happens at a different pace from the one I've set for myself, I felt like I could breathe again. It was like the jumble of all my obligations were bouncing around inside a pinata and a gaggle of laughing children burst it open, creating infinite space. (Of course, this would not be a pinata filled with sweet treats, but something more like the one a Weight Watchers devotee friend of mine concocted for her kids -- filled with little boxes of raisins and other disappointments.)

And to get that rhythm back into your game next time you feel the Friday Morning Bothered Blues yourself, I'll give you some quick instructions for Surya Namaskar (traditional).

Surya Namaskar (Traditional) (sun salutes)

1) Stand in tadasana (mountain pose). Be still for a moment, to remind yourself that it's okay to stop moving sometimes (even when yoga class starts in 15 minutes).

2) Press your feet into the floor as you inhale and circle your arms overhead, gathering prana (energy) for your practice. Let your hands meet at the top.

3) Sweep your arms to the side as you exhale and swan dive, leading with your heart, into a forward fold. Keep your legs strong.

4) Inhale and lift your heart, keeping your fingers on the floor or, to create more space for your spine, your hands on your shins. This is a moment to offer your heart and your trust to the Universe.

5) Exhale and fold forward, stepping back with your left foot into a lunge (high with knee off the floor or low with knee and top of foot on the floor).

6) Inhale and lift your heart. You may keep your fingers on the floor or circle your arms overhead, lifting your body.

7) Exhale and replace your hands on your floor while dropping your hips for a deeper stretch.

8) Inhale into plank pose. This is an upper push-up, which demands that you pull your abdominals in strongly and keep your legs very strong. Make sure your shoulders are directly over your wrists.

9) Exhale slowly to the floor, keeping your elbows close to your sides.

10) Inhale into cobra pose -- pelvis, legs, and tops of the feet on the floor, elbows close to your sides, shoulder blades down the back as you lift your heart and lengthen your spine.

11) Exhale and lift your hips as you tuck your toes under, shifting back to downward facing dog pose.

12) Inhale as you step your left foot to the front of the mat. Use your abdominal muscles to help control this movement. And your hands if your foot needs a little extra help.

13) Exhale into this lunge.

14) Inhale and lift your heart and, if you wish, your torso.

15) Exhale your hands to the floor. Lift your hips and step your right (back) foot forward. Continue to exhale and squeeze out the last of your air in a forward fold.

16) Strengthen your legs, lead with your heart, and inhale in a reverse swan dive to standing, circling your arms overhead.

17) Exhale your hands in front of your heart.

18) Repeat, starting with the right leg stepping back (and stepping forward in #12).

Pardon all the typos in this entry -- I'm off to yoga.

Grandma Versus Jack's School, or Trusting Myself as a Mother

2008-04-10T08:43:00.000-07:00

I didn't apologize to Jake's grandmother for taking him to school today. This is a sign, I believe, of progress.

An awful lot of what I've done as a mother is apologize -- for decisions I've made as a mother (sure, everyone tells you you're right because you're the mom, but do you ever really believe it?), for seeing to my own needs (the better I get at this the more I seem to apologize for it), for not taking care of everyone else nearly as well as I might have once upon a childless time. And, like pretty much every other mother I know, I've done all this apologizing with about the same stealth as a teenage boy copping a feel. And probably the same level of enthusiasm.

Progress, of course, comes in small increments. If I'm being completely honest, I do still feel the urge to apologize to my mother-in-law for not apologizing to her. I imagine her observing how Jake got to stay home from school yesterday, when his aunt and cousin were in town as well, and feeling stiffed. In my mind she becomes someone very different from who she really is, and turns to me with a crafty gleam in her eye saying, "I can watch him while you work, you know."

Then I practice being in the moment and I see how happily she walks him to school with me and how uncomplainingly she spreads out the newspaper for a bit of quiet time when we get back to the house. And I feel gratitude to us both for helping me learn not to apologize. And, yes, not to apologize for not apologizing.

Apology-Free Motherhood

The daycare thing is so fraught as it is -- even though it is an inevitable decision for most of us who can't afford to do it any other way.

In the days when I was still foolish enough to make pronouncements about how I would raise my child without realizing that he and life would have something to say about it, I decided that I wouldn't send Jake to daycare until he could walk. I can't say why walking seemed so significant to me. At the time he wasn't even crawling, and I suppose his lack of mobility convinced me that without one-on-one care he would languish, forgotten, in a corner somewhere, his eyes gradually clouding over with neglect.

Just for the record, he's been going since he was ten months old and just getting the hang of crawling.

Talk about getting twisted in knots. Even now, when Jake loves school so much he waves me out of the building with a cheery "Goodbye, I'm going to play now," (that's what he means; I understand he does not actually say it) I leave with a residue of guilt. How can I possibly prefer having some quiet time to write to playing with my child? Why do I never manage to make it there by 4:30, his documented breakdown time? It's unabashedly about me, this guilt, but it's how my love manifests itself, and I'm pretty convinced it's part of every mother's life.

Now, add to the guilt over sending my child to daycare a dollop of guilt on top over denying my mother-in-law precious time with her grandchild. ("A large dollop," my niece said last night as I asked her how much whipped cream she wanted with her key lime pie.)

To be fair, I'm planning on picking Jake up early tomorrow and not taking him at all on Monday, her last day in town. Still, a certain amount of panic tip-toed through my veins this morning when my brother-in-law -- with whom she stayed last night -- called to say she was on her way here.

"Wait!" I wanted to cry. I thought this was my day to work and go to yoga class and take Jake to school guilt free.

Well -- all mind-generated, panicked evidence to the contrary -- it is. We had breakfast and sent my sister-in-law and niece on their way back to West Virginia and walked Jake to school. It would have been easier on me if Jake hadn't made it seem like I was lying when I told his grandmother he no longer cries when I leave him, but he did have a pretty awesome time with his family yesterday and you can't blame a guy for failing to understand that we weren't all planning on having another party today without him.

The only problem was my urge to apologize for not apologizing. It did that thing to my brain where I could not for the life of me think of anything to talk about on the walk back home. Because I was trying too hard to think of something to talk about and all that was coming to mind were justifications for my decision to send Jake to school today.

So we walked home pushing an empty stroller to the sound of birds calling out their welcome to spring.

It was when my mother-in-law was helping me unload the dishwasher that I realized all she expects me to do is live my life and make her a part of it. She doesn't expect an apology. And, when you stop to think about it, very rarely does anyone else we think wants us to apologize for something we don't think we should apologize for (but kind of worry that maybe we should). I just don't think most of the people I know care that deeply about what I do that they think I have to explain it to them one way or another.

Goals, Expectations, and Intentions

An asana practice is fundamentally built around the understanding that we should replace our goals with intentions. As an illustration, a goal is losing 15 pounds in time to put on a bikini this summer; an intention is taking care of one's body, eating healthy food, and exercising so when the time comes to go to the beach you can put on whatever feels comfortable. Which, if you stay true to your intention, may very well be that bikini, collapsed mommy bellybutton and all.

Expectations can come only from goals. If I set a goal of losing a certain amount of weight (even if it might turn out along the way that I don't need to lose that much -- or any -- at all), I pretty much expect myself to do it. Or, worse, expect myself to fail. Either way, I'm going to have this expectation looming over me and weighing me down (so to speak).

And there, on the next beach towel over, is the woman who set an intention instead of a goal and hasn't failed to meet any expectations because she never had any. Or, when she realized that she actually did have certain expectations -- because, come on, this is a pretty fraught analogy -- she let them go. Most of us feel plenty bad in a bikini as it is, without heaping failed expectations on ourselves as well.

So let's firmly push away the idea of having to wear a bikini and return to the matter at hand. With goals come expectations.

But it gets even more insidious. Because when I start to form my goals around other people, I assume expectations for them without so much as a quick consultation to see if the thought that I am supposed to do something in particular had even crossed their mind.

Hence, if my goal is to make sure my mother-in-law enjoys her visit, I expect her to have expectations of what I will do when she is here. It's like I have to make her enjoy herself, as if I and I alone have that power; and, in turn, as if she expects me to do so. Frankly, I'm a lot lower than that on her important-people-in-Asheville list, considering she has two sons and two grandchildren here who must rank above me, no matter how much she loves me too.

Without a doubt, my intention is that she enjoy herself, and looking at it that way helps me recognize that there are a million ways she can do that. It lets me let go of expectations -- the ones I have for myself and the ones I create for others.

Best of all, for the first time in a long, new mother time, I feel like I can once again just be me around my mother-in-law.

Getting the Kinks Out with Supta Padangustasana (Reclined Head-to-Knee Sequence)

As an homage to how twisted we moms and our expectations are, and to remind us that it's not that hard to straighten ourselves out, I offer supta padangustasana, reclined head-to-knee pose. Only that's a really bad translation because right away there's this goal that my head is supposed to actually touch my knee and this expectation that if I practice faithfully enough one day it will. Plus, if you want to get technical about it, your head eventually touches your shin, not your knee. But wipe that vision out of your head because head-to-knee is hard enough to deal with already.

The neat thing here is that twists in yoga actually untwist you inside. The best image you can carry with you when performing twists is of wringing out a washcloth -- a very supple, beautiful washcloth with a heart, but one that is also soaking wet and thus laden down. As you twist, you wring out the tension that we all hold along our spines. And if we back off of goal-focused yoga and don't twist beyond our abilities, our hearts have more space to sing.

Supta padangustasana has the added pleasure of starting with some straightening. The first two phases of the pose allow you to open your hamstrings and hip sockets. Done properly, they also align the spine. By the time you become that happy washcloth, you're dripping with stuff to release.

Best of all, there are many variations of this pose, so you can really let go of your expectations and see just how beautiful your body and life really are.

Supta Padangustasana A

1) Lie on your back. Take a moment to feel the alignment of your spine. You should be able to breathe freely and easily and feel an evenness in your body, especially between your two shoulders and two hips.

2) Bend your right knee toward your chest and give it a hug to release your lower back.

3) Let your knee move away from your chest so your lower back returns to the floor. Let it rest here as you: a) loop a strap over the sole of your foot and hold the ends in your right hand; b) hold onto your calf with your right hand; or c) grasp your big toe with the first two fingers of your right hand between your big toe and second toe and your right thumb on the outside of your big toe. (Tighter hamstrings consider the a) option; more open ones move toward c))

4) Keep your lower back relaxing on the floor as you straighten your right leg overhead. If this is enough to help straighten you out, stay here.

5) Check in with your left leg. Make sure it is still strongly stretching out along the floor. Keep your foot flexed so your left toes point toward the ceiling.

6) Place your left hand on the left side of your pelvis to help keep it down on the floor. Its tendency will be to pop up to accommodate a deeper version of the pose than your body is ready for. If you let it do so, you are letting a goal get the better of you.

7) If you are able while keeping your lower back on the floor, slowly start to bring your right foot toward your head. As soon as you feel your lower back start to leave the floor, stop and observe just where your body is.

8) Let each exhale relax your lower back more and more. Let each inhale move up your spine to open your heart. Stay here for 5-10 breaths.

Supta Padangustasana B

1) On your next exhale, press your left hand firmly onto the left side of your pelvis to keep your balance and honesty, and start to open your right leg out to the right in a straddle. If it is easy for you to lower your leg to the floor, start to draw your right foot gently in the direction of your right ear.

2) You may have to switch from fingers-on-toes to hand-on-calf or to a strap here. This is not a failing because you shouldn't have any expectations of yourself.

3) Strongly draw your right femur bone into your right hip socket for support and don't forget to relax your lower back into the floor.

4) Stay here for 5-10 breaths and let go of the struggle.

Supta Padangustasana C

1) On your next inhale, draw your right leg up to the sky again. Replace your right hand grip with your left hand (holding straps, on the outside of your right calf, or on the outside or your right foot).

2) As you exhale, let your right leg lower to the left side, drawing you into a twist. You may find it far more comfortable to bend your right knee here, and will get just as much of a benefit from the twist with bent knee. (All a straight leg does is help open the IT band on the outside of your leg.)

3) Take a moment to find your spine's alignment here. You may need to scoot your left hip (the one now on the floor) over to the right a bit. Both of your shoulders should relax into the floor. If your right shoulder is lifting, back out of the twist or bend your right knee. You want to give your heart space to sing by letting your chest face the sky.

4) With each inhale, let your heart lift up and out. With each exhale, feel the distance between your right (top) hip and your right armpit. Stay here for 5-10 breaths.

5) When you are ready, either with your right leg straight or knee bent, roll onto your back, hug both knees in, and realign your spine.

Lower your right leg straight to the floor and repeat on the left side.

Remember, you're just straightening yourself out here. No one expects anything of you.

Though they surely will appreciate you acting with love and kindness. And that's so very much easier to do when you can credit others with acting with love and kindness (or their best approximation of it) toward you.

When Family Visits Cross Paths with Our Personal Journeys

2008-04-08T09:49:00.001-07:00

Any moment now, my mother-in-law, sister-in-law, and niece are going to arrive at my house.

I am, I report with pleasure and a little bit of pride, not in complete meltdown mode, despite just now sitting down to write when there's really no time left to do so. While this was my priority when I woke up this morning, I somehow found it more pressing to clean the shredded bits of tennis ball off the living room floor and toss the yogurt-smeared tablecloth in the washing machine. Then I noticed the diaper pail odor emanating from Jake's room and attacked it with a bottle of orange-scented Seventh Generation bathroom cleaner (perhaps not intended for use on plastic diaper pails, but bathroom functions are bathroom functions). As long as I was paying attention to things I should clean far more often in Jake's room, I figured I ought to give his sheets a wash -- which is harder than it sounds because the organic crib mattress we bought for him seems to be just a half an inch bigger than the standard crib mattress, so that lifting it up enough to change the sheet requires a certain amount of grit. And there was the dishwasher to unload, the huge, plastic screw organizer to move from the kitchen counter to the sun porch that has become one giant tool box, the winter coats to transfer from hallway hooks to the deep storage of the coat closet.

Do I seem nervous?

There's nothing wrong with letting visitors shake us out of our "what mess?" torpor. But there's a certain edge of something else when the visitors are relatives, especially the ones we inherited by marriage.

Did I worry this much before we had Jake? I just don't think so.

There are so many layers to trying to be a mother in front of your partner's mother. Especially one who was as good at it as my mother-in-law was. Really good. Also, I discovered on her first post-Jake visit, different from me. Of course, every mother is different. But, still, if my mother-in-law mothered differently from me, and she was a good mother, what kind of mother does that make me?

If you're reading this without your mother or mother-in-law in the house, you are probably calmly saying, "Why can't you both be good mothers?" Try asking yourself the same question next time you're in my shoes. Unless you don't think much of your own mother's or mother-in-law's parenting skills. In which case, I'm sure you will have no trouble finding someone else who makes you feel similarly inadequate.

It's one thing to follow our own path, and it's another to look up and see that someone else is
following a different one. A fundamental way our minds work is by comparison. A child begins to understand who he is by recognizing that other people are different beings from him. And before you know it, he's attaching labels to others' differences. And with those labels, in short order, comes judgment.

It reminds me of my first year of law school (when people are not so very different from developing infants, in temperament at least). I kept telling myself that I must have known how to study reasonably well, since I got good grades in college and got into law school. But all around me, people were screaming that I had to study differently from how I had in the past. They were all rushing to study groups, briefing every case they read, spending their beer money on commercial outlines, and generally making me feel very, very insecure. It didn't matter what I knew in my heart; my mind convinced me that if there was a different way it was probably better.

And so it is with relatives. You know you're a good mother; you get to the point where you can hold your head up with a certain amount of self-assurance when you drop your child off at daycare. But somehow none of it's good enough when another good mother who happens to be related to you shows up. It doesn't matter how certain you are that you're a good mother who makes good choices; you start to wonder whether everyone else thinks so as well.

I realize I'm saying two things here, probably because I feel like I've found a way to push away the thoughts of the first so my mind tossed the second at me. The first is: "I don't feel like a good mother around someone I know is a good mother because somehow we can't both be good mothers if we're different." To be honest, I do feel like a good mother, even when my own mother is suggesting I'm not.

So along comes the corollary: "I know I'm a good mother. But does my mother-in-law know it?"

The answer is, yes. She tells me all the time. And yet. I fear judgment because I heap it upon myself. Why? Because I'm human.

Non-judgment

Who hasn't learned that the easiest way to feel better about yourself is to judge others? It's probably the only thing I learned in high school that I actually remember.

Well, no one said yoga was easy. But it does offer a better way to feel good about yourself without putting other people down to do it. And when I say "putting other people down" I'm not talking about the high-strung depressive saying nasty things about other people in a lofty tone of voice while you cringe in a corner because, while you might have learned this stuff in high school, you managed to grow up somewhere along the way.

I'm talking about the habit we all have, no matter how subtle, no matter how kind hearted, of judging other people, even if we ultimately proclaim them okay.

For example, when I arrive at Jake's school during snack time I look at what the other kids are eating, initially for ideas of what I can offer him. But when I see the scary bright purple and green goldfish on one child's plate, I immediately pat myself on the back for refusing to serve my child junk food. And then, being a yoga-centered person, I remind myself not to judge and allow that this child's mother has lovingly chosen perfectly nutritious food for her.

Or I listen to the mother yelling at her child in the airport bathroom and want to cry because I am convinced that child has lived without an ounce of soft affection and understanding his entire life. It takes a good while for me to convince myself that just maybe that mother was exhausted and frustrated by travel and uncharacteristically snapped just this once. Maybe that's not the case, but if ever I'm the mother yelling in the airport bathroom it will be. And will anyone know? Or will they just judge me as I have judged this mother?

So. We judge others because we are human. And because we judge others we expect to be judged ourselves. Being devoted yoga practitioners, we notice ourselves judging and let the judgment go. And, naturally, it comes back, perhaps less frequently, maybe less sharply, but without fail. And we continue to practice.

The problem is, sometimes you find yourself in a situation where feeling judged really throws you off your game and it's harder than ever to practice non-judgment. Like when your mother-in-law is visiting.

Such times call for a little extra intervention.

Savasana (corpse pose) meditation

Those of us who have a regular asana practice know savasana, corpse pose, as that period of blessed rest at the end of a good practice when you let your body relax deeply and absorb your practice.

But your practice, remember, is far more than the asanas you've performed for just an hour and a half out of your day. It's the emotions those asanas help release, the balance between future and past, the being in the now, the quieting of your mind. It is, for the purposes of this discussion, the practice of recognizing when you are judging, stopping, and then recognizing when you naturally judge again.

It seems to me I have two choices when I get wound up about being judged (no doubt 90% of it by myself). Either I can draw on the lessons of high school and judge right back in order to satisfy my mind that I'm a good mother. Or I can draw on the lessons of yoga and let my practice of non-judgment sink in.

I know which one I choose. And if I slip in the next few days, well, that's just more practice in not judging myself for judging someone else because I fear they are judging me.

Savasana (corpse pose)

It's easy to forget that savasana is a pose just like any other. What an opportunity, then, to truly appreciate it when relatives are visiting and you feel stretched thin and pulled away from your life and like you need to prove you're a good mother and the only yoga you have time for is lying on the floor of your bedroom practicing savasana before going to bed. If your partner tells you you are being crazy, assure him or her that you are trying to make yourself just the opposite.

1) Lie on your back on your mat. If you have a tight lower back, it may feel good to place a rolled up blanket under your knees. If your heart is feeling particularly closed in, you may roll a blanket along its longer edge and place it under your spine, putting a kink in it where your neck rests.

2) Close your eyes and take a few minutes to find the pose. Lift your right leg slightly off the floor and let it stretch away from your pelvis at a 45 degree angle (roughly toward the lower corner of your mat). Do the same with your left leg.

3) Lift your right arm to create space for a gentle shoulder roll, bringing your shoulder blade underneath you to support your heart. As with your legs, make space between your arm and your shoulder socket before letting the arm rest on the mat, palm up, at roughly a 45 degree angle from your body. Do the same with your left arm.

4) Roll your head gently from side to side until you find a comfortable resting place, Make sure your neck is long by very slightly tucking your chin and then releasing. Swallow to relax your throat.

5) Take a moment to feel your body. Start to scan it slowly in your mind's eyes, finding places where you are gripping, and letting them go.

6) Notice the moments when your heart lifts. When you have finished your scan, return to the presence of your heart energy and let it flow.

A Meditation Exercise

Now comes the hardest and most important part of the pose -- relaxing your mind.

1) Focus on the pause right after you exhale and before you inhale. Don't draw it out. Just observe it. Note how at this one moment you are perfectly still.

2) When you have found this stillness, observe the stillness right after your inhale and before you exhale. Notice what happens to your body and mind during this short moment of stillness.

3) After you have found your stillness, see if you can maintain it during your exhales. Feel as though the exhale is moving through your body into the ground.

4) When and if you have found this stillness, see if you can maintain it during your inhales. Feel as though the inhale is moving through your body from the air around you.

5) Notice what happens when you are still. Feel the energy of the Universe that now moves through you unimpeded. Let it lift your heart and release your heart energy.

6) Observe the ways the energy moves through your body and open to it.

7) Spend some time watching your heart open and release its own beautiful energy. It may unfold like a million-petaled lotus flower. Let this energy join the energy that is flowing through you.

Coming out of Savasana

1) When you are ready, return your mind one more time to your heart. Recognize your own beauty, your peace, your center. This is you without the need to find yourself by comparison to other people.

2) Become conscious again of your breath, deepening it and sending it into your body. Become aware of the shape of your body with a new appreciation of its beauty.

3) Very gently, as if moving for the first time, let your fingers and toes move. Try not to let this bodily movement disrupt the stillness of your mind and soul.

4) As you are ready, let the movement travel into your arms and legs. Continue to focus your mind on remaining still and remembering the beauty and peace and centeredness of your heart.

5) Bend your right elbow and start to stretch your right arm overhead. At the same time bend your right knee toward your chest and then your left knee. This circle of action will roll you onto your right side in fetal position.

6) Remain here for a moment with your head pillowed on your right arm. So often, I see yoga students immediately move toward the end of class. Instead, remain here and think of yourself as a snow globe that has been shaken when you rolled onto your right side. Let all the crystals settle back down again as you regain your sense of stillness.

7) As you lie on your right side, notice how your left arm naturally crosses in front of your heart, sealing your practice. It is this protection that allows you to move into the rest of your life and your house full of relatives with an open heart.

8) When you have found your stillness, keeping your eyes closed, find your way to a comfortable seated position.

9) Once again, let the crystals settle and find your stillness. It helps to rest your hands on your knees, palms down, first finger and thumb touching to bring your attention inside.

10) When you have found your stillness, release your hands and stretch them to the side, palms up. Circle them until your palms meet overhead, drawing in all the lovely energy you have created.

11) When your palms meet overhead, draw them straight down to rest in front of your heart in angeli mudra, prayer position. Recognize that in this position your are offering your heart. Know that when you offer your heart to others, they will offer their hearts to you. There's no need to judge because you share the same heart energy.

12) Finally, bow your head to your heart and feel deep, deep gratitude for who you are.

Carry that gratitude with you everywhere. You are a wonderful mother.