Recently one of the teacher trainees lingered after class to chat. Her message was this:

“Thank you for letting me suck and not making me feel bad about it. Because if I felt bad about it, it would probably push me even further away where I wouldn’t even want to try.”

We can all relate, right?

In high school I dreaded competition, or rather the idea of sucking, so much that I didn’t play sports. As an adult I have quit or avoided things I wasn’t good at.

Granted, there is some wisdom in this — go where your natural proclivity is, go where things flow easily.

But there is obvious benefit in having to work hard for something, charting improvement, or not improving and just doing it for the joy of the doing rather than for the goal of a result.

And perhaps the greatest gift is the permission we can give ourselves — to not want to try, to try and fail, to suck.

What would you do if sucking at it really bad made no difference?

I’ll go first… I would:

play music in public
write a book
plant a garden
cook without a recipe
volunteer to work with kids with developmental disabilities learning to ride horses
teach more

Your turn…….

Patience is a hard discipline. It is not just waiting until something happens over which we have no control: the arrival of the bus, the end of the rain, the return of a friend, the resolution of a conflict. Patience is not waiting passively until someone else does something. Patience asks us to live the moment to the fullest, to be completely present to the moment, to taste the here and now, to be where we are. When we are impatient, we try to get away from where we are. We behave as if the real thing will happen tomorrow, later, and somewhere else. Let’s be patient and trust that the treasure we look for is hidden in the ground on which we stand.

~Henri Nouwen, Catholic priest

Remember when Real Life was coming through the walls of the studio?

Well, life is at it again, this time in the form of a new roof!

I couldn’t be more happy, as rain shower in the studio is not ideal. And… I am once again up against my ingrained idea that it is my job to create a perfectly quiet, protected cocoon in which to experience the blissful state of Yoga.

Until I remember, there is no such place.

For the next four days, the beat of the hammer will represent the pulse of the class. We will meet life as is rather than manufactured.

I am grateful to have such “first world problems” as there are some distractions during my Yoga practice and a new roof to shield us.

How do you meet distractions in your practice? If you teach, do you feel protective of students and their experience?

 As a high school senior I thought I’d known enough heart break to be able to profess as my senior quote that “things are never what they seem.”

Served with a twist, I also have the experience that what I plan or expect is exactly not what will happen.

You’ve heard of Olympians who spend hours visualizing winning the race, golfers who meditate on the ball going in the hole? But here’s the glitch: If all ten sprinters visualize crossing the finish line first, nine are going to be wrong.

For my whole life this has worked so opposite for me that I actually used to picture the thing I didn’t want to have happen so that it wouldn’t. I tried not to think about how I wanted it to go.

If I imagine an event going one way, it doesn’t.

If I rehearse (admittedly not quite visualization) an interaction I’m planning, it takes an unexpected turn.

If I think I know where someone else is coming from, I’m wrong every time.

I know it works for a lot of people, but for me…

Things are never what they seem.

What about you? Do you visualize the ideal outcome? Does it work?

This week a friend gave me a piece of advice:

Make it all about you.

Meaning… indulge in things you love, make decisions based on what you need and want, give yourself permission to be a little selfish.

At first I thought, Yaaaaaa. I’m gonna make it all. about. me.

And then I got a little queasy.

It sounds great in theory — I’m going to take a bath and then a nap and then order my favorite take out, say No to the invitation I’m not interested in, and ask for what I want from the people in my life.

However… aren’t there other people to consider? Feelings? Responsibilities? What if I disappoint someone?

It’s true, there are other considerations. But my guess is that most of us don’t live in a bubble of our own world. Consider how often you make your decisions based on what someone else wants. For me, it’s more often than not.

So here’s the challenge. Choose a duration of time — a week, an day, an evening — and make it all about you. Let your loved ones know, set yourself up with super-indulgence of your favorite things, and don’t fold. Make it all about you:

Ask inwardly what you want, what you need.
Be aware of any hint of answer, even if it isn’t what you expected.
Have the courage to give that thing to yourself.

This sounds deceptively easy. It is not.

But particularly powerful in times of transition, major life stress, or low self-esteem.

Try it on and let me know.

Recently I was asked to consider a perspective different from my own:

Sometimes there are things or feelings that can’t be made better.
Is there a little relief in knowing that something can’t be fixed?

I’ve been sitting with this idea for the past month. Not sure if there is relief in this, but perhaps a hint of acceptance that there is some pain that is simply meant to be experienced. Not fixed. Which also means not avoided.

For me these are feelings of grief, aloneness, not belonging.

Is there something you’re struggling with that can’t be fixed? Would that in some way be a relief? That you don’t have to do anything about it?

Poet and teacher David Whyte says that the human heart can’t believe how much pain and suffering there is in this life. And that after a great loss, something in us says, if this is the way the game is played, then I’m not playing.

I would add to that the shock of the pain we cause others. How humbling and difficult it is to hold, to own the fact that inevitably, and sometimes unbeknownst to us, we hurt other people.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this pain lately. Certainly the hurts of the past year, but also memories and images from long ago.

How much pain and suffering there is in this life.

Since the poets say it best, here are two that speak to my heart. The first by Wendell Berry:

A Warning to My Readers

Do not think me gentle
because I speak in praise
of gentleness, or elegant
because I honor the grace
that keeps this world. I am
a man crude as any,
gross of speech, intolerant,
stubborn, angry, full
of fits and furies. That I
may have spoken well
at times, is not natural.
A wonder is what it is.

And the second from Robert Bly:

Wounding Others

Well I do it, and it’s done.
And it can’t be taken back.
There’s a wound in my chest
Where I wounded others.

But it will knit, or heal, in time.
That’s what you say.
And some that I wounded
Claim: “I am the better for it.”

Was it truth-telling or
A thin man with a knife?
The wound will close, or heal
In time. That’s what you say.

As I continue to meditate on the human condition of hurts as well as joys, I send into the new year the following Buddhist prayer of forgiveness:

If I have harmed anyone in any way
either knowingly or unknowingly
through my own confusions
I ask their forgiveness.

If anyone has harmed me in any way
either knowingly or unknowingly
through their own confusions
I forgive them.

And if there is a situation
I am not yet ready to forgive
I forgive myself for that.

For all the ways that I harm myself,
negate, doubt, belittle myself,
judge or be unkind to myself
through my own confusions
I forgive myself.

And so it is.

From Stephen King, “Different Seasons,” ‘The Body’

The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things that you get ashamed of, because words diminish them— words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you’ve said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That’s the worst, I think, when the secret stays locked within—not for want of a teller— but for want of an understanding ear.

Here’s what I wish for you this new year:

An understanding ear.
The feeling of being known.
The feeling of being home.
The feeling of being whole.

With or without your New Year Resolutions.

Cheers, love, and happy 2012.

Many years ago I was the maid of honor in a friend’s wedding. I wanted to read something deep and meaningful so I went to my bookshelf where the mysterious books my grandmother had given me lived: books with browned and cracked covers, by authors whose names I couldn’t pronounce. Books for mature and wise eyes.

I opened Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet and turned to the chapter On Love thinking Well this will be a no-brainer!

Much to my dismay the piece was a total downer. Not at all appropriate for a happy wedding reading. I probably made a that smells bad face and moved on to Joan Walsh Anglund.

We do not know what we do not know.

Returning to this passage all these years later, all these experiences later, I understand. Or at least I understand in a different way.

Threshed, quivering, naked and pliant.

I hope you have a moment to take it in. Read it slowly. Drink it like warm tea. Aloud if you can. To a Friend if you are inclined.

From the Prophet by Kahlil Gibran

When love beckons to you, follow him,
Though his ways are hard and steep.
And when his wings enfold you yield to him,
Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.
And when he speaks to you believe in him,
Though his voice may shatter your dreams
as the north wind lays waste the garden.

For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you. Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning.
Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun,
So shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth.

Like sheaves of corn he gathers you unto himself.
He threshes you to make you naked.
He sifts you to free you from your husks.
He grinds you to whiteness.
He kneads you until you are pliant;
And then he assigns you to his sacred fire, that you may become sacred bread for God’s sacred feast.

All these things shall love do unto you that you may know the secrets of your heart, and in that knowledge become a fragment of Life’s heart.

But if in your fear you would seek only love’s peace and love’s pleasure,
Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love’s threshing-floor,
Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.
Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself.
Love possesses not nor would it be possessed;
For love is sufficient unto love.

When you love you should not say, “God is in my heart,” but rather, “I am in the heart of God.”
And think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.

Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself.
But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires:
To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.
To know the pain of too much tenderness.
To be wounded by your own understanding of love;
And to bleed willingly and joyfully.
To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving;
To rest at the noon hour and meditate love’s ecstasy;
To return home at eventide with gratitude;
And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips.