Rox Does Yoga

Yoga, Wellness, and Life

books: The Magicians January 24, 2013

Filed under: books,reflections — R. H. Ward @ 1:03 pm
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The Magicians, by Lev GrossmanLast week I read a book called The Magicians, by Lev Grossman. We meet the main character, Quentin Coldwater, during his senior year in high school. He’s a brilliantly gifted but awkward kid, dreaming of his best friend’s girl and trying to get into Princeton because that’s what seems to be expected of him. Instead, he receives an invitation to attend a secret college for magicians. Quentin had practiced card tricks and sleight of hand, but apparently he has a gift for the real kind of magic also.

Quentin is no Harry Potter. Frequently depressed, Quentin’s life is characterized by disappointment that all the things that were supposed to make him happy never do. This makes some sense when he’s younger – what smart awkward kid is ever happy in high school? – but his disillusionment returns again and again. A magical school is what he’d hoped for his whole life, but after the wonder wears off and the hard work sets in, Quentin isn’t happy there. And later on, with graduation looming and afterward, Quentin still isn’t happy, despite the fact that with his powers he could do, literally, anything he wants.

Quentin keeps expecting the circumstances of his life to bring him happiness. He thinks that if he works hard and does what he’s supposed to do, happiness will happen to him, like a reward. What he doesn’t realize is that he’ll never be happy if he doesn’t change his attitude. Alice, the girl Quentin loves, sees his problem and tells him he needs to recognize just how lucky he is. “You can’t just decide to be happy,” Quentin says, to which Alice responds, “Yes, but you can decide to be miserable.”

Although our problems are less magical, most of us are a lot like Quentin. We work hard and then expect happiness to come to us, always looking ahead to something else that, like magic, will make us happy. We expect happiness to be a country we can inhabit where, if we can just get there, we’ll never be sad again. But happiness has to come from within. It’s an attitude, a state of mind. If we can let go of our expectations about what it means to be happy and open ourselves to the possibility of being happy right here, right now, then we can experience what happiness truly can be.

 

Food Update: The High Price of Quinoa January 22, 2013

Filed under: reflections,yoga lifestyle — R. H. Ward @ 1:32 pm
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This is really disturbing: Can Vegans Stomach the Unpalatable Truth About Quinoa?

As a vegetarian, one of my guiding principles has been ahimsa, or nonviolence. It began to seem more and more wrong to me to fuel my body on another creature’s pain and death, so I eliminated all beef, pork, and poultry from my diet (although I still eat fish, eggs, and dairy products, first because I believe that it’s healthiest to make these sorts of drastic changes gradually, and then also because I got pregnant and didn’t want to lose the protein and other nutrients when my body most needed them). Not eating meat, I’ve naturally been exploring other foods like beans, chickpeas, couscous, and quinoa. Granted, I don’t buy quinoa often because it tends to be pricey, but I’ve loved it when I’ve eaten it. And through all of my vegetarian journey, I’ve been proud of myself for  identifying and sticking with a change I wanted to make to my behavior based on what I believed was right.

Now, according to this article, the farming of quinoa is seriously damaging the people in Bolivia, making it hard for them to afford a food that’s traditionally been a staple of their diet and pushing them towards unhealthy mass-produced imported foods. Since I began my vegetarian journey on the principle of ahimsa, I find this really upsetting. The West’s hunger for this new exotic food is obviously doing violence to these people. There are a number of non-profits who work in urban communities in the US that don’t have access to healthy fresh foods, and I believe in that mission, so it seems two-faced to support an industry that deprives people in another part of the world of healthy fresh food.

I’m not going to say that, based on this one article (which is pretty subjective, honestly), I’m never going to eat quinoa again. I think if you take to heart every story you see in the news about food, you’ll end up living on water and cardboard. But I do hope to do some more research on this issue, and to think more about it. Since becoming a vegetarian I’ve leaned towards locally grown or US-grown foods anyway, so if I try to continue following that path, I’ll eliminate much of the problem (and that goes for asparagus too, which now I’m also concerned about). But because vegetarianism began for me as a moral choice rather than a health choice, I owe it to myself to examine my assumptions about the food I eat and the impact my food has in the world, regardless of whether it’s an animal product.

 

Creating Identity-Based Habits January 17, 2013

Filed under: reflections,yoga,yoga lifestyle — R. H. Ward @ 1:11 pm
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Here’s an interesting look at new year’s resolutions: Stick to Your Goals This Year by Using Identity-Based Habits. The idea is that most resolutions are appearance-based or performance-based (consider “I want to lose 20 pounds” or “I want to do more yoga”). Most people start off highly motivated but then lose momentum and don’t succeed at their goals. What this author, James Clear, recommends is that you focus not on changing your appearance or your performance, but that you set goals that change your identity. In essence, you become the kind of person who can accomplish what you want to do.

For example, if you have a goal of wanting to do more yoga, you might start off strong by getting to the yoga studio or the gym twice a week. But then life catches up with you, you get a cold, you miss a few sessions, and then despite your good intentions, you realize you haven’t done any yoga in a month. But “do more yoga” is a performance-based goal, which you fulfill by performing the task of showing up at class repeatedly. Consider instead an identity-based goal: something like “I want to be the kind of person who really cares about yoga”. Then you could start with small steps, like doing a sun salutation every morning. Once you’ve made that a part of your daily habits, you start to see yourself as a person whose yoga really matters to her, and you can branch out to larger yoga-related goals.

You could even try “I want to be a yoga teacher” (or, “I want to be a yoga teacher again”). Before my teacher training, I had an image in my head of what a yoga teacher is like, and that person was not me. Because I enrolled in a training program which required a significant investment of time and money, I felt like I was committed, and I began to put in my own time to make sure I got the most out of my investment. I practiced yoga and pranayama and meditation every day, read books about yoga, wrote this blog. The constant practice shaped me, and more importantly shaped my concept of myself, from “yoga-enjoying person” to “real actual yoga teacher”. I began to see myself differently, which only drove my yoga practice further as I became someone who not only wanted more but was capable of more. This example is a little extreme and beyond the scope of a new year’s resolution, but thinking about identity this way is just really interesting.

Recently I’ve started to become very invested in motherhood – I see myself as a mother first, and I’ve lost some of that concept of myself as a competent, confident yoga teacher. What do I need to do to rebuild that part of my identity? A regular yoga practice of some sort will have to be one of the first things I work on, but I also have to remember that a yoga teacher takes care of herself too (and, for example, doesn’t force herself to get up early to practice if the baby kept her up all night). Even just keeping up with this blog more often reminds me that I’m a yoga teacher. There are plenty of little ways I can start reinforcing my yoga identity again. Once I reconstruct my basic idea of myself as a yoga teacher, then I’ll be the kind of person who can accomplish even more: teaching a regular weekly class again, preparing and teaching a special workshop, maybe even planning the yoga and writing retreat that Heather and I have dreamed of. But that’s the long term – little steps first!

 

2012: Year in Review / 2013: Year in Preview January 15, 2013

Filed under: checking in,reflections,yoga lifestyle — R. H. Ward @ 1:25 pm
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Last January, I set out a long and detailed list of goals. Looking back on that list, I kind of can’t believe that I even remotely considered all of those things to be possible when I started out 2012 four months pregnant. I wanted to keep up with all my interests and passions, keep moving my yoga career forward. I was so determined not to lose “myself” in having a baby. I had no idea, about so many things. I had no idea how much I would love being pregnant, or how active a state it is: that I could just sit there and be pregnant and I’d be totally busy. I had no idea how much rest I would need while I was pregnant, or how much energy and mobility I would lose. And I had no idea how drastically and irrevocably my life would change on July 8 when YogaBaby entered the world, how my priorities would instantly rearrange themselves around her. I realized last summer than I wasn’t in danger of losing “myself” in motherhood. Losing my free time and the ability to go out at night, sure. But “myself” is deeper and more confident and just MORE because of my love for her.

So, yeah, 2012 was a heck of a year. I gave birth. My child is still breathing, and despite all my fears and worries, I haven’t done anything to drastically harm her yet. In fact, she’s thriving, and smiling, and generally being awesome. And I learn new things about her, and about myself, every day.

But 2012 wasn’t just the year I became a parent. I published my first poetry chapbook! Which is a pretty big milestone – it just didn’t feel like it at the time, since my copies of the book arrived about a week after YB did. I also published three book reviews at good publications and had favorable responses to reviewing queries at others. I got solicited for poems for really the first time; the editor loved the work and one of the poems will be printed this year in a magazine that has probably a lot more readers than anywhere else I’ve ever published. And I managed to make some forward progress on the new poems – not as much as I would have liked, but under the circumstances I’ll take any forward progress as a success.

And 2012 was a good year for yoga. I taught prenatal yoga, which was unexpected and fantastic, and I taught at Awaken, which was a great opportunity at a great studio. I registered with Yoga Alliance, got my yoga Facebook page up and running, and kept this blog going, albeit at a much reduced pace. I didn’t meet my goal of reading one yoga-related book per month, or of following up on yoga book reviewing, but I did still read four books that related to my yoga goals, which isn’t too bad. My personal yoga practice disappeared for a while, which was sad but necessary, and I worked hard to find my yoga in other places and give myself the space to be imperfect.

So now it’s 2013. I’m at risk of setting another bunch of impossible goals for myself, but I do want to make a few resolutions. I want to get back some sort of a physical hatha yoga practice, and I’ve started steps to make that happen (they involve the alarm clock and YB sleeping well, so it’s kind of a shaky plan at best, but initial experiments are promising). I want to keep educating myself about yoga and spirituality, and I want to take some steps towards reestablishing myself as a yoga teacher, even just in my own mind. I want to keep recording my journey here and maybe try to be a bit more regular about it. Most important of all is that I want to be a good mother to YB. And taking care of myself, regaining some of my yoga and meditation practice -and continuing to give myself the space to be imperfect – is a crucial part of doing that.

 

The Beauty of Imperfection December 28, 2012

Filed under: reflections,yoga lifestyle — R. H. Ward @ 1:03 pm
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I’ve been thinking a lot about perfection lately. Now that I’m at my new job and my good friend K and I work for the same company again, we usually have lunch together several times a week. After hearing me enumerate my woes and personal shortcomings over lunch for two days in a row, K said to me, “You know, I’ve been thinking about it, and a lot of your problem is that you try so hard to be perfect all the time. And you don’t have to do that.”

K is totally right, and I’d never really thought about my actions in those terms before – that I try to be perfect. But it’s what I do. At work I want everyone to think I’m smart, competent, and efficient, and sometimes I put up fronts to make it seem as if I don’t make mistakes. In my writing I labor over my poems, stories, and book reviews for ages, rarely sending anything out to be considered for publication because I never think the work is good enough. At home and in my personal life, this tendency shows itself most strongly. I take housekeeping personally and obsess about the dusty floors; if we have people over then I run myself ragged trying to be the perfect hostess. I guilt myself over every little way I fail to be perfect: forgotten phone calls and birthday cards, wasted minutes on Facebook when I should be doing something useful, every single time I perceive myself as having said the wrong thing. And I can’t even count all the ways that I’ve failed as a mother already. I try to make my appearance perfect too, obsessing over wearing the right clothes and shoes, feeling uncomfortable all day if I didn’t have time to dry my hair in the morning. And that shit should have been over back in high school.

Sometimes striving to be perfect causes me pain on the happiest occasions. I woke up sobbing the morning after my wedding with regrets about things I’d done or failed to do on the big day. It took a long time for that guilt to go away and for me to remember our wedding day as the beautiful day it was, without those distortions. And the most painful area where I failed to be perfect was YogaBaby’s birth.

We’d taken a birth preparation class focused on using self-hypnosis to control pain, and saw all these videos of women calm and peaceful during labor, almost as if they were sleeping. I wanted such a beautiful, peaceful, all-natural childbirth, and with the techniques I was learning, combined with the yoga, meditation, and breathing practices I already knew, I thought that giving birth would be no problem. Of course when the time came, it was fast and intense and hurt worse than anything I’d ever experienced. Some of the relaxation techniques we’d learned in class helped a lot, but the hypnosis flew out the window. As I brought my daughter into the world, I was crying, writhing, and screaming. Her birth was an amazing, magical event, and holding her in my arms for the first time will always be the most beautiful moment of my life. But I’m carrying around all this guilt and shame about how I acted during the labor. I know that I did an awesome job – I birthed my daughter with no medicine, no epidural, and she came out healthy and strong. I know this, and I hate having these guilty feelings in my heart surrounding such a profound, meaningful experience. But it’s still there.

So what I want to say now is, Screw perfect. There is no perfect. I (and all of you out there nodding your heads as you read this) need to let go of perfect. We don’t have to do it all. I’m going to start sending out my poems again, even though I don’t think they’re ready. We hired a cleaning service to come to our house once a month, and I’m going to revel in the relief I feel about that instead of feeling guilty that I can’t do it all myself. And most of all, I’m going to strive to let go of the desire to be a perfect wife and mother. F married me, with all my faults and neuroses: I’m the perfect wife for him just as I am. My daughter’s birth was hard; I worked hard to give birth to her, and I rocked it. I need to honor that. I need to do this for myself, so that I’ll stop allowing guilt to cloud my days, and I need to do it for my baby. If I don’t, she will see it in me, learn it from me, and that’s a legacy I don’t want to give her. My baby girl is perfect just the way she is, and I have to start recognizing that maybe I am too.

 

yoga in the schools December 18, 2012

Filed under: reflections,yoga lifestyle — R. H. Ward @ 1:22 pm
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I heard on the radio yesterday morning that parents of schoolchildren in California are preparing to sue their school district over a new program of yoga classes in the elementary schools. I looked it up and, while I’m not sure why this was showing up on my radio now, it is in fact true: ABC News and HuffPost reported on it back in October.

Considering that this is a yoga blog, my opinion on yoga in schools is probably obvious, but I’m trying to look at this issue from the perspective of the parents in question. I know how I feel about, say, including the words “Under God” in the pledge of allegiance. I think that it forces a religious question into something that’s not a religious subject, because many people are patriotic and proud of their country without identifying that country with a deity. And I think inserting those words into the pledge of allegiance could serve to make children who are in the non-Christian minority uncomfortable and uncertain, and could lead to bullying if that non-Christian child is singled out for not saying those two words. I don’t think you should force any set of religious beliefs on anyone, and I think doing so can be particularly hurtful when children are involved.

So now to apply those principles to something I do believe children should be taught. I can sympathize with parents who want to ensure that religious beliefs aren’t being taught in a public school, because teaching religion to a child is the parents’ job. I wouldn’t want my child being taught beliefs that I don’t share. And gym class and fitness are important for children, but why does it have to be religious stretching?!

You don’t have to pray to Krishna to get value out of a yoga practice. The physical benefits of yoga are myriad, and new studies are published all the time describing the benefits of yoga for, say, heart disease. For this reason alone one would expect parents to welcome a school yoga program in a nation where lack of physical activity and lack of healthy food choices are making obesity and poor health an epidemic among our children. Beyond the physical, yoga also has proven mental benefits. Yoga includes techniques that help the practitioner achieve a calm, focused mind, the advantages of which seem obvious for schoolchildren learning study skills and test taking, and that’s before you even get to the benefits of yoga for conditions like ADD, ADHD, PTSD, and depression.

When talking about a yoga program in schools, it’s hard to state a definite opinion, because we’re talking about an entire curriculum taught across several grade levels for 30 minutes twice a week (versus the addition of two words like in my example above). Without having any direct experience of the program, I would imagine that the yogis who created it would have anticipated a negative response from some parents and proactively removed any Sanskrit and any reference to spirituality, focusing specifically on yoga for fitness. That’s what I would imagine, anyway. I’ve read only a bit about the Tudor Joneses, but I would not imagine them to be so blinded by their love of yoga and desire to share it that they would create a program that would fail on this front. The principal and school board as well would hopefully not have accepted the money if they’d had any thought of the program being contested (but then, principals and school boards have to find money wherever they can). Overall I want to believe that the program they’ve adopted has been sufficiently de-Hindued so as to be acceptable to a mainstream audience.

Yoga is a truly multifaceted system. You can use it to advance your spiritual practice, or you can do physical postures for years without ever knowing that there’s an eightfold path. There’s no true parallel within Christianity – you could say that praying the rosary calms and focuses the mind, but the rosary in essence is still a prayer and always will be, because that is its purpose. Yoga is not a prayer, although some people use it that way. It is a systematic and holistic approach to personal health and wellness, which can include spirituality, but does not have to.

I would hope that, before pressing forward in a legal battle, the the parents in this school district will learn more. Review the full program plan, attend and observe some classes. It is foolish to judge something you haven’t taken the time to understand. That’s what I hope I will do someday if an issue arises at my child’s school that worries me.

Coincidentally, a friend who lives in another state sent me a photo the other day of her five-year-old son practicing yoga. He’d learned it in school. He was doing a mean triangle pose and was obviously having a great time.

 

Anger and Patience December 11, 2012

Filed under: reflections,yoga lifestyle — R. H. Ward @ 1:00 pm
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A week and a half ago, YogaBaby got her first bad cold with a fever. Coincidentally, it was also the first time my husband F had to travel for business since YB was born. My mom came down and stayed home with YB on Thursday, since she couldn’t go to daycare, but the two of us were on our own Thursday night. I was pretty terrified: YB hadn’t been sleeping well anyway, and now she was sick. How would we get through the night?

It was an incredibly hard night, but we did get through it. I was there with my poor sick girl every time she woke up, over and over all night, ready with comforting arms (and boobs) to soothe her. It was the best mothering I’ve done since YB came into my life – I didn’t think about it or complain, I just did. As I rocked her to sleep one more time and watched the sun rise early that Friday morning, I let myself realize that the hard night was over – in a few hours we would go to the doctor, and a few hours after that, F would be home from his trip to help share the load.

Fast forward to Sunday morning. YB’s fever was long gone, but she was still under the weather, and even with F by my side, it had been a rough weekend. We were all tired and grumpy, me most of all, and I wanted a break. No nap or quiet time in the swing was long enough for me. I felt angry and resentful at being so needed, defeated and discouraged about my independence. What happened to that supermom who’d been here just a few nights ago? I hate being angry, and it was even worse to be angry at my little sick baby who couldn’t help being miserable. I broke down and cried.

I had been hoping to go to yoga class on Sunday afternoon, but after the weekend we’d had, I thought I should stay home instead. F made me go. The baby, feeling fine, was hanging out in her stroller helping her dad rake leaves as I drove away. The yoga class at EEY was taught by a sub, one of the current YTT students about to graduate in two weeks, and meeting her gave me a chance to reflect on where I was one year ago at the end of my teacher training. Throughout the class, I focused on centering myself here, right now on my mat, letting go of all the anger and bad energy I’d been feeling, reaching towards my truest self and the patience and kindness I know live there.

After class, I felt refreshed, as if the reserves inside me had been empty and now were full again (or, if not full, at least not empty anymore!). I came home feeling like I had something to give to my family again. Of course, when the baby cried for half an hour as we tried to eat dinner, I lost my composure again, but anyone would have felt that way, and later on in the evening I reached for patience and was able to find it.

This experience made me think about a few things in yogic terms. First, it was important for me to remember that sometimes I need to take care of myself first. I want to give my best self to my daughter, and if I’m exhausted physically and emotionally, I can’t possibly do that. This is such a vital thing to remember, and such an easy thing to discount and forget.

Also, examining my feelings and realizing I was angry made me think back to my musings on yoga and emotion last year. First, I had to acknowledge that I was angry, not just to myself but to my husband, out loud, and share my frustrations and fears, and let loose some of the intensity of the emotion by crying it out. Too often I bottle things up, which only serves to make me angrier in the long term. Then, according to Patanjali, the way to end negative emotions is to cultivate the opposite emotion instead. For me in this situation, the opposite of my anger was patience, kindness, my love for my baby, and my compassion, both for her feeling sick and for myself feeling tired and worn out. When I was able to focus on these qualities in a thoughtful way through my yoga practice, the anger dissolved.

I also needed to remember that I can’t be a supermom all the time. Sometimes I’ll do a great job, and other times I won’t, but that doesn’t make me a bad mother or a bad person. It just makes me human. We all strive for perfection (and I think I have a separate post brewing on that topic), but in an imperfect world, we have to take the good with the bad. I will never be a perfect supermom, but in all my imperfections, I’m still a super mom.

 

Mornings November 20, 2012

Filed under: reflections — R. H. Ward @ 1:00 pm
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Yesterday YogaBaby had her four-month doctor visit and some vaccinations, which didn’t agree with her, so she was up every two hours fussing during the night. I’ve adjusted to a lot of the changes of motherhood, but not the lack of sleep, especially when I feed her at 5 am, drift off again at 5:15, and wake up with the alarm at 6. I spent a good amount of breakfast time whining to my husband, who had given up on sleep after that 5 am feeding and gotten up, and who had to be at least as tired as I was. The baby, of course, was peacefully sleeping.

After breakfast I went into the bathroom. The sun was just coming up, so I left the lights off, and looked out the window at the brightening sky behind my neighbors’ houses, and the bare tree branches silhouetted against the dark gray sky overhead. It reminded me of how I used to exercise in the early morning: yoga on our enclosed porch, watching that sky brighten through the big windows as I saluted the sun, or jogging in the cold crisp air, getting acquainted with the colors of the trees and the rabbits, squirrels, and sometimes deer in my neighborhood. Feeling my feet connecting, first thing in the morning, with my mat or the sidewalk or the beaten trail through the park. How solitary I had felt, how good and strong.

If this were fiction, this is the part where I’d realize that giving that up for now is all worth it in my new life as a mother, and I’d leave the bathroom window refreshed by my memories and with a renewed sense of purpose. But this is real life, and I am tired. I miss being outside in the cool air; I miss feeling flexible and strong and powerful, in touch with my own breath and my inner spirit. I miss being by myself. I took a long shower and washed my hair. Then I went in to feed the baby, and she looked up at me with her big grey-brown eyes, full of trust, and she gave me her big good morning smile. And I smiled back.

 

[Note for my future reference, and for those following the ongoing sleep saga: this post was hand-written last Thursday morning, after a doctor visit on Wednesday evening, and it took a while to type up. Since then the sleep has gotten worse, and even worse, and then last night slightly better.]

 

New Beginnings November 7, 2012

Filed under: reflections,yoga lifestyle — R. H. Ward @ 2:00 pm
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Last week I started a new job.

I wasn’t happy at my old job – I’ve always been up front about that here on the yoga blog – and I’ve written about trying to apply what I’ve learned about meditation and mindfulness to my work troubles. I reminded myself to be grateful to have a job at all, especially one that paid well, where I was liked and respected. I tried to treat my job as my karma yoga duty, the work that’s mine to do at this point in my life and the work I need to do to support my family, and so I tried to do my best and practice non-attachment. My mantra became “I am here to do my work the best I can, without attachment to the work itself or its results”. On the whole, this isn’t a bad attitude to practice, but it was always hard to let go and not get caught up in frustration, and I kept hoping I could find a job that would suit me better: work I liked better, a better work-life balance. After YogaBaby arrived, sending out resumes became my little project, something I worked on while she nursed or slept in my lap. And I got some calls, and some interviews. (And believe me, you’ve never been nervous about a job interview until you’ve worried about leaking breast milk in front of your potential employer.)

A few weeks after I started back to work, this job offer came along. It wasn’t perfect (with all due respect to my new colleagues and my division director – hi, E! – who’s already found this blog). The work will be pretty similar to what I was doing before (although with some key differences that make me think I might like it more). The pay is also very similar (although the recruiter did her best to make the offer as sweet as possible). It’s a lateral move in terms of job title (although with more potential for advancement than I felt I had at my old job). The offer was actually so similar to what I was doing and earning at my old job that I had to consider it for almost a week. I compared the cost of health insurance, the time off/vacation policy, even the 401K matching program – in some respects my old company was stronger, in other respects the new company was stronger.

Ultimately, it came down to a choice between the known and the unknown, the familiar and the new. Did I want to stay where I was and maintain the status quo, good and bad? Or did I want to take a chance that I could be happier making a change, taking a risk?

I decided to take the chance, partly because I knew that if I didn’t accept the job, I’d always wonder if I should have, and partly because I feel like you can’t wait around hoping for change to come to you. There’s no point in waiting for the perfect thing to come along because nothing in this world is going to be perfect. I felt that I had to put myself out there and take action if I wanted a change to happen, and I really did need a change. I made the best decision I could, and so far, I think I made the right choice. So here’s to change, and risk, and being brave, and crossing our fingers as we jump.

 

Balancing Acts October 18, 2012

Filed under: reflections,yoga lifestyle — R. H. Ward @ 2:16 pm
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It’s been two weeks since I posted here. Um. Coincidentally, two weeks ago my husband F started back to work and YogaBaby headed to daycare. Until you have had such things happen in your life, you would not believe how complicated this gets. When I was at home on leave, F hung out with YogaBaby in the early mornings while I caught a little sleep, then got himself out the door to work; when F was at home on leave (and YB started sleeping more), he usually got up early with me and then waved goodbye as I got myself out the door to work. Point being, in both cases there was one person who wasn’t trying to get out the door to work and who could reliably have a baby placed on them while the other showered. Now I, F, and YogaBaby all need to get out the door in the mornings. Admittedly, YB is a pretty easy character in the morning – she often sleeps until or past 7 o’clock, so the grown-ups can get fed and showered in the 6 o’clock hour before she needs attending to. But it’s still a lot of stuff and humans to coordinate. And some combination of sleeping unswaddled, being at exciting daycare, and having a constant low-level daycare cold, has been affecting YB’s sleep schedule such that she was waking up 3+ times per night, so F and I were coordinating all of these morning things while barely conscious. (I think we’ve got that figured out now – the new plan involves feeding her more, and more often – but don’t quote me on that.) And don’t get me started on the craziness of the evenings, or how being a one-car household affects the new babyful commute.  Suffice to say, we are tired, and still seeking the new normal.

Besides the busyness of family life with two working parents and a small hungry hungry hippo, I think there’s been another reason why I haven’t been posting. It feels somehow wrong to write in a yoga blog when I’m not doing any yoga. Lately I’ve been thinking back nostalgically to the days of my teacher training, just last year, when I practiced my yoga every day – every day! – and even meditated on a regular basis. I felt so centered back then! I had so many good yogic things to write about, asanas to discuss and tips to share. And now, even if I found the time, what would I have to say about yoga? If I want to write about yoga postures, I ought to be actually doing them; if I’m going to write about teaching, I should be teaching some classes that I can then write about. How can I write about a yoga practice when I have no practice?

My practice, right now, is different from what it was. Instead of rolling out my mat, I lay a blanket on the floor and play with my baby. Instead of luxuriating in asanas, I remind myself to pee. I sleep when I can, and I don’t guilt myself for not getting up extra early to do yoga, because sleep is just as necessary as downward dog. Two weeks ago, a friend watched the baby so F and I could have dinner and go see my favorite band play a concert, and that was yoga. Last week I got a massage, a whole hour just to relax and not worry about getting anything done, and that was yoga. I ride my bike to the train station and that’s yoga too. There will be asanas again at some point, and even meditation, but right now my balancing act has nothing to do with tree pose and everything to do with responsibility and family and time. My yoga practice, right now, is to do the best I can with what I’ve got.