being in the moment

MIA Part Three: Not Doubting Your Path

July 11, 2008

Sometimes there are good reasons you don’t have time to, say, write a YogaMamaMe post for two weeks. And I don’t mean “good” in the “eat your spinach, it’s good for you” sense of good. I mean good, like good for my soul, happy, fun. I mean, to get to the point, Coon Dog Day. [...]

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I’m Really Here, Now (Even in Wal-Mart)

June 23, 2008

What surprised me as I stood in a Wal-Mart off I-40 in Hickory, North Carolina, was not so much that I was standing in a Wal-Mart off I-40 in Hickory, North Carolina. The exigencies of a Blankie left far behind at school can leave one in some pretty surprising places. What surprised me was that [...]

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Driving with the Brakes On

June 12, 2008

I had a Very Bad Moment walking Jake home from school yesterday. We were strolling down a moderately trafficked street — the kind of residential road motorists use inappropriately as a through-way, inducing the residents to have cement traffic calmers installed which end up acting only as a challenge to the faster drivers but at [...]

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

May 14, 2008

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 [...]

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There’s Something Bigger Than Forgetting to Buy Antibiotic Ointment

May 9, 2008

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 [...]

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

May 7, 2008

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 [...]

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

May 5, 2008

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. [...]

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When You Absolutely Have No Choice But to Let Go

May 2, 2008

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 [...]

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Being Patient with Your Practice

April 29, 2008

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 [...]

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A Temper Tatrum Teaches Me to Be in the Moment

April 17, 2008

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 [...]

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Being Open to Change

April 2, 2008

I was stuck in the back of yoga class again yesterday. This is not my favorite spot, for no particular reason, other than habit. I like being in the front, in my own world, diving into empty space instead of someone else’s mat. No doubt books (or at least lengthy articles) could be written about [...]

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How Getting Knocked Off My Feet Helped Me to Grow

March 25, 2008

Yesterday I surveyed the field of unexpected obligations suddenly stretching between me and my YogaMamaMe website and declared myself okay. Getting published, I realized, had become too much of a goal, and I should feel deep gratitude to the Universe for throwing a bunch of other things at me as a reminder that I don’t [...]

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Why Waiting for What You Want (and Maybe Not Even Getting It) Is a Gift

March 24, 2008

So, I’ve been working on this being a writer thing more or less steadily since I quit my teaching job in 2003. And, not for the first time, I feel like I’m on the verge of it actually panning out. All I’ve got to do is finish my YogaMamaMe book proposal, get the website up [...]

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Learning to Let Go of the Saturday Morning Baby-Free Panic

March 22, 2008

Here it is again. It’s Saturday morning, I’m gloriously still in my pajamas, and Mike has taken Jake on an expedition. We should both be thrilled: he gets the Jake Time of which he manages only snippets during the work week and I get a morning free to practice yoga. The problem is, I spend [...]

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