inner peace

Mothers, Daughters, and “The Eye of the Tiger”: How a Bad Song from 1982 Moved Me Closer to Stillness

June 16, 2008

On Father’s Day morning, when I started the car in the parking lot of EarthFare (Asheville’s local Whole Foods-ish place I love to shop for groceries even though we really can’t afford it), I had one of those delicious moments that happens when I hear “Eye of the Tiger” on the radio. Immediately, it was [...]

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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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Happy Mother’s Day

May 11, 2008

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 [...]

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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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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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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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How I’m Learning to Take More Naps

April 28, 2008

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 [...]

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

April 26, 2008

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 [...]

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Taking Some Time on Sunday Morning to Honor My Heart

April 20, 2008

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 [...]

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What Not Being a Real Buddhist Has Taught Me About Motherhood

April 19, 2008

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 [...]

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Why I Can’t Take a Compliment (Even of My Kid)

April 18, 2008

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 [...]

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Learning to Trust (Including Yourself)

March 28, 2008

My favorite yoga class begins in 10 minutes, and I will not be there. I ensured this outcome by eating breakfast a few minutes ago because I knew I could not be trusted to resist throwing on my yoga clothes at the last minute and dashing out the door. [One should not eat ideally 3 [...]

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Practicing Not Yoga with a Glass of Wine and 2 a.m. TiVo

March 23, 2008

There are days when you don’t have time for a yoga practice but can still practice yoga. On these days I still eat in a way that nourishes my body (mostly — we went to Trader Joe’s in Charlotte last weekend and walked out with three packages of Droste dark chocolate pastilles that aren’t very [...]

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