Defining Wellness

Headlamps are useful before dawn.

This morning I woke my nine year old at 5:00 a.m. for a sunrise hike to a pond near our home. We didn't actually get to see the sun rise due to an overabundance of clouds, it was cold and the pond was still frozen, but we enjoyed our first hike of 2013 anyway. It was as much an acknowledgement of my own return to wellness as it was a celebration of the start of mud season in the Adirondacks.

My husband is not a morning person. When I announced our planned hike, he noted that my idea of wellness is someone else's idea of insanity. This had me thinking that it is impossible to define wellness in a broad sense. We each have to define wellness in our own terms, and we only can by knowing our own bodies, minds and spirits.

This is very evident whenever I get together with the Bona Fide Butterflies, who include myself and my two friends and partners Annie Gregson and Beti Spangel. Together we facilitate empowering retreats and workshops for women. We strive to help women design and live authentic, inspired lives based on their individual values.

Individual values - that's the key. Society likes to tell us what to value. Media gets paid to tell us what to value. But it's our individual values, the ones that come from the heart, that make us unique, that keep everyone from being the same and living the same life according to the same plan. It's our individual values that make human existence diverse, colorful and fun. 

The BFBs

Annie and Beti are incredible women living joyful lives of their own design. Neither one of them is likely to start training for a marathon. Neither one wants to teach yoga, although they enjoy their own yoga practices. Annie, a life coach, also makes incredible art. She has lots of time in her life for long walks in the woods with her dog, and she throws fun, seemingly spontaneous parties. Beti has horses and chickens on her homestead, and she makes yummy cheese. She can drive a tractor. She's also an awesome writer.

Our differences are what we have in common. All three of us have taken the time to figure out what's important to us and we've created lives that honor those things. Unique, diverse, authentic lives. Our own definitions of wellness. 

The other thing we have in common is a road in Schroon Lake, where we're neighbors in the "I'll drive a few miles up the road to your house" sense of the word. I think fate had something to do with that.

Take a look at the Bona Fide Butterflies website and see the workshops and retreats we offer. We're also on Facebook. 

I'm heading to a yoga class to stretch out sore hiking and running muscles, and to honor my own idea of wellness.

A Head Cold, an Adventure Story, Some Envy and Yoga #365Yoga

Freya Hoffmeister (Photo credit: eriksjos)

I tried to ignore my second head cold in less than a month, but couldn't really deny the heaviness in my head and finally slid back under the covers for an afternoon of napping and reading. My bedside book pile consists of books about yoga and books about adventure, most of the latter being monthly reads of the Women's Adventure Magazine Book Club group on Facebook, in which I lurk for the reading suggestions. I passed up the heavy-thinking-required yoga reading and picked up Fearless by Joe Glickman, the story of Freya Hoffmeister's record-setting circumnavigation of Australia in a sea kayak.

Freya's year-long paddle included encounters with sharks, crocodiles and stinging jellyfish, crazy currents and surf, fatigue, seasickness and unpleasant rashes. It was an impressive journey by a woman who never doubted she would be able to complete it. While I admired her tenacity, I had trouble, and I believe the author did too, with Freya's lack of humility. But, when it comes to people who have both the physical strength to accomplish amazing feats and the organizational skills to make them happen, I tend towards a bit of un-yogini-like envy.

My adventurous heart tends to reach further than my body wants to go. When I announced my latest battle with germs on Facebook, one of my friends was quick to comment, "Why are you always sick?!? Between your diet and physical exercise, you should be the healthiest person on Charley Hill!!" That, unfortunately, has been my life-long question and one that, despite years of work towards wellness, remains unanswered. What makes me so susceptible to upper-respiratory-system-attacking viruses is a mystery. So is the extreme fatigue and depression that comes every time I ramp up my physical activity beyond "easy," which, while allowing me to build endurance, means I will never run as fast as I'd like to, or faster than a turtle.

During her year of extreme kayaking, Freya Hoffmeister never had to spend a few days in her tent on the beach nursing a head cold. It's possible that the author decided not to mention it, but I find it hard to believe he would leave out an illness when he was so careful to mention every time she puked from seasickness and how she managed bowel movements without leaving her boat. While my heart longs for an adventure as amazing as Freya's (although I'd be happy without the crocodiles), I have to resign myself to knowing my body my may never be up for it.

So what do I do? I get back on my yoga mat. It was yoga that taught me to accept my body as it is. It was my asana practice that got me to the place where I could start running and not stop for 13.1 miles, which is pretty darn good even if I never break out of the back of the pack. It is yoga that reminds me to rest when I need to, that it's okay to drop into Balasana or take a nap. And it's yoga that pulls the rug out from under my ego and shows me the way to be humble and grateful.

Perhaps I will have to experience the grandest of adventures in the pages of a book, and perhaps my practice includes sitting with the envy I feel on the way to self-acceptance. Perhaps that inner exploration is the greatest adventure of all.