Facing fears...and giving gifts

I don't like myself.  I'm crazy about myself."

~Mae West

Thanks to some fear-facing inspiration from Shannon and the participants of Inside Out, I took a big, deep breath and recorded my first podcast yoga class.  This fulfills a promise I made to some of my "summer" yoga students who headed to warm southern states when the leaves started to turn.  It sounded like a good idea at the time, but when faced with the reality of speaking into a microphone for an hour and having my every imperfection recorded and broadcast to the internet, I was scared.  The fear kept me procrastinating for months.  Today I broke through that fear, put my trust in the creative process and, after six hours of learning to use the recording software and site uploading stuff, the first podcast is done. 

In the spirit of Valentine's Day and everything I've learned in the e-course, this yoga class is all about opening your heart to love yourself.  It's my gift to you.  You can listen here, or on my podbean site.  Enjoy!

Podcast Powered By Podbean

It wasn't easy to get to the point where I feel I have something valuable to share with the world.  This morning, as I battled the last of the feelings of self-doubt before clicking the "record" button, this song came to mind.  I saw Paula Cole perform this song at Lilith Fair in 1996 (yes, I'm that old) and it's one that I need to listen to every now and then.  One more gift of self-love for you.  And the yoga-minded will appreciate the chakra journey in the video.

Paula Cole - Me (Official Music Video). Watch more top selected videos about: Paula Cole

Still Playing with Paint

I can't get enough of acrylic paint. I'm like a kid with the cardboard box some new toy came in. I want to keep playing with the paint to see what else I can turn it into.

Lucky for me that the Inside Out e-course gives me lots of excuses to pull out the paint brushes.

Last week, while I was in the throws of collage-making, my desk got a bit messy. Alright, it was more than a bit messy. (The word "disaster" was thrown around.) I had cut out many, many pictures and words, but not all of them made it into the finished collages. Some just didn't fit into the theme, some took up too much room on the page and there were some that, when I looked at them again, I couldn't remember why I'd cut them out in the first place. These leftovers were in a disorderly pile on one side of my desk.

One particular image really appealed to me, but it was large and didn't seem to fit in anywhere. It was in the leftover pile, which was slowly getting spread around my desk as other things were stacked on top of it. I guess I was meant to do something with it, because that picture kept finding its way into my hand. It seemed that every time I looked for a different piece of paper I ended up holding this particular image. It stuck to everything I picked up.

Today we were supposed to paint intuitively. My intuition told me to use that magazine clipping. Then it wouldn't be free to jump into my hand anymore.

I glued it down to a page in my visual journal, then painted on it. I let it dry, then I painted more. And so on. And here's what I got:

Nobody's surprised that it has a yoga theme, right?

Oh, and after a week of coughing every time I tried anything except sitting-upright-on-the-couch-inhaling-Vicks-asana, I was finally able to get on my mat. Overjoyed at being there, I played. I put myself through obnoxious sequences (that I would never ask my students to do, in case any of them are reading this) and laughed when I fell over. I did handstands against the wall with poor alignment. I flipped my down dog into wild thing just because I can. It felt great to get my asana in gear again.

Related articles

• Playtime with Paint (truenorthyogini.blogspot.com)

Playtime with Paint

With all the things I try to fit into my life, playtime usually gets left off the schedule. Time to play never seemed like a priority. But the Inside Out e-course gives homework, and the homework feels an awful lot like play.

After the first week, my visual journal has fewer blank pages. My favorite journal project was putting paint on pages, using any method I wanted. My friend, Anne, gave me some acrylic paints to use - lots of gorgeous, bright colors. I didn't use any brushes. The paint went on with the edge of a piece of cardboard,


a sheet of plastic wrap



and some yarn.


I had fun creating my painted pages. Since I have never painted, I got to approach the project with a beginner's mind, free of any expectations. That attitude makes yoga fun, too. Sometimes I take my practice too seriously and care too much about what asanas I can do and, worse, which asanas I can't do.

Looking at the splashes and streaks of color, I'm reminded that what I can't do is just an opportunity to try something new. I feel very satisfied with the results of my painting play. It makes me smile.

Going Visual

The start of my 2011 creative adventure is being guided by Shannon Kinney-Duh's Inside Out e-course, which started two days ago. It's wonderful so far! I'm really looking forward to the next four weeks of exploring.

Part of the course is creating a visual journal. Today's assignment was to find words in old magazines and put them in the journal. I wasn't really feeling creative, but I ended up having lots of fun gluing the words onto the pages.


When I spread out the words on my desk, they seemed to fit into groups and some clearly were part of the same thought.


Yoga had a whole page, of course.


Looking again, I see messages I hadn't planned. Or, at least, not the part of me that thought it was doing the planning.

Dancing Star

"One must still have chaos in oneself to

be able to give birth to a dancing star."
Friedrich Nietzsche

Today, Creative Every Day 2011's January theme of cosmos, and Nietzche, inspired me to create a yoga flow sequence I've named Dancing Star.

The circular pattern of the flow, which fills the whole mat, and the ever-changing focal points felt cosmic. The movements flow through five-pointed star and dance in and out of triangle pose on the way around the mat.

Roll out your mat, free your inner chaos and be a dancing star.

stand in tadasana
reach overhead and fill your lungs with a big inhale
as you exhale, fold into uttanasana
lift halfway up, hands to shins, and extend your spine
jump (or step) back and lower yourself to chaturanga dandasana
lift to urdhva mukha shavanasana
reach back into adha mukha svanasana
lift your right leg behind you into a down dog standing split
step your right foot forward between your hands into
runners stretch
spin your left heel down, reach your left arm forward
then up, lifting you into
virabhadrasana II
straighten your right leg and bend to the right
into trikonasana
lift your torso upright
turn your right toes toward the side of your mat and feel
five-pointed star
drop your arms down
sweep your hands together in front of your heart, then
press your hands overhead
open your arms back to shoulder height
turn your left toes toward the back of your mat
and bend left into trikonasana
lift out of triangle, bend your left knee and take
virabhadrasana II
windmill your arms to the floor framing your left foot
in high lunge
step back to plank and flow to down dog
lift your right leg behind you
step your right foot forward between your hands
and flow from lunge to virabhadrasana II to
trikonasana to five-pointed star
(you should be facing the other side of your mat this time)
bring your hands together at your heart then press them overhead
and flow to triangle then warrior II and back to lunge
step back to plank and come back to down dog
now you've circled all the way around your mat
you're facing front again
repeat the flow, beginning with your left leg this time
you'll circle around in the other direction
when you flow back to down dog facing the front of your mat
hop (or step) forward
lift halfway up
fold deep and let go
come up to standing, reaching your arms overhead
return to tadasana
smile

I played with my kids' colored pencils this afternoon. I guess "dancing star" is my theme today.

Softening

My asana practice has been softening. I've been softening. Even Surya Namaskar has softened. Movements are lighter and, when my body is still, I let go in a new easy effortlessness.

Perhaps I am mirroring the light, powdery snowfall. The world is softening.

I wanted to play with that softness, so I dug out my extra-soft charcoal pencil and tried to capture the world outside.


The trees are beautiful today, looking like they've all been sprinkled with down then dusted with glitter. The snow is still falling in tiny flakes I can only see when the light hits them just right. The sun is low in the sky, turning the snow clouds gold, and blindingly bright.

Tonight is a good night for a movie and my knitting needles. I've been knitting every day, keeping the holiday momentum going, but enjoying the process without the December 24th deadline looming. I'm taking my time, feeling the soft yarn as it slides between my fingers. Even my knitting is softening.

Finishing What I Start

When I started knitting again a few years ago, the first thing I did was finish a scarf I had started seven years earlier. Indeed, it took me seven years to knit a scarf, but I did finally finish it. Of course, the coat it had been meant to go with was outgrown by my daughter years before it was finished, but she was gracious enough to pretend she liked it anyway.

Leaving projects unfinished has become a bad habit. When the yarn dust settled after my Christmas gift-giving knitting, there were two partially-finished projects left on my needles. Both projects had been started, and abandoned, in 2009. I decided to start the new year with a clean slate and finished everything I started.

The first project was a lace ribbon scarf that I was making to use up some leftover yarn. I knitted a couple of hours a day for 3 days and it was finished. Rather than leaving it lay somewhere, I blocked it right away and it was ready by the next morning. That was all it needed. I'm wearing it as I type this, because I really like it.


The other project was a pair of mittens - my first attempt at mittens - that I knitted from a skein of beautiful alpaca yarn I had picked up at a harvest festival. When I followed the pattern my mittens turned out too short, so they had to be taken apart at the top of the fingers and made longer. One was done. The other was waiting. It took less than 30 minutes to fix and I now have a soft, warm pair of mittens that I could have worn last winter if I had taken just a bit of time to finish them.


Once all my needles were empty, I tackled a quick knit that helps me meet my One Small Change goal for the month: replacing our disposable kitchen sponges with reusable, eco-friendly alternatives. I found a pattern for knitting scrubbies. Strips of tulle are knitted with the yarn to make them good for scouring pans. I just happened to have a roll of tulle that I bought years ago for who-knows-what, so last night I enjoyed the satisfaction of a quick knit.


The pattern, by Julie Anderson, is available for free on her blog.

Perhaps my favorite thing about the scrubbies is the needle size. They just happen to require size 10 needles, the size of my new Buddha knitting needles, gifted to me at the holidays by a yoga student. How awesome are these?