How come every time I print new schedules I need to change them? It happens every single time. It doesn’t matter how much I plan, or how much feedback I collect before putting a new schedule together. Every time I head to the copy store I know I will be back within two days to do it all over again. My kids have a lovely collection of colored scrap paper to doodle on from all of the out-of-date schedules floating about the house. Their art is now sponsored by Growing Yogis. The only thing I have learned from this, so far, is only to print a few at a time.

I think this speaks to not really being able to plan anything entirely. 
There is a saying that keeps popping up in everything I read:
 “Man plans, God laughs.”  This seems to hold true in my world lately.  It can be so incredibly frustrating to watch the best laid plans crumble at our feet. Life's little speed bumps. We grasp at holding it all together but when it gets right down to it, there is simply nothing we can do but to go with it. 

Yoga teaches us to practice non-grasping. Letting go. Going with the flow.
Spontaneity. Change.  Embracing the unexpected.  Rolling with it. Thinking on the fly. These are not my favorite games to play. Lately, though, these are the things that are challenging me.  From tropical storms that steal my power, to locating a new preschool four days before school is scheduled to begin, I am rolling with it. Or, at least I am working on rolling with it.

Controlling the need to not control the uncontrollable is my paradox.  This
is where my work is at the moment.  My yoga.  Yoga isn’t all physical. It isn’t all about having a flexible body, or the ability to sit still, focus on your
breath, and meditate. We have to live it. Put it into practice and live it.
Easier said than done, as usual. 

Go ahead and make your plans. It’s great to have plans. Just be prepared to
accept that you may have to change them. And maybe check the schedule on the website before you head on over to class.

I opened this week’s issue of Newsweek after a conversation with my mother. She had asked if I read it yet and what my thoughts were. The article is titled “Bow Down to the Yoga Teacher”. It’s about the relationship between yoga teachers, their students and their egos. And it makes me angry.

Not angry at Newsweek, or the author Casey Schwartz, but angry at these teachers of yoga. In the article Schwartz writes “Do yoga, transcend your ego and discover your inner humility- at least that’s the idea behind this ancient spiritual practice” and then goes on to rail against the “celebrity teachers’ who are so ego driven they have lost the reasons behind why we practice yoga in the first place.

The western practice of yoga has come under fire in the last ten years or so (probably longer but I was peacefully unaware). In the east yoga is a much more spiritual practice. It isn’t the tool for fitness that we most often see here. I’ve experienced spiritual awakenings through yoga and I’ve also seen the physical changes that it has brought to my body so I guess I fall somewhere in the middle of the why-to-do-yoga spectrum. I don’t see the harm in using yoga to achieve physical fitness as some of my colleagues do. I think that anything that gets people off the couch and in their bodies is worthwhile. If you are attending yoga classes simply to complement your weight training or cardio work-out, SUPER. At least you are doing yoga. Maybe you won’t meet your true self or access your inner energy, but you’re being active. You are lowering your stress level, you are building strength and flexibility, you are gaining all the health benefits that yoga brings.

Yoga is more accessible now than it has ever been. Yoga is everywhere. We no longer need to seek out gurus so that they may deem us worthy of their wisdom because yoga is almost on as many street corners as Starbucks. There are so many varieties of yoga it can make it hard to choose where to go to a class when we’ve decided that we want to go to a class. Keeping in mind that all teachers are not created equal, we also need to keep trying until we find the teacher that is right for us. It shouldn’t come down to who is the most famous as much as it comes down to who works best for you. I’m not suggesting that instructors who have been teaching for a lifetime shouldn’t be sought out and praised, or that they don’t have something to offer us, but they are still only human. Sometimes we build people up in our minds, putting them on pedestals. It can be disappointing when that pedestal crumbles.

The ‘celebrity’ teachers seem to have forgotten, as Schwartz puts it, “the fact that they were ever students themselves”. There is a yoga instructor in my community, who I greatly respect, who attended a class with a well-known teacher a year or so ago in Portland. It was an event. There were pre-requisites for the class, such as being able to be in unsupported headstand for 15 minutes. This is a teacher who my friend greatly admired. During the questions and answer period, my friend asked a question regarding a pose, which was apparently a mistake. The teacher verbally berated her in front of the entire class for wasting her time with such a trivial question. Huh? Isn’t that the point of teachers? To answer questions. I remember in middle school hearing a teacher state that there are no stupid questions. Talk about ego.

We do not come to yoga to be judged. We come to learn. We do not come to make our teachers feel good. We come to make ourselves feel good. Whatever one’s reason for practicing yoga, we should leave feeling better than we did when we arrived. That isn’t going to happen if our teachers think of themselves as gods. In the world of yoga instructors I am an infant. I know that there is a lot I have yet to learn. I know that I the longer I teach, the better the teacher I will be. I also that there is one thing I will carry with me through my career: my classes will be accessible to my students. I will not judge. I will not condemn. I will continuously check in with myself to be sure I am practicing my yamas and niyamas and not letting my ego take over. My classes will be places to ask questions and get answers. Maybe I won’t have your answer right away but I will find it for you or better yet, I will help you find it for yourself. I am not a “yoga diva” nor do I want to become one.

I think that articles like Schwartz’s are important because yoga students or potential yoga students need to know that yoga is for everyone. If teachers behave as deities, yoga loses its user-friendliness and people stop practicing. Of course the die-hards will still keep on but the rest of us will get left behind. Those of us who are out-of-shape, overweight couch potatoes will never try yoga. We will never find the life changing peace it can bring. We will never meet the muscles that have hidden dormant in our bodies. We will never stop and breathe. So don’t bow down to me. I am no one special. I don’t care if you are a vegetarian or can stand in headstand. I am a yoga teacher and I appreciate your stupid questions, so bring them on.

This week has come with defining moments. Opportunities for me to grow as a person, a teacher and a business owner. Light bulb moments, when if you were a cartoon character, a light bulb would suddenly appear over your head when you hit upon a brilliant idea. I believe that it is what you do with such moments that make or break you.

In the time since I began my journey through yoga until now I have been pretty focused on the physical side of yoga. I have spent my yoga time practicing asanas (poses), preparing class plans and teaching my small classes. I have studied the yamas and niyamas and worked to put them to good use in my life and practice. I have experienced energy moving through my body. I have understood, although not made much time for the spirituality of yoga. The piece that had escaped me was meditation. A few months ago a friend asked me to teach her how to meditate, and I laughed. Can’t teach something I hadn’t successfully learned to do. Recent events in my life have begun to shift my yoga practice from a purely physical one into something entirely different.

I have begun to find the benefits in meditation. It happened quite unintentionally. I didn’t decide to sit and meditate, one of those light bulbs I mentioned suddenly went off and I found myself sitting on a bolster, breathing into the quiet of the room around me. Things suddenly became very clear to me. And then after the first time, it has come to be easier and easier. When faced with a decision to make, instead of frantically rushing head-long into a choice (a choice I will most likely come to regret), I have been able to sit and breathe. I have successfully turned off my brain and surrendered myself to trusting that an answer will come to me when I am ready to receive it. Thus the light bulbs. Answers to my dilemmas are falling into my lap. That’s not to say that the solutions are easy. Some will take quite a lot of work. Some answers bring more choices. Choices about how hard I want to work to solve the problems.

Not solving your problems is quite easy. Sometimes we have the answers and know what we need to do to achieve our goals but the work involved scares us away. For some of us the concept of success in our lives causes anxiety. We sabotage ourselves so that success slips from our grasp. Or, the opposite happens. We grasp at what we want so intensely that we can’t see when things are no longer working. Practicing meditation can provide an opportunity to step back from whatever issue we might be facing so that we might see it from a different perspective. I’m not suggesting that meditation can solve everything. We know that we can’t expect a light bulb moment every time we meditate. But at the very least, we stop, we breathe. Sometimes that’s all we really need is a chance to breathe.

The journey continues through yoga and through life. Finding time to sit with the stillness is now a priority in my life. Making room for meditation defines me. What defines you?

    Each Sunday I look forward to finding the 'Mini-Yogi Tip of the Week' in my inbox.  Shana Meyerson does a lovely job of providing inspiration each week in a short and sweet paragraph. This week's tip involves the concept of Asteya which translates to 'non-stealing'. Teaching children about stealing usually involves not taking things from others. We don’t take things that don’t belong to us. Be that taking a toy from a friend, money from Dad’s wallet, or candy from a store. We simply don’t take things. Asteya asks us to go beyond things. We become aware, as we look closely at Asteya, that there are lots of other things up for stealing. Time, attention, and feelings to name a few.

One of my most frustrating moments as a parent comes when an unnecessary mess is made that falls to me to clean up. I’m fine with making planned messes. I know when we take out finger paints there will be clean up involved. It’s the unexpected messes caused by lack of thought really push my buttons because they steal my time. I remember a teacher in high school saying to a student “if you are going to waste my time in class, I’ll waste yours in detention after school”. No, the student wasn’t me, but the words stuck with me. The teacher, most likely without knowing it, was commenting on Asteya. The waste of time.

Another example of Asteya is the stealing of attention. Anyone who has more than one child understands this by another name - sibling rivalry. Siblings compete for the attention of their parents every day in lots of different ways. One child is happily snuggled up on mom’s lap when, out of nowhere, comes an imaginary emergency, from a brother or sister, requiring mom’s immediate attention. Another example, that I was recently a part of, involved a visit with a friend of mine. Her super smart preschooler was determined to not let me have a moment of her mother’s attention and tried every trick she could think of to bring our awareness back to her. In her world I was the one stealing the attention. A classic case of the chicken or the egg, I guess. Who didn’t practice Asteya was it her or me?

Practicing Asteya as adults can be a tricky thing. As adults we experience ways to steal every day. At work, persuading clients to come try our services instead of staying with the same company. On the phone, we know the other person wants to end the conversation and we keep talking at them. Listening a friend tell about something fabulous that happened and then directing the conversation back to ourselves, instead of being present in her joy. There are fine lines out there that we cross every day. Sometimes intentionally and sometimes not.

Once attention is called to something we begin to see it everywhere. We become aware. How does the concept of Asteya present itself in your life? How are you aware?