Opportunity

This week's dance lesson was on adding a little hoppy crossy thing to inside turns. Surprisingly difficult for a lot of people, and putting it into practice means figuring out what constitutes an opportunity.

For this move, for a follow, it's an inside turn.

For life, it's anything.

The job that just ended was weighing on me. At times there seemed to be the possibility that it might go permanent, but that was only mentioned once.

This is a tremendous relief.

When I got the job, it was just what I needed: minimal human interaction, sitting at a computer, occupying and exhausting my brain. Endless mounds of work, unimaginable cascades of documents to be read and refined, good pay, security, the ability to not be home using my utilities, so I could save money.

By Larsinio at en.wikipedia [Public domain], from Wikimedia Commons

But it was also extremely boring.

Not that I didn't have work to do. I had tons of work to do. All of it was boring.

Still. In the last month of working there, I went from friendly to friends with some people. I'm trying to keep in touch, even if all that means is using social networking sites -- since I am terrible at actual networking.

The biggest opportunity I get from the job being over is the gift of time. I've never been busier. Being in an office 40 hours a week, driving to and from said office, participating in teacher training, dancing, spending time with friends, teaching yoga, trying to maintain a house and yard, trying to blog and look for a permanent job. Some of these have suffered (witness this blog entry was begun at work and no one seemed to notice or care).

Now I have some time. I have a list, a very sloppy list that I'm going to try to tidy up and physically display in the house, so that I know what I'm doing with myself.

• look for jobs that I actually want to do
• spend time with friends
• go to career counselor people office thing at local university from which I have a big fancy degree (really, I have never seen diplomas with larger physical measurements)
• touch up baseboards, paint/finish furniture
• make lots of cool stuff
• dig up weeds, cut back ivy, mulch mulch mulch
• blog more and promote this blog (and the other blog)
• take daytime yoga classes
• resume a daily yoga practice
• get caught up on my teacher training reading, observing, and assisting
• go to advanced WCS classes (which are the same night, just earlier, and I always had trouble getting there on time)
• buy a new suit since I lost a bajillion pounds and had to give away the old one
• consider getting some kind of a certificate in something boring but reliable
• see if I can get myself back to Kripalu and visit my adorable as yet unmet babyfriends Jonah and Xander
• get stuff fixed, like my teeth and car door lock
• a thousand other things

First step

I taught my first yoga class Thursday night. Even though I had anxiety tummy all day, I was not overly hyping it up in my head. My thoughts were these:

1. It does not have to be the greatest yoga class ever
2. I just really don't want anyone to be injured
3. There is something "more" that isn't quite there yet, and the only way to figure it out is to teach. So enough already, start teaching.

And just like that, an opportunity came up to fill in as a volunteer teacher for a group organized through Americorps for people without health insurance. I am both an Americorps grant recipient (paid off my expensive grad school degree!) and a person who doesn't always have health insurance. Plus the class was 10 minutes from both work and home.

I got there early, did the aura kriya, had my usual when-are-they-coming am-I-in-the-right-place-even-though-I-asked-and-was-told-it-is-in-this-room head thoughts, meditated, and the volunteers showed up. Granted I only had 4 students, but that's a good number, sufficient to watch and see what they're doing.

It was a little not-real, in that it was in a cafeteria. So it didn't feel yoga-ish. They didn't say "namaste" back to me, but then, why would they. Still. They did good work, didn't get hurt, and even though I forgot about 5 minutes of my sequence (It was right on the floor next to me, but I was looking at my students, not my notebook, which is probably how it should be if a choice has to be made) and wondered why my class ran so short, they'll never know that I left something out.

What I understand from my first "real" class is that there is a continuum. That I have started on this journey. That I have made the leap from yoga-teacher-trainee to beginning yoga teacher, and that it's only going to get better, more natural, and more me from here.  The only way to do it is to do it.

By Ciro Duran from Caracas, Venezuela (Master Yoda) [CC-BY-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

The power of letting go

Four summers ago at outdoor yoga, I was first introduced to the idea of headstand. 


At the time, headstand was this thing. This goal. This unattainable, top-of-Mount-Everest goal that I thought I would never achieve. Oh, sure, I tried the little egg preparation. I decided that was as far as I could go, as far as I needed to go. It gave me the feeling of being upside down without the vulnerability.


I didn't practice headstand for three years. I practiced with my hands in a tripod with my head and rested my knees on my elbows, and that was my headstand. And it's a fine pose and gives all the benefits and keeps you safe.


And then things started to change. I changed. I discovered social dancing, I opened my mouth about things I didn't like at work, I lost my job. I went into a deep depression. I wanted to feel strong again, so I started doing the Five Tibetans, which are these great exercises that align the chakras and strengthen the core and made me feel so strong and confident. I horsed around, showing kids at the daycare how to start a headstand with that little egg. And before I knew it, my feet were floating up.


I was shocked and scared. My knees came right down to my elbows again and I couldn't get them to lift. This went on for a while.


And then another day, I was putting a sequence together for a friend, and thought, well, some kind of inversion on the end would make sense.


So there I went, into my little egg, and my feet floated all the way up.


I was, of course, so shocked that I fell over.


But there it was - headstand. Something I'd let go of so thoroughly that I didn't even want it. It suddenly appeared.


When I was a child, my grandparents had a framed poster on their wall with a picture of a monarch butterfly. The quotation at the bottom was 

Happiness is like a butterfly: the more you chase it, the more it will elude you, but if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulder.

-- Henry David Thoreau

Which may actually be from Nathaniel Hawthorne, according to the wisdom of the internet.

I had a challenge this past week - owing to a situation that made me uncomfortable, in a place where I was previously comfortable, I had to go someplace new. 

Last week I could have gone, but I couldn't quite see it. I went out in the yard and took my meditation there, among the new crocuses and burgeoning weeds.

Within five minutes of closing my eyes I knew that it didn't matter. That whatever decision I made would be okay, that I was deciding between going dancing and going to yoga that night, and either decision would be a thing I wanted to do and either thing would end up being the right thing to do and the thing I most needed to do. I knew that I would try the new dance studio when I was ready, and that I needed to let myself need it, and then I would be ready.

This week I wanted to dance so badly, I knew it was time to be ready. I was nervous. My stomach started feeling uneasy around noon. I checked the information over and over again, wondering if the week I picked to go would be the week it was cancelled for mysterious reasons. I was shaking when I walked through the door, even though I knew there would be at least a couple familiar faces there.

There were more than a few - it was nearly the same crowd. I was recognized, welcomed, even used for a demo as the other instructor fiddled with the music. It's different there, a smaller crowd, a different floor, a different vibe. But it's all right. It keeps me dancing. I let go of pushing myself, and I floated to where I needed to be, just as my feet floated up to point at the ceiling.

New beginnings

What "detached" is changes, depending on the day and the things I'm working on. For several months now, I've been detached from the blog itself as I sorted out issues involving employment, career path, and state of mind.

Or perhaps I shouldn't use the past tense there, since none of these things are "sorted out" in any permanent sense. Sometimes not even in a temporary sense.

One thing I've come to accept is that all things are temporary and provisional. The trouble with that is the tendency to get caught up in the future - what happens when this ends? What will I do then? I think that's what I was talking about when I talked about redoing the kitchen - that even while I had the job, I was afraid to spend money for fear of what might happen in a few months. Perhaps this was a wise decision financially, but perhaps it was unnecessary. Eight months have passed since I lost my job, and I haven't dipped into my savings at all. I've been earning and turning down unemployment. I haven't always loved what I was doing, but from mid-August on I was earning enough or nearly enough.

In the meantime, I've delayed some joy.

Not all of it. There have been many, many moments of joy, particularly since the new year arrived. A new, though temporary, job has helped me to be kinder to myself and to move away from those days of fear and doubt. We've had an exceptionally mild winter. I've changed in so many ways.

So I've decided to retry the blog, explore the things I hold onto and the things I have let fall away.