Choosing Contentment, Accepting Change

"Choose contentment. In this very moment, you can choose contentment - and in the next, and in the next, and in the next.

The changing seasons show us the absolute reliability of change. Nothing is more dependable than change. Take comfort in the changes."

From Judith Hanson Lasater's book A Year of Living Your Yoga.

A milestone birthday reached. A growing realization that my growing family has outgrown our wee, quaint dreamhouse and needs more space. A growing understanding that I want to live my next decade somewhere with trees. Choosing contentment while also taking comfort in change.

I turned forty this week. My children are growing into larger boys. Three very large boys in one very small house. The train tracks that are twenty feet behind our house are getting busier, stinkier, louder. They rattle the house, my bones, every fifteen minutes or so. They park and idle for half an hour at a time, spewing black clouds of lung-raping particulates into the air, blackening our walls. A large housing development is going in around the corner from us - 200 units. Our government representatives are admitting that the subway we were planning on isn't going through. A growing discontent with the schools that my children attend. The sinking feeling that everything is about to change. A heated, all-consuming debate in the community about the schools and how they stink but they might be better than they used to be. The fact that we can't spend ten minutes with other parents from the community without someone complaining about the school system.

The fact that my youngest is afraid of trees? That many of my kids' peers are playing "gangsta" on the playground? That they are reading books about urban blight, a young girl who rather than getting depressed every morning tiptoeing around the homeless drunk person asleep on her stoop, decides to pick up some litter and make her neighborhood less depressing? And realizing that we don't have to live like this, that we can make a choice. And realizing how hard that choice is to make. And resisting change. And trying to choose contentment in this moment and the next and the next.

Whoever Brought Me Here Will Have to Take Me Home

This is like what they used to do on radio when there were holidays - the DJs wouldn't be there, and they would eat up time playing canned "Greatest Hits" or "Top 100 Countdowns" until everyone came back from wherever they were. So, as I embark on a holiday adventure, enjoy some Rumi, who says things better than I do, anyway:

"What strange beings we are!
That sitting in hell at the bottom of the dark,
we're afraid of our own immortality."

"All day I think about it, then at night I say it.
Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing?
I have no idea.
My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that,
and I intend to end up there.
This drunkeness began in some other tavern.
When I get back around to that place, I'll be completely sober.
Meanwhile, I'm like a bird from another continent, sitting in this aviary.
The day is coming when I fly off, but who is it now in my ear, who hears my voice?
Who says words with my mouth? Who looks out with my eyes?
What is the soul?
I cannot stop asking.
If I could taste one sip of an answer, I could break out of this prison for drunks.
I didn't come here of my own accord, and I can't leave that way.
Whoever brought me here will have to take me home."

"In Complete Control,
Pretending Control.
With dignified authority.
We are charlatans...
Or maybe just a goat's-hair brush in a painter's hand.
We have no idea what we are."

"Can you endure silence?
Are you a night fighter?
Or more a child bored with outgrown toys
trying to win at tip-the-cat?
If you have any patience left, we know what to do.
If you love sleep, we'll tear you away.
If you change into a mountain, we'll melt you.
If you become an ocean, we'll drain you.
This is how a human being can change:
There's a worm addicted to eating grape leaves.
Suddenly, he wakes up, call it grace, whatever,
something wakes him, and he's no longer a worm.
He's the entire vineyard, and the orchard too,
the fruit, the trunks,
a growing wisdom and joy that doesn't need to devour."

Rib Cage, Body Awareness, Mortality, Giving Myself a "C"

After living with my body for many many years, after studying anatomy and physiology periodically, I must admit that I still am only now coming into embodiment, body awareness and deep understanding from the inside. I thought I knew what my body was capable of, what I could ask it to do in yoga, in life. And then I lost all of that somehow in the last several years. Some sort of disconnect, crossed wires, that I attributed to the rigors of childbearing, child-rearing, aging, any number of things.

Now I find that all of what I came to know about my body over the past decade was false - impressions placed upon me from external sources - doctors, psychiatrists, physical therapists, other authorities who I trusted to guide me and help me understand my self.

Deepening my yoga practice and study over the past two years has brought a level of embodiment that I did not know existed. I can physically feel things in a way that I never have before, and I have pushed my body well beyond anything it has ever done before - all of this on my fortieth birthday!

Part of this comes from a greater understanding of the mechanics of movements, an idea expressed so beautifully by Iyengar in Light on Life, that all movement is expansion from the core: "When you extend and expand, you are not only stretching to, you are also stretching from...Always try to extend and expand the body. Extension and expansion bring space, and space brings freedom. Freedom is precision, and precision is divine. From freedom of the body comes freedom of the mind and then the Ultimate Freedom. The Ultimate Freedom that yoga works toward can be tasted in our own bodies, as each limb gains independence, flexibility, and freedom from its neighboring limbs."

I feel like this is only the tip of the iceberg, but deeper body awareness has been building in me over the past two years, daily, step by step, but one big milestone was reached during the anatomy portion of my 200 hour teacher training this summer. The class was taught by Lou Benson, the most skilled and passionate bodyworker I've ever had the pleasure of working with (and I've known many and trained to be a rather unskilled one myself many years ago). Lou has a knowledge of anatomy and physiology that is beyond compare, and she has an enthusiasm for the topic that makes it surprisingly easy to understand.

Lou spoke about how the rib cage is misnamed - that it isn't a cage at all. And it seems obvious now, but I can honestly say that I never thought of it that way before. That little seed of knowledge planted in my mind made me realize through all of my movements over the past six month that my rib cage doesn't move. I can practice deep inhales and exhales in pranayama, and I'm still not breathing any expansion into my ribs. I'm breathing vertically, not in 3-d.

Knowledge and practice not being the same thing, I've been hammering myself over the head with wanting to bring movement to my ribs for the past six months. But last week, I went to Lou for a massage, and she worked on the spaces between the ribs, the spaces where the ribs connect to the sternum, and the pecs, which she discovered on a previous visit were always carrying tension. She spoke of how I stand up very straight, but that I'm actually standing up too straight. She spoke of how I'm doing backbends, heart-opening poses, and even pranayama with movements that approximate the real movements and look right on the surface but are really only reinforcing bad postural and structural alignments.

She spoke about how being embodied is scary for people because recognizing the body, meeting it where it's at in any given moment of any given day, this makes you realize that you are a body, that you are going to age, fall apart, and die. And many people prefer ignoring their bodies and living separately from them so as to avoid that knowledge on a daily basis.

And finally she spoke about not trying to fix everything all at once. And this is the biggest lesson. She says little lessons, practiced regularly, make the biggest difference over time. Iyengar speaks to this as well: "If you learn a lot of little things, one day you may end up knowing a big thing." Lou says you have to be okay with giving yourself a grade of "C" on your efforts, rather than always striving for the "A". "C" is good enough, and will be sustainable over time and won't knock you out.

This was the real meat of the lesson, now, wasn't it? Lou works in mysterious ways. Mysterious, calm, glowing ways. So, on the dawn of my forties, this is what I work on. Giving myself a "C" on everything. And knowing that is enough.

Most Meaningful Songs of All Time

A friend asked me to put together a compilation of songs from my embarrassingly large music collection for her teenaged son who is like wicked cool and a guitar player and he's kinda awesome. So, I spent a day and a half sorting through the list, parsing through the songs collected over a forty year period (I turn forty tomorrow), trying to find the ones that were the Most Meaningful.

I wasn't just sorting songs, I found I was sorting memories, feelings, old loves, periods of depression and lightness. My computer was moving at the pace it prefers - haltingly slow - so I had plenty of downtime in which to ponder those late teenage years where you feel torn in fifty million directions and none of them make sense. You are waiting for the singular path of your future to appear, with neon signs pointing it out - "Go This Way", but instead all you get are forks in the road, myriad forks with none looking any more promising than any other. You are a grown up and a kid at the same time, and - here's the tough part that I don't think you get until a few decades later - you think you are going to outgrow that feeling when you finally grow up, but you never really do. Even now twenty years past that point, I still feel like a child and a grown-up all at once, and I'm still looking for the one road with the neon sign saying "Go This Way". True, now that I'm a few decades in, many of the forks in the road have disappeared in the distance - no longer possibilities for the future - but there's still no outline to follow. And now I have my kids who think I'm the grown-up with all the answers, which would be hilarious if it didn't feel so weighty. Like I should have the answers but I somehow missed them along the way.

At any rate, here's the playlist of The Most Meaningful Songs of All Time. I tried to steer clear of songs that still get played on the radio, and I threw in some less meaningful songs so that the meaningful ones wouldn't drag my teenaged friend into some sort of depressed abyss. I tried not to pick anything from the past decade - preferring songs that were written before he was born (yikes - that's how old I'm feeling today). I went heavy on the guitar, since he and I share a love of that instrument, and I tried to steer clear of Seattle, because I think he knows all those songs already.

You Said That Last Night - Apples in Stereo
Heaven in the Gutter - Cobra Verde
Drawerings - Dinosaur Jr.
Not Ready Yet - Eels
The Swimmer - Frank Black
Any Other Way - Posies
Common People - Pulp
Driver 8 - REM
Screenwriter's Blues - Soul Coughing
A Good Idea - Sugar
Hook in Her Head - Throwing Muses
Swamp Song - Tool
Don't Go - Matthew Sweet
I Kill Children - Dead Kennedys
My Last Christmas - Dirtbombs
Carry the Zero - Built to Spill
Not Even Stevie Nicks - Calexico
Porno Starlet Vs. Rodeo Clown - Califone
All Her Favorite Fruit - Camper Van Beethoven
The Man's Too Strong - Dire Straits
Yer Ropes - Giant Sand
Growing Up (Falling Down) - The Living End
Divorce Song - Liz Phair
O Lonely Soul, It's A Hard Road - Mary's Danish
Wanted to Be Your - Spoon
Piss Up a Rope - Ween
Mr. Riely - Vic Chesnutt
Boys Don't Cry - Cure
No Depression - Uncle Tupelo
Cool as Kim Deal - Dandy Warhols
Doin' the Cockroach - Modest Mouse
Hole in the River - Crowded House
Bottle of Fur - Urge Overkill
Sugar - Bikini Kill
Dry - PJ Harvey
All F*cked Up - Nashville Pussy
Beauty in Vulnerability - Hybrasil
Exoskeletons - Lynnfield Pioneers
Scratch - Morphine
Oh Comely - Neutral Milk Hotel
Socks - King Missile
Bad Things to Such Good People - Pedro the Lion
Rebel Yell - Quintaine Americana
Moon Calf Tripe - Red Red Meat
RV - Faith No More
Pretty As You Please - Ass Ponys
Fell Off the Face of the Earth - Firewater
Satan Gave Me a Taco - Beck

On Mermaids, Unicorns, and Faith

Maybe I was trying to start something with him, maybe not, but after Fred's Dark Prakrti comment yesterday, I decided to follow up after the kids' bedtime by asking him to comment on the following excerpt from Iyengar's Light on Life:

"A scientist sets out to conquer nature through knowledge - external nature, external knowledge. By these means he may split the atom and achieve external power. A yogi sets out to explore his own internal nature, to penetrate the atom (atma) of being... The presence of truth can make us feel naked, but compassion takes all our shame away."

Now, Fred lost it after the (he called it) inflammatory sentence about scientists. I had to shush him to even be able to read the rest. Then he said that, since there is no spirit, or soul, there is no penetrating the atma because there is none. And that this, according to him, is the problem with yoga as it is sold in the West. He thinks we are being sold a religious system that is outdated and dangerous, mixed in with our postures. Seems we might be dealing with an atheist rather than an agnostic at this point. Hmm.

So, I argued that some yoga is selling the idea of a divine, of a spirit, but it doesn't have to be so. Some yoga is just therapeutic, take it at face value, it feels good, it does good things in the body. He says he's okay with that.

So, I argue that during restorative and meditative practice, I have felt something Other that I can't describe or explain. He says, "Well, I can explain it. You've trained your mind to the point that you are accessing it differently, the same way anyone who trains in meditation or those kinds of practices can."

So, I argue that we can't really argue about it, because he hasn't experienced it, and he gets all mad. I tell him that this perception that I have of there being something more is the unicorn. In this book I have about raising agnostic kids, it describes a fun activity that they do at agnostic kids' summer camp (sounds like a fun place, huh?) - they break up into teams and try to disprove the theory that there's a unicorn that lives at the camp. You can't do it. I told Fred he was trying to disprove my unicorn and that he couldn't do it. He said we shouldn't argue anymore; that after bedtime wasn't the time for such discussions. Hmm.

Which brings us to the point of faith. I was raised a good Catholic - bought into the whole thing. If I had met a nice Catholic boy and settled down, I might even still be practicing to this day. But I met Fred instead, and somehow over the course of our undergraduate days he chipped away at my faith with penetrating questions and dark, sarcastic skepticism until it was completely gone. I was thinking last night (instead of sleeping) that it's very tragic and sort of like a fairy tale - let's say "The Little Mermaid". To be able to be with the handsome prince and live my fairy tale life, I had to give up my old life, give up my tail, my faith, and take on the legs and other trappings of an agnostic scientist, which I truly am not at heart.

Fred argues that there doesn't have to be a soul to explain the things that I am experiencing, and I say, "Yes. That's true. The teachings would agree with that." He says there doesn't have to be a divine for there to be all this Prakrti, all this matter, and I say, "Yes. That's true." I think it infuriates him. His science brain can't find a crack.

So here I am, at a place where I feel that my faith is growing, albeit in a different direction again, and I'm willing to take Fred on this time. These are arguments neither one of us will win, though. I argue with him that he has to take his physics and new scientific discoveries on faith - that he hasn't seen them and can't do the math himself (though he can do a lot of it), so he's believing in something someone wrote somewhere and that this is a lot like a religious faith. He disagrees. On these things, we will never agree.

Ah well. We can always discuss plans for next spring's garden. We argue there, too, but at least there's some give and take and agreement can be reached. Maybe I'll keep Prakrti and all the rest for myself. And maybe he's right - after bedtime definitely isn't the time for such discussions. I could have used more sleep and less Little Mermaid in the wee hours last night.

Unity, Prakrti, Purusa, Matter

I was taught that Prakrti is matter, Purusa is soul. Iyengar talks of Prakrti as Nature, and Purusa as non-physical reality, because he likes to avoid the religious connotations of the word "soul". Everything around us, and even our "us" is Prakrti. The nature of Prakrti is change. We find comfort in thinking that our bodies and our personalities will continue forever, but it is not so. I have heard Prakrti compared to sand paintings. Great, beautiful realities are built up and then blown away. In contrast, Iyengar says Purusa is an abiding reality. He says, "It is logical but remains conceptual to our minds until we experience its realization within ourselves. We rightly associate this abiding reality with selfless love, which is founded in the concept of unity, not difference. The strength of a mother's love derives from her unity with the child. In unity there is no possession, as possession is a dual state, containing me and it. Soul is unchanging, eternal, and constant; it always remains as witness, rooted in divine origin and oneness. The whole practice of yoga is concerned with exploring the relationship between Prakrti and Purusa, between Nature and Soul...It is through the correct practice of asana and pranayama and the other petals of yoga that the pracitioner (sadhaka) experiences the communication and connection between them...To achieve this union, the sadhaka has to look both within as well as looking out to the frame of the soul, the body. He has to grasp an underlying law or else he will remain in Nature's thrall and Soul will remain merely a concept. Everything that exists in the macrocosm is to be found existing in the microcosm or individual."

A few things here. First, the italics were my emphasis on Iyengar's words. Here, he describes that intense feeling I had with the twins when they were newborns - that they were the same flesh as me. We were one being; they were not other. This is a far cry from the call that we should all abandon our intimate connections to avoid suffering that I have read in other texts.

Second, Edwin Bryant took this explanation of Prakrti versus Purusa further when he described matter. He said that matter is only here to give the different Purusas the experiences they need to have in each lifetime in order to grow. He said something to the effect of "this Prakrti might be a dinosaur and then a sea plant and then a redwood and then a Celestial and then a cockroach and then a rock." I thought of the kids' play dough when they are being really creative and playing pretend.

Fred just leaned over and asked me what Prakrti was. I said "matter", and he said, "well, you should write about dark Prakrti. What does Krishna have to say about the fact that most of the universe is made up of dark Prakrti?" His constant questioning and undying scientific agnosticism only makes me want to dig further to somehow prove him wrong, I must admit. And, ultimately, it does not matter what either of us believes because, as he would be the first to say, "It's gonna be what it's gonna be, and we can't change it." And despite his skepticism, I find it pretty easy to find a groove between the barebones cosmic physics that I know and the barebones Hindu philosophy I know. He would say that it's because I know only a fraction of what there is to know about the two things that allows that groove. But learning more doesn't seem to be making the connections go away; they seem to be getting stronger and grooving even more. It's a journey, and it feels good to be asking the questions, even if the answers are not forthcoming and do not, ultimately, matter.

Light on Iyengar

I've been doing yoga for most of my life, and most of my yoga friends are surprised or horrified that I have never read or studied BKS Iyengar. I decided to crack open my old copy of Iyengar's Light On Life in honor of his recent birthday. It is riveting, and I feel a little bit guilty (though with loving kindness and self-compassion) for not having read it before.

I tried reading Iyengar's Light On Yoga a few years ago and got about halfway through. I found that some of Iyengar's recommendations in that text did not resonate with me or work on my body at all. So I put the book - and Iyengar - down until now.

In Light On Life, Iyengar focuses more on the journey rather than on the specifics, and this I can appreciate. He is humble yet glowing, and his personality shines through as compassionate and inspirational. He promises that the yogic journey will "pay benefits commensurate to the time and effort we put in - the lowest being our ability to tie our own shoelaces when we are eighty and the highest being the opportunity to taste the essence of life itself." Both pretty good outcomes, so how can you lose?

Here is an extended excerpt for your perusal. There will be more talk of this Light On Life here in this blog, I reckon, as I haven't even gotten through the introduction, and I'm already moved to grab a highlighter and start blogging about it.

"I wanted to live as an ordinary householder with all the trials and tribulations of life and to take my yoga practice to average people who share with me the common life of work, marriage, and children...the life of a householder is difficult, and it always has been. Most of us encounter hardship and suffering, and many are plagued by physical and emotional pain, stress, sadness, loneliness, and anxiety. While we often think of these as the problems caused by the demands of modern life, human life has always had the same hardships and the same challenges - making a living, raising a family, and finding meaning and purpose. These have always and will always be the challenges that we humans face. As animals, we walk the earth. As bearers of a divine essence, we are among the stars. As human beings, we are caught in the middle, seeking to reconcile the paradox of how to make our way upon the earth while striving for something more permanent and more profound. So many seek this greater Truth in the heavens, but it lies much closer than the clouds. It sits within us and can be found by anyone on the Inward Journey."

Withdrawal

The Sutras and the Gita talk about withdrawal of the senses from their sense objects as part of the process of yoga and meditation. In Elemental Yoga, we spend a few minutes at the beginning of every class closing our eyes and turning our outer gaze inward and turning our outer hearing into a deep, internal listening. This is a great way to begin a class, to "drop in" to oneself and to have a truly meditative practice.

These days I'm thinking about a different kind of withdrawal, as I've tapered down to a minuscule fraction of a fraction of my anxiety meds. This last round of withdrawal was nothing like what I went through last spring when I came off of Zoloft and Xanax - a potent cocktail a terrible drug-pushing psychiatrist had put me on. It was so bad that I went cold-turkey and went through the "zaps" of withdrawing from Zoloft and the increased anxiety of being off the Xanax. Ironically, when you go off your anxiety meds, anxiety is one of the withdrawal symptoms.

Now I'm coming off the of the benzodiazepine that my new, not so drug-pushing psychiatrist put me on when she found out I went cold turkey off of the others. This is a replacement drug that is easier to titrate down off of, so I was cutting pills in half, then in half again, until I basically was swallowing some pill dust each night before bed. I did have increased anxiety, again, with each titration, but it was nothing like the cold turkey craziness of the Zoloft/Xanax.

I have found that restorative yoga takes the place of these meds. If I take one hour of restorative everyday, it has the same effects as popping a benzodiazepine. Of course, it's much easier to find the time to pop a pill than it is to find an hour to lie on a bolster and a couple of blankets with an eye pillow on my forehead (restorative has been shown to be much more relaxing for people with the addition of weight on the forehead in the postures). But then restorative doesn't have any negative side effects. Though I think it can be addictive.

The last stage of this withdrawal from the meds seems to be a general foggy mind. I forgot my son's backpack this morning - had to drop him off then run back home to pick it up and take it back to school. I got our schedule mixed up and showed up to a Tae Kwon Do class 45 minutes early. I can't seem to find the energy to cook supper beyond heating up frozen vegetarian chicken nuggets. But this will pass, and I'll be myself again. A self without psychotropic medicine, a self that still has panic attacks at times, and still has anxiety, but who is capable of viewing those things as passing emotional and nervous system states that can be watched with a compassionate, meditative eye, knowing that they will pass within ten minutes (usually) or faster if I'm in a place where I can watch my breathing, do a restorative pose, or practice some other intervention (engaging uddiyana bandha works wonders here, too).

The Way of Love

I designed a heart opening sequence yesterday that I'm tweaking. I am drawn to heart-opening poses because I tend toward closed-heartedness, posturally, anyway, and the reverse can be challenging but can also offer relief from neck and shoulder pain. But what really prompted me to go towards heart-opening was Chapter 12 of the Bhagavad Gita, "The Way of Love". Krishna is describing another way that one can come into his presence and divine love:

One who is impartial, pure,
Capable, detached,
Free from anxiety (uh-oh),
Who has completely relinquished all undertakings -
That one, who offers love to me,
Is dearly loved by me.

One who neither
Relishes nor loathes,
Who neither laments nor desires,
Relinquishing the pleasant
And the unpleasant -
That one, who is filled
With offerings of love,
Is dearly loved by me.

The same toward both
Enemy and friend,
Honor and dishonor;
The same in cold and heat,
Happiness and suffering;
Freed from attachment;

One for whom blame
And praise are equal,
Who is disciplined in speech,
Satisfied with whatever
Comes of its own accord;
Who is without
Attachment to hoeme,
Who is of steady mind,
Replete with offerings of love -
Such a person is dearly loved by me.

One sticking point here, however, is that relinquishing home and non-attachment to loved ones is mentioned repeatedly in the Gita and other texts I've studied. It is part of Buddhist meditative teachings as well, as I understand them. Yet, throughout the Gita, Krishna advises Arjuna, the warrior, to uphold his duties as a warrior in battle even though the civil war he is fighting in has pitted brothers against one another and students against teachers (both big no-nos in the teachings). Arjuna feels heavy-hearted and full of dread at the thought of battling these loved and revered ones, but here is God telling him that upholding his duty to kill is more important than his duty to uphold the lives of ones he has been taught to preserve and defend.

So, my point is that my duty now is to my home and my loved ones here, so, naturally, I'm going to have some level of attachment as a sort of work-related necessity; as I understand it, loving and cherishing my family is one of my duties - and I like to think that Krishna would advise me similarly to Arjuna - that even though the texts say I should relinquish feelings of attachment to home and to my children, in my case, they are understandable and important parts of my Duty.

Of course, then there's the Buddhist argument that any attachment causes suffering and therefore should be let go. I suppose anyone who has raised a child through their teenaged years would understand and feel where that advice is coming from.

Pranayama

Pranayama can be translated as control or regulation of the breath or life force. It is one of the eight limbs of yoga mentioned in the Yoga Sutras. Patanjali describes pranayama as an exercise that prepares one for the concentration of meditation.

In Elemental Yoga, we practice pranayama at the beginning of each class. For beginners, a good first step is just being aware of the breath - this is an inhale, this is an exhale. Then begin to control the length of each - inhale to the count of one, two, three, exhale to the count of one, two, three. One can play with lengthening both inhale and exhale as a next step, then experiment with making the exhale longer than the inhale, particularly if one's mind tends toward agitation (not to rat myself out or anything, but this is my go to pranayama - the 1:2 breathing I mentioned in an earlier entry, where the exhale is twice as long as the inhale).

I just read this passage in the Bhagavad Gita, where Krishna is describing all of the various ways that yogis can come to know him. Just by being aware of your breath, you can come closer to a relationship with the Divine.

Still others offer
The incoming breath
Into the outgoing breath,
Likewise, the outgoing breath
Into the incoming breath.

Having restrained
The movements of incoming
And outgoing breaths,
They are wholly focused upon
Control of the life-breath.

In Elemental Yoga, we also practice a type of pranayama called Climbing Breath, where you increase lung capacity on each inhale, expanding the rib cage, feeling the fullness of the lungs in all directions. Since I have been more dedicated to a daily practice, over the past two years, my primary care physician has noticed a change in my lung capacity. None of my doctors have figured out why, but I have the lung capacity of a ten year old child all the time, and I tend towards asthma whenever I do any rigorous physical activity. But lately, my lung capacity has been registering at low normal for my height and age. My doctor was amazed the last time she checked. She asked what I had been doing differently, and she was surprised that the answer was just yoga. Low normal may not seem that great to a normal human, but for me, this is an incredibly big deal.

Bhagavad Gita

You have grieved for that
Which is not worthy of grief,
And yet you speak words
Of profound knowledge.

The learned grieve
Neither for those
Who have passed on,
Nor for those
Who have not departed.

Never, truly,
Have I ever not existed-
Nor you, nor these kings
Who protect the people,

And never
Shall any of us
Ever cease to be,
Now or forevermore.

This is an excerpt from Graham M. Schweig's Bhagavad Gita - the only reading I brought with me to Georgia. I'm taking a class with Schweig at the Yoga Journal conference in NYC in the spring. I've never enjoyed the Gita this much, but I suppose I've never been this vested in it, either. Still, I think Schweig has done a great job setting up the story and translating and annotating it to make it more understandable to the modern mind.

I'm reading it at approximately 30,000 feet in the air, sealed into a metal death tube with all that I hold dear, hurtling at a thousand miles an hour toward home, away from my husband's family home in a small college town southwest of Atlanta.

This particular passage sings right now, as I tend to be panicky in the air, particularly when with the kids. Flying always made me nervous, then you add in my recent tendency toward panic attacks - particularly when I perceive that the children are in danger - it's a heady fear cocktail.

The kids are sad at leaving - they love being with family. It's a special treat since we live so far away from all of our relatives and see them rather infrequently. They are also sad that we had to leave behind their old broken carry on bags that look like steam engines. They were too broken and ragged to make this leg of the journey with us.

I tried to talk with them about the yogic concept of non-attachment, but non-attachment just doesn't really resound with six and four year olds (or many grown-ups, for that matter).

Our hotel was run by a family from India. We enjoyed the seeming disconnect between being in rural Georgia and Hindu statuary.

I'm also enjoying the connection between my fear of metal flying death tubes and Duff McKagan's fear of metal flying death tubes. He blames his panic attacks and some of his addictions on flying. At one point during a tour, he was taking over TWENTY Xanax pills a day mostly to deal with his fear of flying. I used to take one and it would knock me flat. Still, I never miss them as much as I do when I'm boarding a plane. I also never ramble so much as I do when I've had only about ten hours of sleep spread out over three nights in a cramped hotel room, sharing a bed with my four year old who transforms into the girl from The Exorcist when he's sleeping.

We are enveloped in clouds now. I remember reading in the Globe that people are like clouds - that our cells are constantly dying, being replaced, and rearranging themselves like the molecules in clouds, and that our idea of ourselves as constant, static, physical beings is completely untrue from a scientific perspective.

So, it's good to remember - when flying, when traveling with kids, when leaving behind family or beloved childhood keepsakes - that we all have always existed and shall never cease to be.

Yogas citta vrtti nirodhah or What the Duff?

I have been doing yoga for decades. At first it was just exercise, then it was exercise that felt good, and then I noticed that it did something good to my mind. It slowed it down, calmed it. It could even bring me out of full-blown panic attack if I remembered in those moments to do it. I remember wondering what the heck was going on ... How could stretching slow down my mind?

My understanding of the process of yoga has grown considerably since then. In a weekend long intensive study of the Yoga Sutras with Edwin Bryant, I learned, in fact, that I was experiencing what yoga was supposed to be doing and had been designed to do thousands of years ago. Yogas citta vrtti nirodhah. Yoga stills the fluctuations of the mind. Yoga was designed to get the body out of the way so that the mind could be brought into stillness.

I'm reading and thoroughly enjoying the book It's So Easy by Duff McKagan. I thought it would be light reading for distraction, but it turned out that Duff has a pretty compelling story to tell. He went through dark times in GNR and turned his life around. He drank heavily during his GNR days to deal with panic attacks. Avoiding panic became a big factor in his life, and he only began to be able to deal with panic in a more healthy way after he started doing these really intense workouts. He found that his mind could still and he could come to a safe room he had designed for himself in his mind but only after he had worked himself to true physical exhaustion. Yogas citta vrtti nirodhah. He didn't practice yoga, but he could have. He was experiencing the same stilling of the mind that comes when you get the body out of the way with yoga.

Duff's story pre-enlightenment is very sad and all too familiar. He drank to quiet his mind. It took more and more booze to get to the quiet place until eventually he exploded his pancreas. Yes. Exploded his pancreas. In his book, he quotes Hemingway, "of all men, the drunkard is the foulest. The thief when he is not stealing is like another. The extortioner does not practice in the home. The murderer when he is at home can wash his hands. But the drunkard stinks and vomits in his own bed and dissolves his organs in alcohol."

My teacher, Bo Forbes, has written an excellent book called Yoga for Emotional Balance, where she talks about different poses for anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues. And in her classes, she discusses something even more relevant - it is not what you practice - specific poses or exercises - but how you practice that matters. For people with panic and anxiety issues, practicing slowly and mindfully is the key. You slow the body, the nervous system, the emotional responses down by going through slow motions, and the quality of your mind follows. With practice, your body can slow itself without a full yoga practice, and you can achieve stillness just by tuning in. For those who are interested, a good first practice, a great start, is to listen to your breathing. Practice breathing through the nose. Practice making the in breath and the out breath the same length. Then, to calm an anxious mind, make the exhale longer than the inhale. This little trick, which Bo calls 1:2 breathing, has saved me from many a panic.

Yogas citta vrtti nirodhah.

During the yoga sutra training, Edwin made us repeat that phrase over and over again until it was really in our heads. At the time, it felt odd and unnecessary and annoying. It sinks in there, though, and the sounds of the words bring a stillness all by themselves. I think I understand what he was up to now.

Desire and grief

Learning to grieve for things lost, and then to move on.

I've been listening to a lot of Morphine lately. I had put it away. The kids don't like it, and it can sink me into depression. I loved this band, and it was the soundtrack to many good times (and bad ones). When Mark Sandman passed away, I grieved his loss like he was a best friend or loved one even though we had never met. I'd followed him and the band around a bit, and I'd ended up at a few of the same clubs where they were hanging out on a couple of occasions, but we never met.

I have, in the time since, met Dana Colley a few times. He works around the corner from my house, and I briefly entertained the thought of putting my youngest son in the preschool that one of his kids attends. At the open house for that preschool, somebody left a baby crying unconsolably in a carseat near the cheese and crackers and puzzles table. Dana Colley went over to it and whistled for a few seconds and had the baby cooing calmly and softly. Every time I see Dana out and about, I hear Mark Sandman's deep, mesmerizing voice introducing him at shows, "Dana Colley on saxophone, everybody..."

Morphine is about longing, for me. Listen to Mark's slide infinitely approaching the desired note, sliding slowly up and up, and you feel desire. Let the bass reverberate through your rib cage and feel passion.

I read this book about birds. The author described the cassowaries in New Zealand. They have a resonator atop their heads like some of the dinosaurs did. They can use that space to make sounds deeper and more powerful. You feel the sound rather than hearing it, because it is at a frequency that is too low for humans to hear. But you feel a thunder in your chest before this giant bird appears. They have a dagger on each foot. They can slice an adult human from throat to pubic bone in the time it takes them to jump up.

The thrumming deep sound of morphine is like that, too.

It's ok to grieve for people you have never known. It is good for you to just let yourself feel whatever you have to feel without judging it. A few years of therapy and mindfulness training have me realizing this finally. I no longer have to feel silly for mourning the loss of a beloved performer. I feel sad, I feel loss, I sit with it and experience it and it, too, will pass. Then maybe I can listen to Morphine again without crying.

On attachment

Raga is attachment and is one of the impediments to enlightenment that one should strive to weaken through the yoga of action (from the Yoga Sutras). Attachment to self, to loved ones, to possessions, to pleasant memories of times past.

This became a poem of sorts after I experienced intense longing for past recently and wrote down some reflections.

I'm in my yard,
My chickens and my boys are digging
through some fresh, black soil I just uncovered.
Two hawks fly over head.
I miss you.

Many of our positive and negative emotions stem from longing and desire. We wish to feel again the bliss of joyous memories. We feel pained that those times have passed.

I felt strong attachment to my twins when they were born. It took several months for the feeling that we were one being to pass. I looked at the little ones suckling at my breast and felt that we were one being, the three of us. I would gaze at them and marvel that i had this piece of me that was so clearly me but still other. It was not until they were several months old that the feeling began to subside, and it was painful, not unlike losing a real physical part of myself. I grieved the loss. My twins are nearly six and a half now, and I still grieve that they are no longer part of me, though the feelings of loss have weakened now. With every milestone they achieve, they become less a part of me and more fully realized others. Each lost milk tooth is a celebration for them but it is also experienced as a loss for me.

They will grow up and move away, even though they say now that they will live with me forever.

Attachment. Longing. Desire. Letting things go so that we can be liberated. Letting them go.

Mindful eating

The book Savor tells a story that Buddha once shared about a young couple traveling through the desert with their baby. The journey was difficult, and it became clear that the family would not make it. The parents made the decision to eat their baby - if they did not have nourishment, no one would make it, and the baby could not survive without them. The Buddha said that each of us should approach each bite of food as those parents must have approached their meal - thoughtfully, with knowledge of what sacrifices were made for that morsel to make it to our mouths, mindful to only eat what we need to nourish our bodies.

We haven't shared this story with the boys yet, but it has been a great exercise for the boys to try to think of all the people and processes involved in getting each piece of food to our table. It takes the space of grace at our table when we remember to do it. They brainstorm, for instance, all the people who were involved in getting the raisins to us. It's a LONG list - from the people involved in the growing to the processing to the shipping and stocking. It also often includes my husband and I, which I hope begins to instill in the kiddos a bit of gratitude for the work we put into feeding them. It is also fun to contrast when the food item is something that we grew, like eggs from our backyard chickens or produce from our garden. The list is very different, and we all can take pride in our minuscule efforts at self-reliance.

I fell off the vegan wagon yesterday - hard. I knew this week would be a non-vegan week, as I will be at the mercy of non-vegetarian family during the holiday, and at the mercy of Bob Evans and Cracker Barrel. But I did not expect to find my husband's birthday lunch at our favorite Cuban restaurant to be so difficult. Pork never tasted so good. I thought of that baby in the desert, and I ate it anyway. Lots of it.

Ahimsa Part Two

Shortly after I decided to become a vegan, I started module two of my training with Bo. Another ten days of training, this time covering assisting, spinal anomalies, the science of yoga, structuring a class, and finished up with an intensive on the Yoga Sutras by Edwin Bryant. Our training is being filmed for use as a future online training. On some days we feel like reality stars, like Jersey Shore Yoga or something. During this module, our camera guys were amazing - quiet, unobtrusive. They looked like camera guys. They sounded like camera guys. One of them was named P.H. I don't know ... I felt like that name was too cool for anyone that wasn't in the film industry.

Filming during a yoga training can be an interesting thing. At times, you find yourself clamming up. Other times, you find yourself running on and on and opening up about things that, well, you might not want out there in the universe with your rights to them signed away forever (or whatever that release said that I signed). One can only hope that editing in teacher training is different than editing in reality shows. I don't think I'll appear to be a drunken, hair-pulling, sex-crazed maniac a la Jersey Shore Yoga, but who knows?

We got through all of the filming, and then Edwin showed up. We had been told that he was a live wire. That no one knew what would happen when Edwin was around, and that we shouldn't give him any chai. It felt sort of like the warnings given to the new Gremlins owners. Bo dropped Edwin off, told us not to give him any chai or get him wet after midnight (that part might not be true), and then took off.

Edwin taught us many things that weekend. And he drank some chai. Most importantly, he taught us what it looks like when someone has a true love for a divine being. Edwin manifests his belief in and love of Isvara in every moment. I haven't met someone that possessed of belief in a long time.

Edwin also spent a lot of time discussing ahimsa. He believes that one cannot be a practicing yogi or yogini while harming others - and that includes eating meat. His fiery speech on the topic shored up my baby step veganism. Not because some guy says he doesn't think I can practice yoga while also eating meat, but because it just feels right for me at this moment in time.

Sometime during Edwin's weekend of Yoga Sutras, sitting out under the trees in the first burst of autumn, listening to his lecture, I recalled wanting to be a vegetarian as far back as when I was a child. I grew up in a hunting family. People killed things and then cut them up and ate them. I would go visit my best friend and cousin, who lived a few yards away through the orange grove my great grandfather owned, and there sometimes was a dead thing hanging from a tree in her yard, face down, neck slit, bleeding into a pan. I ate doves that had been freshly killed. I was served (did I eat it?) possum, rattlesnake, gator, armadillo, venison, and other things. In the South, even vegetables have meat in them. And they taste good.

It wasn't to lash out that I decided I wanted to be a vegetarian, but even as a child, it just felt right. I was friends with the cows that lived in the pasture that bordered our orange grove. They had loving eyes and I watched them for hours tending to each other. They cried when they gave birth. They were playful and joyous and not obviously smart but fun to be around. (Interestingly, they were Brahma cows) When I announced my plan to give up meat to my mother, she said there was no way, that it was too much work, that she didn't have time to feed me differently than the rest of the family. An understandable position. I dropped the idea and didn't even think about it again until my early twenties, when I was so skinny and unhealthy and pale from being a poor recent grad that people often mistook me for a vegetarian. Maybe I even was. We didn't have money for meat. But I dropped it again as I was taken over by a passion for cooking, the Food Network, the slow food movement, local food, humanely raised and slaughtered meats procured from a friendly farmer at the local farmers' market.

Then I got chickens to raise as pets. One of my twins is allergic to animals with fur. We had to get rid of our cats. Dogs were out of the question. If I could raise my own eggs, then I could have harm-free eggs, and the boys could have pets. I fell in love with the chickens. They were sweet. Sure, they'd peck your eyes out (they tried - with my youngest), but they had relationships, what appeared to be feelings (bird feelings, but still). There was a pure joy in watching them peck and scratch through the yard. I even enjoyed the way they would seemingly purposefully dig up my husband's prized plants - not even to eat them, just as if they knew that it would make him fuss at them. Well, now I couldn't eat chicken anymore, either, obviously.

Edwin kept asking us, during his weekend with us, to LOOK at the animals we eat. To get to know them. His point hit home with me and reminded me of a childhood dream that could be realized now that I'm a grownup. Just like those cowboy boots I finally got myself on my last trip to Austin. Oops. I wasn't a vegan then. And now that I own them, I can't get rid of them. That would just be wrong.

Yoga Kids

I took my sons to yoga yesterday. They have varied relationships with yoga. My youngest loves it with his whole heart. He can even name poses using Sanskrit. He's been around a lot as I've studied and practiced, and he's picked it up like three year olds pick up anything they are around a lot. My oldest twin also loves it. He shares my hypermobility, and he could be a contortionist. We can fit him into tiny places. He can do poses I will never be able to do, just flop right into them. He loves meditation and can take himself from hyper to calm in seconds just by tuning into his breathing. His twin brother has an on-again, off-again relationship with yoga, depending on who is in class with him. If he's trying to look "cool" (he's very concerned with this already), he will refuse to practice, but he still sits, watches, and takes it all in. If it's just him and his brothers and random other kids, he practices and wants to be a good student. I'm proud of him. Often, if there's an activity that he cannot do immediately as well or better than his twin, he gives up on it. But he really tries in yoga on some days.

The boys take yoga from Checka. She is a powerful teacher and really never ceases to amaze me. I would like to have her here as a yoga nanny or yoga mother's helper. She gets the kids all crazy hyped up, doing made up poses like rockstar (still not sure what this one is - some sort of hopping three-legged dog is the best explanation I can give), then getting them to sing Peace Like a River, then getting them all to drop right into savasana. A classroom full of crazed three to seven year olds! As a former teacher, I can honestly say that I have never, ever seen that happen before. Checka is like a yoga pied piper.

Yesterday, after yoga, we came home and the boys just chilled out to dinner time, through dinner (they happily, calmly ate chickpea pesto burgers with potato salad and green beans and a dessert of blueberries? whose children are these??), bath and dreamily into bedtime. Checka, will you marry me? Or at least train me. Once I'm done with this other yoga training, of course.

Buddha Hunting

I just read in the Globe that Buddha statuettes are on the "out" list in home decorating. We don't have a Buddha here at the house (yet) but we have studied him, and the boys seem to favor his stories over many of the ones we have read on different philosophies. We go irregularly to Little Buddhas class at the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center. When there, we always go on a "Buddha hunt" (the boys named it that), where we run around the grounds finding all the Buddhas we can spot. I'd say that, given his rather impressive staying power, despite what the Globe's resident Decorating Expert says, Buddha never goes out of style.

At the last Buddha class, we sang the usual song about Buddha. The children are asked to raise their hands and say a thing that the Buddha wasn't bothered by when he was meditating under the tree. The standard answer by most kids on most days is "mosquitoes". So the chorus goes ... "He wasn't bothered by mosquitoes, he wasn't bothered by mosquitoes. He let mosquitoes, just roll on by." And repeat many times.

At this point in the class, my oldest raised his hand. The leader of Little Buddhas said, "And what do you think Buddha wasn't bothered by?" And J said something to the effect of: "You know? When the Earth gets pulled into the sun by the sun's increasing gravity when the sun is dying? And the Earth explodes and everyone dies? Yeah ... Buddha wasn't bothered by that." The leader looked perplexed. I tried to summarize into something that would fit the beat of the song, "Um ... I think he's referring to 'Cosmic Calamaties'." It would make a great chorus - "He wasn't bothered by cosmic calamaties ... he wasn't bothered by cosmic calamaties ... he let those cosmic calamaties, just roll on by." But after some discussion, we shortened it to gravity. It fit better, and it sort of summed the idea up. And it gave me a great image of Buddha sort of floating off, uninhibited by gravity, and still meditating with that sweet little smile.

Gratitude

At Checka's most recent children's yoga class, she asked the kids to think of things that they were thankful for. My oldest twin had quite a list - the planet, the universe, the land, food, our country, and family. My other two kids say they didn't say anything at yoga that they were thankful for, but I know from recent talks here at the house that their lists are similar.

I was thrust back in time to when I was in what must have been third grade. The librarian at our school was a very stereotypical librarian - stern and cruel, with a powerful shusher. Her skin was leathery and cracked, showing the skin damage indicative of having lived at least seven decades in Florida and having smoked for at least six of those. She had been the librarian at the school when my mom went there. Needless to say, I was terrified of her.

On our library day prior to Thanksgiving, we, too, were asked to recall what we were thankful for. As usual, I wasn't paying much attention, and she picked me last. I thought the directions she had given were to say something we were thankful for but that we couldn't repeat something that someone had already said. So here I was, twenty or so kids in, and I didn't pay attention to what any of them had said, and I couldn't think of anything that wasn't obvious that had probably already been mentioned. So I said I didn't have anything that I was thankful for.

Lizardy Librarian then turned on me with the full force of her thankfulness and unleashed an angry tirade that I have fortunately blocked out. There was some sort of punishment involved that I seem to remember consisted of writing "I am thankful for ..." several hundred times.

I've always had a ready list of things to be thankful for since that day. You know, just in case.

Letting Go of Things That No Longer Serve You

A lot of my teachers and friends - even my kids - have been talking lately of the idea of letting go of things that no longer serve you. I suppose it's that time of year. In New England, we have a very visual reminder that this is what we should be doing this time of year. Trees are doing it all around us. It's only natural.

Many teachers have talked about how we hold onto things - emotional and physical - in our hips - making hip opening kind of unpleasant for many folks. I've got floppy, overmobile hips, but last week in class, Bo found one tiny little muscle that grips for me in pigeon. She poked it. It screamed. I was sore for days.

OK. So I learned that my hips aren't as open as I thought they were.

In her book The Women's Book of Yoga and Health, Patricia Walden says that people who suffer from "overholding" in the neck - symptomatically evidenced as pain, kyphosis, stiff neck and shoulder muscles - are overholding elsewhere as well. I do often have pains in the neck - and a genetic predisposition towards kyphosis (also known as dowager's hump - pretty). So I need to let go of something, somewhere.

In a beautiful yin class this past Sunday, my beloved teacher Carolyn Little spoke to this. It was a celebration class. There was live musical accompaniment on cello and harmonium by Nirmal Chandraratna. I could feel the vibrations from the cello going through the floor into my body. The full moon was shining down on me through the window. Carolyn invoked the goddess Kali - destroyer of obstacles, of things that stand in the way, of things that no longer serve. We were asked to call forth the one thing that may have served us in the past but that we no longer need. I didn't call mine forth so much as it hit me in the head - worry. I want to shed my worry the way the trees are shedding their leaves.

When my twins were toddlers, my worry served me well. They were both the "explorer" type, which meant that any excursion outside of the home ended up with me chasing them each in separate directions at top speed. And they weren't safe in the home, either, despite my Sleeping Beauty-esque childproofing. We were one of those families that was in the E.R. so much that the nurses started to look at us warily, suspiciously. How were these children getting so many black eyes and busted lips? Oh, nothing. You know, they were just LITERALLY climbing the walls.

I developed the stereotypical anxious mother wariness that quickly cascaded into full on panic attacks at the slightest provokation. Meds, therapy, mindfulness training followed. Some doctors just looked at me and said, "Oh, yes. You should be worried. You've got three kids under the age of five!" Hilarious.

Now all three kids are in school. I'm not saying I don't have things to be worried about anymore, but I've seen my now six year old twins cross streets safely. I've seen them look out for each other on the playground. I've even seen them keep a watchful eye on their little brother at times. I've watched them make good choices. I've nervously stepped back, letting them make more and more decisions on their own, and they do a good job most of the time. It's time to let the worry fall to the ground.

At the same time, I am thankful for the path that the worry put me on. Without it, I would have kept my yoga practice safely at home. I would never have gotten involved in the yoga community. I certainly would not have pursued yoga teacher training. And I would have missed out on a lot.

Ahimsa

I first ran across the yogic concept of ahimsa during Module One of my 200 hour teacher training with Bo Forbes. Ahimsa, simply put, is non-violence. The concept was planted almost as a seed in the midst of a giant download of new and exciting information during that ten-day module. It has germinated and grown over the course of the summer and autumn into a full-fledged practice that has been life-altering.

Bo explained that ahimsa could be simply not harming other people in very basic ways, like The Golden Rule. It also could be applied to your choices in life - the foods you eat, purchases you make, friends you keep. It can be applied to yourself - non-harming the self, self-compassion. I had been studying up on self-compassion as a result of another seed planted by my good friend Paula. We went on a mommies lost weekend to Portland in the autumn last year, and she was reading Loving Kindness by Sharon Salzberg. I had been working on Loving Kindness off and on for a year or so, prompted by my mindfulness-based therapist and by continued studies in meditation. Most people can breeze through a loving kindness meditation - sending waves of love to your children or loved ones, a mentor, even the entire world of sentient beings, but when it's time to send love to themselves, they falter, breeze over it, give up. That had always been my experience with loving kindness meditation. I've got love for everyone, but I usually find myself falling short of being loveable.

My therapist had a trick for that - imagine loving yourself as a four year old child. This trick always made me cry, though, and I wasn't getting any closer to loving myself.

I decided to tackle the other parts of ahimsa first. Just like in a loving kindness meditation - practice non-harming on easier subjects first. I tackled my food choices. I was mostly a vegetarian anyway, and a seven-day detox invite from Yoga Journal came into my inbox at just the right moment. I dutifully followed the detox instructions, buying a week's worth of mung beans and giant packs of spices from my local Indian grocer. I was thrilled and excited by my tiny little containers of mung beans and rice ... for every meal ... for the first two days. Then I got a migraine. And it clung to me for days. I gave up the detox, figuring that it was definitely loving kindness on my part to give up and try to address the migraine.

Still, the two day detox that was supposed to be a seven day detox did me good in the long run (once I got over the migraine). Eating the same food for those six meals broke something in me. At this same time, I was reading Savor by Thich Nhat Hanh. Savor spends several chapters discussing how having extra weight and eating mindlessly causes suffering. It asks you to devote time to thinking about the harm you have caused yourself. If you have extra weight (at the time, I was holding an extra thirty or so pounds from my last pregnancy), list the ways that the weight hurts you - physical, emotional, psychological. My list was long and powerful. My feelings of ahimsa toward myself were growing.

My interest in losing this damaging weight and in eating mindfully prompted me to finally watch Forks Over Knives, a documentary about plant-based diets that had been sitting in my queue on Netflix for a while. It jived so well with what I was studying elsewhere - both the concept of ahimsa with regard to food choices and self and with the concepts of mindful eating covered in Savor - that I decided I would try it. I would try switching to a vegan diet.

I had read many people's thoughts on going vegan, and following the popularity of Forks Over Knives, there were more every day. I was turned off by Alicia Silverstone's glossy, air-headed veganism, but I was intrigued by some of the others. And after a couple of days, I really did feel better. My husband and I were both eating vegan. He instantly lost ten pounds. He wasn't overweight. I tried to practice loving kindness on myself while I waited for my weightloss.

One of my twins - he's six now - has been obsessed with my weight ever since we bought a Wii Fit two years ago. He likes me to weigh in so he can see if I'm still in the overweight category. As with all things in six-year old land, healthy weight is a black and white, do or die thing. Just as he has no shame in going up to a stranger smoking a butt on the corner and telling them that smoking isn't healthy, he has no shame in telling me that being overweight is not healthy and I should lose the weight. I wanted to lose the weight for him, too, and not in some high-and-mighty motherly way ("I should lose this weight so I'll live longer and be around for him") but in a purely selfish way ("God, if I lose this weight, maybe we can all focus on something else besides mommy being fat.").

Within two months of going mostly vegan, I had lost ten pounds. As of this writing, fifteen. I'm hovering three pounds over that coveted "Healthy Weight" category on the Wii Fit. My son says, understandably, I think, "Why don't you just lose those three pounds?!?!??" Deep breath. Loving kindness. Self-compassion. Ahimsa.

I've still got three pounds of mung beans. My husband has no pants that fit, as he's lost another five to ten pounds. He's happily vegan now. He doesn't even seem to miss cheese! I mean, COME ON. It's CHEESE. But my studies in ahimsa continue. My self-compassion is maybe budding? And I've still got love for everyone.