Intention-setting.

Ah yes, it's been awhile. Integration has been the most difficult part of training and sort of feels like it will never be complete -- some parts of me don't integrate, which is cool and good and new and full of possibility actually. I like the new ways I fit and don't fit places. I defended my thesis and finished university. I have been on an art tirade.

That's why I'm writing again. I have been thinking a great deal about intention-setting, only because I have been watching intentions unfold almost falling straight out of my mouth. I decided, realized (the same thing -- I'll talk about that some other time), at training that this would be a summer of art, of establishing my identity as an artist (to myself; by proxy, to the world). I am an artist, after all. (See!) My artist self has been in impatient hibernation for most of five years of university. My summer project is to call myself an artist. Since I finished writing my thesis I have painted three paintings, one giant ceiling mural (it's a magic spell), and begun work on two nests. I've been waking up, doing art for two hours, eating breakfast, doing art until dinner, doing art all night until bed. Sometimes it isn't even what I want to be doing but it demands to be done. On top of insane compulsions art supplies have been falling out of the sky to me. A few days ago a friend dropped off three ten-foot tall canvas (free) and my roommate just gave me a beautiful history of a toolbox filled with rejected mediums (pencils pastels pastels charcoal charcoal comte oils goache, plus paper). It's a treasure.

I'm working on a painting for a ceremony I'm helping with, thereby working on my organizing skills and keeping me connected to another of my always-expanding artistic and spiritual communities.

I am experiencing (and so I am sharing) that setting a true intention, a wise spirit-true intention, creates near instant change.

Integration

The day I got back I went to a stunning full moon meditation lead by a friend, and found myself singing and playing my little wooden flute, and glowing, and having deep visualizations, and feeling like all was right. I could feel the ways I'd changed and deepened. The meditation and following celebration felt like a place I could bloom.

But in the days since I've felt like all of my training has slipped away, like it didn't even happen, like I'm alone, and depressed. I leapt into yoga classes but some that used to be my favourites weren't challenging and engaging like they used to be, and the sequencing felt unsafe, and I know that going to them won't keep up my training. My community is scattered around the city and world, and there's no community gathering I can rely on. Practicing alone in my room feels... lonely; I'm so used to 40-90 people sharing energy. Planning my own sequences deflates the experience. I feel panicky about all of the physical work I've done over the last month slipping away.

I haven't yet started to look for work. I'm settling in, but I'm also really intimidated.

The last thing Ana said to me was, "remember that you can brighten up any time you want, especially when you run energy" but this city is full of energy healers -- I feel silly offering in the company of other who have trained in just that. Friends seem skeptical.

I don't feel ready to tackle teaching yoga full time (and it would take months to build up a full time schedule), I have no money at all, and no job, and I'm scrambling to find any kind of work that will pay me decently and not suck me dry spiritually and emotionally: it turns out there's nothing I want to do. Actually, half the time I do not even want to be a yoga teacher, it seems taxing. I came back bursting to throw myself into art and community, but I don't want to write or paint.

I yearn to do one of my favourite, favourite things -- sit in a cafe and write and read -- but upon my return, coffee makes me feel gross, I have no patience for reading, and nothing I read inspires me to write anything.

I've been sleeping all day. I'm concerned that I'm allergic to the house or the cat. I don't know if I should move with my house in June to a place with cheap rent, or try to find a place of my own -- if that's good for me, or if I'll just squander much-needed traveling-and-adventure money on rent if I do that.

I didn't think returning would feel like this at all. Friends who've come back have come back charged up and raring to teach. Where have I gone?

LAST DAY.

I can't believe it. My body is tired and needs rest, but I don't want it to be over.

Even yesterday I was making breakthroughs and going through process. I felt a line of energy shoot from my heart to my pelvis in wheel, and I was able to jump from downward dog to crow for the first time. I think I taught my most coherent and interesting on-the-spot co-teaching piece.

Today will be full of ceremony, and I want to drink it in as fully as I can. I am talking to myself in my head about whether I went for it with my whole spirit this training, and if I took advantage of Ana's presence enough and asked enough questions, but I have to quiet it.

The brevity of this training is another way of driving home the theme of don't wait to do what you want!

I wonder how much I've changed. Tomorrow I'll be on the train home. I've also finished the paper journal I started in November: so, a new one, for a renewed life journey.

MM

Day 21 & 22

There are only three days left in this training... and the last is ceremony. I can't believe it. I can't believe I'm going to have to leave all the amazing beings I've encountered here for I don't know how long before we'll reunite. I feel like I've just started to get to know who they are and I want to dive deep into knowing them but we've run out of time. Many live in Seattle; I think I'll be coming back here to visit often.

Yesterday I spent about 20 minutes in wheel practicing assists, with a tweaked low back. It is a testament to the safety and healing of this style of yoga that I can be properly warmed up so as to hang in wheel with a smile on my face when I'm tweaky!

(here I fall asleep without finishing . . . )

I was listening to a rendition of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, yesterday, by an old co-volunteer, and it made me realize how raw and open I've become over this training. It also made me realize how much I want to stay always raw and ever-opening to feeling, so that the sweetness of the beauty in the world can was through me like his song did.

Since the last progression I've made in my teaching, the last intro class I taught, I feel like I'm at a plateau again. We're teaching more advanced classes to our peers, now; we sequence a class and then rotate at ten-minute intervals. It's easier because everyone knows the poses and don't need to be demo'd to and walked into in the same way, but I still always get up there and freeze, and can't see anything to correct in the poses, and all the fun, energetic things I had in my head to keep the energy up fall out. It's frustrating... and I probably shouldn't be storing them in my head ;) . But I do feel pretty capable of sequencing a safe and interesting class, now, and that's big. That was one of my major impetus for taking this training: learning how to sequence. I know I know the poses, and I can see and empath corrections, and see correct and incorrect poses, but I'm having trouble putting them all together. It will come in time, but I can't believe there's no time left in training for it to come! And my peers say pretty good things about me, so I'm sure I'm not doing as badly as I think I am.

I think I'm leaving out things I wanted to say, but I'm exhausted, and going to bed.

MM

Day ... 19? Already?

Yes, a quiet period. Business, and lack of words, and learning.

I'm out of my dark night.

I have realized a bunch of things:

I have always felt like I was not a shy person, that I had a lot of energy, and have always been confused when people referred to me as shy. I understand this now as blocking energy; I've started to see the ways that I block my energy from leaving my body for other people to experience, and I am aware of the training I've put myself through in order to learn how to keep that energy in check.

A lot of the sad things that have happened in my life I have worked through completely -- on an intellectual and emotional level. Let me just tell you about my peer support years and womens-rights, anti-violence, and anti-oppression politics, and dreams of setting up healthy relationship workshops for young people. But I haven't worked through those things in my body. I can explain feminism to you and comfortably call people out on misogyny; and I can give you the tools and resources to help get you out of your unhealthy relationship; I can take you to a play about women who learn to paint abstract-emotional pictures of their vaginas through vagina workshops; but I can't paint you a picture of my own vagina. Yet.

Again with the intellectual workthrough: I talked and wrote and painted and meditated and reframed and accepted myself out of depression, and don't really consider myself depressed any longer, but it still feels normal to never want to get out of bed in the morning, and to have several-day periods of sadness, and to have low energy overall. I treat those times as moments of illness and care for myself kindly, and they pass quickly, but I cared for them by submitting to them and letting them run their course: by staying in bed, by accepting that I was going to get nothing done that day, and so forth. That's fine, but I just realized on a deeper level that tired and unenthused and submissive is not the vital energy of my life force -- what kind of life force energy would that be? It's energy I've absorbed and stored, and I've stored it in my body. Whenever I tweak my low back (twice this training, oy) I crash emotionally (my last few posts were the result of the last one; the most recent was today). Spending a little time (ten minutes) in healing with another trainee who ran energy and had me breathe into my back perked me up right away. The fact is that more often than not, when I'm feeling bad, I willingly and deliberately submit to that feeling. Usually it involves not breathing, and, unable to muster the will to breathe, I hold my breath and sink deeper. Breathing does not take a lot of effort. I have been unwilling to allow breath into my body to nourish my cells. It feels like there is a parasite in me that feeds on unhappiness, and makes breathlessness an addiction to feed it like candida makes the body want sugar to feed it, and, well, I don't know what other parasites take from the body and make it crave.

It's like the way my body slumps my shoulders and neck forward and makes me slouch. Time and time again during this training assists have proven me that the muscles in my back have more than enough strength to pull my shoulders blades away from my ears where I put them when I'm stressed, and that my chest is open enough for me to stand proud. I am strong enough to stand up straight with my chest up, my abs are strong enough to keep the kink out of my low back, but the muscles refuse to work that way. I'm willing to reject the pull of low energy and submission now.

Really the best thing that I've realized here is that I see and feel energy, and how to use it to heal. I've let go of the idea I had that I needed to have some kind of huge, dramatic, teary breakthrough, but I think I did have one big breakthrough among many, and it happened on Sunday, after I'd taught my second intro piece (My inner critic is disappointed in my performance but Ana says that it's completely insane, and I believe her, and am choosing to ignore it: I improved since the time before, which is great!). There was a woman who'd had a major accident that caused her whiplash and a concussion, and after I adjusted her in savassana, Ana got me to run energy on her head and brain, to help it calm down after being jostled. I was there for maybe ten minutes, and in that time my feet and my hands tingled... not pins and needles, something else. I sent cooling energy through my hands into her head, and could feel it moving down my arms, and could feel her head responding. It felt amazing, and my head turned into a dark and quiet cavern. In video review, there was some footage of me running the energy, and I was lit up like a lightbulb.

Partly the discussion about it was special to me because I've felt like I haven't had much deep attention paid to me during the training... attention, yes, and constructive coaching, but for some people Ana's known just what to say to suddenly transform their teaching in a dramatic moment of intensity, or she's shared searing insight into their lives. I have been getting a lot of corrections of technical mistakes, and comments about my clear instructions but low-energy teaching technique. Comparing isn't constructive, but I hoped for something personal, something that proved that Ana saw me in a special way. I just wanted validation. Anyway, I was on the screen, and Ana pointed out the good energy work I was doing, and later some trainees commented on how bright I was on the screen after I was done. I stopped feeling so middle-of-the road. When I was done with the work, at the end of the pose, she also told me that I'd done very good work and gave me a little bow in namaste. "The sacred in me recognizes and salutes the sacred in you." THAT means something to me.

As of right now, energy work is the brightest jewel in myself that I've found... but there are still five more days, and a lot can happen in that time.

And now: BED time.

Love love love.

Break day 1

Last night we had a process that was supposed to be really intense and revealing, but it wasn't all that intense for me. It revealed things, but things I already knew. Ana said the less we fought her words, the more we would get out of it, but I just didn't find myself totally convinced at any point. I tried to... maybe that was the problem. I'm not sure if any of my responses were sincere. Part of me feels guilty for not getting into it enough, but the wiser part of me thinks that this just wasn't the right ceremony for me, and that's okay. Maybe I had a moment of clarity. I reached a space of acknowledging that I'd had some negative experiences, but that I'd also been taking an active role in healing them for some time. Ana said we'd glimpsed our sacred selves, and if that's the case... my sacred self is orange, blue and purple, and wants to charge around the country in a sandalwood scented hippie fan making art and picking sage (hey, Diana?). It wants to explore the natural world and it wants total freedom. I'm not sure how that aligns with my passions though -- I'm passionate about art, yes, and nature, but I'm also passionate about helping people, and that usually takes something different from charging around in a van like a wild being.

I think my experience in morning meditation yesterday morning was more revolutionary, but for some reason it has left my mind entirely. I was telling someone about it and had to stop because practice was starting, and didn't get to finish or write it down. The residual feeling was that, yes, my downward spiral into murk the other day was a last hold on the clenching around self I do, and I think I had the sense of unfurling around myself.

But today I woke up feeling hung over and anxious (that is not an unfurled sensation at all). I slept in until 7:30, and had to drag myself out of bed (that's pretty usual) and didn't accomplish much besides going to the business workshop that's scheduled for our two day break. I feel different, in a disillusioned way. I'm not sure what I'm doing here. I feel stuck at my current skill level in teaching and nothing seems to be helping to break me out of it.

I need to learn how to stand up straight. Ana tells me that when I teach I collapse in my chest and that as soon as I do my energy drops. I think I have the muscular strength but my body is not willing to do it. I'm not sure how to fix that. At this point it does seem like more of a habitual refusal than a muscular issue.

I had half a mind to decide I didn't want full certification and to skip the business workshop, but I know if I did that it would be one step into losing hold of this goal altogether and just going home. Suddenly I feel like I don't care. What's that about? Today I just want to live my life. I feel like a normal person all of a sudden. One of the trainees had a potluck tonight in celebration of our small break, and it was good: we did get to hang out like normal people, and vent about the stuff we didn't like and laugh about the stuff we did like about this training.

I have an insane amount of homework to do during the break that was not a break, so I'd best be off and doing it. Here's updated. (Also, I think I dreamed posting this, once).

Day 11

Today's our last day before a mini break (sort of). I think I went a little of the deep end yesterday. I have to remember that I've been working my body really hard on little sleep, too. Exhustion makes me weepy and dramatic.

I love yoga, and it makes me feel good. I'm gonna go do some yoga and it's gonna make me feel good!