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!

Day 10, with a little perspective

I called my friend Sue, who owns Unity Yoga, and she reminded me that there is life outside of this yoga training, which I needed. I have a real tendency to get totally swept up in what I'm doing, whatever it might be, and lose track of myself and real life.

So I'm reminded to do what Ana herself told us to do: find what's true for me. Maybe I don't believe everything she has told us, maybe it is not all true for me. I'm going to engage more of a gently critical mind toward this training, sounding for how I feel more. I'm sure that Ana pushes us, and uses some degree of regiment, so that we can react with the force of self to her admonitions. She is trying to draw our unique selves out in full light, and I know she's wise enough to know that not all of what's true for her will be true for us. She teaches that.

And one tendency I can really work with is not getting so swept up in any one thing to lose myself. I do that with everything, and it doesn't serve me. Strange to think that on a journey into self one could completely lose sense of self. I could do with thinking about it a little less. Effort in place of patience!

Sue also told me that tomorrow is the new moon, not today, and that today is a pig day: I am always, with no exception, utterly lost and confused on pig days. That's encouraging.

I feel reset, and I'm going to bed.

Day 10

Today is a new moon. I could feel it in the morning because my body was quiet and filled with an orange glow -- there was extra energy, and quiet energy today. I knew it for sure as soon as Ana walked in wearing all black instead of in full bloom like usual. I just checked and moonrise is in two hours.

Today was brutal. The morning was good, peaceful, orange light in my body and mind. She offered the practice to use to choose an intention for, like a physical or emotional area or focusing on not struggling in a posture. In my practice I concentrated on feeling the beauty of each pose, which is a really good strategy for me. I respond to beauty. I would envision my body in the ideal pose and the beauty of the pose in my mind helped energy flow better and the struggle to disspiate: I got stronger. I felt good.

On the way back from lunch, though, my low back felt extremely fragile. I got to the studio early and got to hang out in the good energy and sunny spot from the skylight, but as I practiced my next teaching poses my back got tweakier and tweakier until I felt like any small movement would throw it out. One of Ana's assistants gave me some energy, and it's better now, but through the afternoon practice it still felt pretty fragile and beforehand another trainee recommended some poses that had worked for her, such as Camel on the wall, which is a restorative backbend. Camel is maybe the most difficult pose for me. Everything hurts, including my low back, even on the wall. She got alarmed because I shouldn't be able to feel that pose in my low back, and got me to demo my tailbone tuck, and then got alarmed about that, too: "that's it?" She noticed I wasn't using my abs.

In the afternoon practice I felt like my body was injured everywhere... the low back, the knees, the shoulder (my bicep tendon, it turns out, not my rotator cuff, which is a good thing), the ankles, the elbows, the low abs. I paid more attention to my abs during afternoon practice and I kept on looking down when they were supposed to be engaged and there they were, just hangin' out. This makes me panic about reinjuring myself through every backbend, bind and sitting position, and the pelvis disconnect just seems so insurmountable. I still feel like not much has changed for me in terms of my bad patterns, and all this injury pointing to all this illness, and all this holding on was so overwhelming, it just felt like I'll never heal my injuries or stop my patterns, and I wanted to give up not just this training, but everything.

I'm watching and celebrating with these other people who are figuring out huge things and lighting their energy on fire. We're halfway through and I'm deeply afraid that I'm going to reach the end of this training the same that I cam in, and that it will be my fault for not caring enough to get off my ass and change my behavior.

Ana has a formula for this thinking, called: breathe, breathe more, think of something that lightens your spirit, breathe more, think of more things that brighten your spirit, breathe, and more breathing. But partly I don't feel like I have the energy to use that formula, and partly I'll end up efforting so hard I'll stress myself out about my inability to think of something that lightens my spirit, and partly when I uncry myself through breath I feel a little hollow, like I buried that outward energy flow back down, that I have more to cry that I denied exit.

I hope that this is a dark night of the soul, under a sky without a moon, and that it is a good signal heralding light and growth.

Yesterday was my birthday, today I taught!

The first half of yesterday was spectacular. Aside from being a little short on sleep (the usual these days, no bigs, lots of breath keeps me vibrant) I went forth tremblingly into the day and the first thing that happened was that CHARLIE from VANCOUVER (my recent-Forrest-graduate friend and yoga co-journeyer of this summer) showed up at morning meditation with a gift of raw protein squares! He was my birthday present from the universe. He didn't even know it was my birthday. It was so nice to see a friendly face from my former life as a person who was not in the midst of a Forrest training. And it was so nice to see a friendly face who knows exactly what is going on in my life because he went through it. And it was nice to see Charlie's friendly face because he is especially always grinning and full of vitality. I cried through half of the four directions, though, which was the start of it.

During chanting, we usually get up and dance to the river song, and yesterday, everyone joined hands and ushered me to dance in the centre of the circle. So much love and light and spirit. I did plenty of leaping. Mid-song, when the tempo changes, I always have the urge to leap, so I leapt into star shapes and had a beautiful time. Practice was amazing, and deep, and there were lots of long, intense lunges and inversions, and thrilling body contortions. I think the universe gave me another birthday present of my inner thighs back. I'm just starting to notice them for I guess the first time. Ana's assistant gave me an amazing assist in bridge with half-lotus (I guess that's what you would call it) -- her birthday present, working out what has felt like a little hook that makes my legs collapse when it catches, right around the front of the hip joint. Those star-leaping moves send amazing new energy along the inner lines of my legs. Bridge with one leg up is my new favourite pose: never have I felt such depth of burning in my thighs. It's like the raggedy usual burn of poses emulsified and dispersed into millions of vibrating, cellular points of heat. I suppose that is what you might call going to a deeper layer. The assistant said to me that I have to chase my edge more -- and now I know how to do it in that pose. After practice I was wonderful, spaced-out goo. It was the first day I've really felt strong again. Strong and ready to take on anything. I am most impressed with how my shoulders are learning to wrap better, and how different my handstand felt from the last handstand I did a few days ago. The class was a restorative, and it worked.

After practice I gathered some troops and went for breakfast. I was going to go for Pho lunch, but I realized that lunch is at 9:30 now... which is breakfast for everyone else. Every time someone says good morning after morning practice I chuckle -- it's afternoon, man; I've already been up for 5 hours. It was nice. I haven't had food that wasn't homecooked and ultra healthy for two weeks, so it felt really special. Another trainee picked me a flower. Everyone wrote me warm fuzzies and collected them for me, and gave me birthday hugs.

Once back, it was practice teaching time. I was assigned the second section of the intro course, with uddiyana, wide forward bend, and wide side bend, but someone in the course got sick and I took over her spot -- the first spot -- which was the basic moves. Hard - to - teach: lots of talking, no movement, hard to keep the energy up. I started bawling mid-teaching ujjayi and basically didn't stop crying for the rest of the day. I cried all of this morning, too. Shit is hitting the fan. Lions today were incredible: I have never made such noises, and also never collapsed into heaving sobs pretty much anywhere, much less on a yoga mat. I think teaching ujjayi triggered me because there's just so little you can really use to describe it. How it sounds, yes, and what it is similar to, but what it feels like is a pretty abstract thing to describe, and I think I just felt overwhelmed by the lack of flow and inability to help my students get it. By the end of the day I realized that it was of course something that people just get when they get it, and reconnected to yoga as a personal practice guided by a teacher -- understanding that being a teacher is not about 'making' people 'get' anything, just guiding and communicating and providing tools. This is something I know, but my unconscious apparently has different ideas about things.

I taught today, and didn't burst into tears over ujjayi (if I had I was planning to crack a joke about how it was such a beautiful practice it brought me to tears). I taught accurately but boringly, as we discovered through video review. Once I got over my initial nerves, I actually felt better and calmer and more confident teaching than I had on any previous day, despite real live people from the real world being there, but I was apparently much less vibrant than any previous day. Silly rabbit, the room is not full of critics but instead full of people who want to learn yoga and expect it to make them feel better -- them's good vibes. What is that about? I think partly it's the energetic toll of crying for hours and hours, which saps my sense of self. I'm having trouble bringing my personality into the very specific language necessary for a beginner teacher teaching a beginner course to use. I usually express my personality with MY words, and improvisation and verboseness. Verbose improv does not have a lot of space on a yoga teacher's mat, especially not a beginner yoga teacher, so how do I do it? What part of the language formula is flexible here, and what is essential in its present form? It's true, I didn't feel my personality today, but where is it? How do I put it here? I feel like I don't know how, but Ana says I had it two days ago, and I wonder where it went and why.

A lot of people are grinding against the precise language formulas that Ana instructs us to use, and reacting with resentment about how she corrects them. I figure, hell, I'm in her training, she knows what she's talking about, I'm gonna do what she says. I assume that she has reasons for everything, and I don't challenge them. Is my easy willingness to follow all of Ana's coachings and languaging exactly graciousness and genuine trust, or a pattern of complacency with systems of learning that lets me be a passive self and not challenge or stir shit up?

I'm also wondering if taking on a second section in order to make my piece more challenging was bravery and desire to expand myself to become a better teacher faster, or part of a pattern of taking on more than I can handle? There's a little bit of this in it, I think: "well, I had twice the amount of work to do, so it's no wonder I wasn't as successful teaching as I'd like to have been." Did I keep myself from trying as hard as I could?

Teaching was good. It'll be better next time (I went from zero to twenty minutes of poses in 8 days, I'm sure another 7 will bump me up again). Every time we breathe into our hearts I cry. What is that about?

Birthday.

I woke up with my body tingling.

Last night, after working on my ethics before bed, and with a premonition that I would be dreaming importantly, I had the following dream:

I was for some reason staying with my first boyfriend -- his apartment was a strange atticky thing. All I remember is that there had been a fire, and all of his stuff came out okay, but all of the books in my bookcase, specifically all of the creative writing notebooks I have ever produced, had burned. I couldn't understand how they'd burned while the bookcase wasn't even smoke damaged. I was furious. My notebooks are my most precious things. How could everything I'd ever written burn, when the bookcase was unharmed?

Now what does THAT mean, then, hmm?

Tomorrow is my birthday. I wonder if my shit is going to hit the fan -- birthdays are often really intense times. Then, on Friday, I teach non-trainees for the first time. I was supposed to be teaching second -- a ten-minute three-pose sequence -- but the trainee who was supposed to go first fell ill and won't be doing it. For the practice round today, I asked Ana if I should sub in, and she said yeah. At the end of practice I asked if the trainee was going to be coming back to teach, and Ana said to practice up just in case I had to present -- "because now we know that you can teach it fine even without practicing it" (thanks!). Now I'm going first, and teaching poses I've never studied and only practiced once so far, and I'm going to be up there for twenty minutes. Ujjayi breathing is hard to teach, and hard to cue for assistants. Part of me did it because I wanted the challenge, and want to push forward hard and really learn; part of me doesn't know why I managed to get myself into more work when what I had was already enough (this is maybe something I am known for doing... is it a good thing? Or am I irresponsibly overloading myself?)

For my birthday this year, I want to teach these poses without twisting my body into a squeaky anxious mass, which was the major criticism Ana had of me when giving feedback this afternoon: "trying so hard makes you stupider". Send me mellow vibes, and help me be relaxed, knowing I will make mistakes.

MM

I've been drawing cards some mornings. The day before we started with Ana:

The Owl (the catalyst of self): Self-realization, Self-knowledge, Analysis, Determination, Wisdom, Transition, Clear-sightedness, Forced Adaptability, Awareness, Ruthlessness, Patience, Intellect.

This is a card I pulled in the summer that supposedly represented my "self" animal.

Today (and I didn't read it until I got home):

The Stag (power of choice): Strength to Run or Fight, Choice, Avoidance, Responsibility, Protection, Leadership, Rhythms of the Seasons, Sacrifice, Determination, Challenge, Aggression, Self-contained.

Heavy stuff.

Today during morning practice we were focusing on feeling pleasure in all of our poses. The idea is to find the pleasure in the pose even when it intensifies, and explore why it doesn't feel pleasurable, and I admit that I balked out on a lot of poses and didn't keep my joyful mind. I do feel like I cheated myself, and gave in to my shit, and could have unearthed some stuff if I had chosen not to let myself get mopey and weak. But I felt mopey and weak, which is the shit that today's practice brought up. I just wonder if I moved it out or wallowed in it -- I suspect I wallowed. Ultimately, it doesn't matter, it was my practice today and stressing about it instead of accepting it and being interested in it is just indulging different shit by being too hard on myself. I injured my shoulder, though, and that makes me very angry with myself. The injury I gave myself in the lower spine during morning practice last summer still hasn't healed completely, and I'm afraid that this injury will stick, too, and keep me from reaching the deep places in my poses that I crave to reach. It makes me angry at my shoulders for caving forward and refusing to open. But it's clear that I put too much expectation on my shoulders, and then associate my self-worth with how well they perform -- put ego into it. Thinking on it, I'm not surprised that I got an injury and I feel gratitude to my body for speaking up and telling me it's had enough of that behavior by refusing to bear that weight anymore.

Interestingly, I've found that all of a sudden I can't go deeply into very many poses at all. Partly I think that Ana's style is very healing and injury-preventative. She makes it difficult to injure yourself because she provides excellent cues that keep you from doing the pose incorrectly. My warriors, which used to be deep, low, right-angled things, are now way up in the sky because I have to be accountable for my feet -- I like to ignore them. No more. Partly it's the hot room in the morning which makes me feel weary and week. Partly, all my issues are showing up.

Ana assigns us sadhana, spiritual practice, and I am very grateful to her for this: she has given us the sadhana of stopping what, in the Speakeasy world, we'd call negative self-talk. She makes it a goal for us as spiritual beings to stop criticizing ourselves, dimming our own spirits. She doesn't mean not being accountable -- we're asked to be accountable for a lot of hard things, that push all of my self-judgment buttons -- but truth doesn't have to come in the form of self-abuse, and should not, and probably isn't being truthful when it comes in that way. I guess the goal, or at least my goal, is to feel and know the truth of myself, trust that feeling and knowing without manipulating it, and dealing with it kindly.

This training is one of the first times in my life that I've been able to take criticism without it feeling like a personal attack (so far, anyway). I'm grateful to Ana for her ability to deliver criticism with such loving energy that I can feel the loving energy and not be oversensitive and internalize the words as an attack on my character.

I'm having a lot of trouble figuring out how to trust that I am stronger and more talented than I let myself realize, in a way that is not an ego trip -- I fear being egotistical. I think I should explore what I associate with the word "egotistical." Gratitude helps. I like to seek out the things I am grateful for and to wash in that gratitude because it dissolves my ego to appreciate something outside myself, it is a sincerely pleasurable feeling, and swells and fills me, and I feel good about my ability to be grateful.

I'm glad to be blogging this experience. I'm practicing speaking my truth and I think it keeps me accountable to have an audience... perceived or actual. An audience is also easy to perform to, and so it's a challenge as well. It's helping me process things. All of the good things I just wrote down came out of a person who, for the most of the day, has been feeling mopey and self-critical, and I know and have always known that writing is a good way of helping me see clearly. In this case, honouring all the good work I did today. I couldn't get my head straight to figure out what it was I did today, or how I felt about it, to sincerely appreciate my own good work. The blog keeps me positive, because I'm not interested in publishing whining about how I think I suck. I know that this training is massively good, and that is what I want to share.

For awhile I was concerned about the professionalism of having a blog, as a yoga teacher, that includes all of my inner crap, because I wouldn't want my students to feel... what? Somewhere I got the idea that full disclosure is unprofessional. It's connected to the idea that students want some paragon of good and perfect yoga in their teacher, and that I have to be a good example, and they might be put off by whatever of my crap conflicts with their crap. But right now my body is declaring strongly that those ethics aren't mine. I was a peer counselor who believes that people, as they are, are powerful healers, and can heal strongly by relating to those who ask for some input on the exact same level -- as peers. At home I practice mostly at Unity Yoga, where one of the goals is to dissolve the scary, hierarchic divide between student and teacher, and create -- surprise surprise -- Unity among a community of yogis. I have always admired role models who are open about their humanness, Ana Forrest included, and I think it is important to me to try harder to make sure my self is not in hiding.

Maybe I will change my mind and decide this this blog is not appropriate for students to read. I have time to think about it and partway through my last valiant paragraph something in my started fluttering. I don't know yet if it is something warning me that I'm not speaking truth, or part of my self that's afraid to be exposed, but I'll explore it and let you know. The point is: I want to be real. I want to be writing this blog, and I know that when I started it I wanted to be sharing it with students, and that writer-Meaghan doesn't want to have to be a separate identity from yoga teacher-Meaghan, and writer-Meaghan writes like this. That's my truth right now as best I can express it.

Love,
MM

Yesterday Ana taught us how to SEE ENERGY.

Yep, this was the right training for me.

Day 2

Starts today. Yesterday was GOOD. I was not sure what I would be asked to do or if I could handle it. The morning chanting was WONDERFUL. The intensive was challenging, and I was really dragging by the end of it, but it was okay. My abs already look different . . . no joke. She got teacher trainees to shout out the instructions to most of the ab and shoulder work while we were doing it, which was difficult. How do you follow your own direction of holding breath and reaching with your elbows and extending a leg when you're yelling it AND trying to remember how to coordinate which of your legs you are straightening?

One thing became clear explicitly and implicitly in the afternoon: this course is not about trying to do anything perfectly. I've never met a better perfectionism-buster than Ana so far. I am really, really surprised and really proud of myself for surviving the afternoon exercises -- and with relative ease, as well. She threw us immediately into teaching one another using touch, then strictly non-verbal visual cues, then strictly verbal cues. She says, "teach a pose" but I don't feel like I ever KNOW a pose to teach. Being put on the spot, performing something I haven't digested how to perform is a recipe for a panic attack for me, but I floated through it. I think the intensives are a good tonic for my nerves, and I also think that I somehow managed to own my inexperience and use it to my advantage psychologically. Broadly speaking, I am inexperienced with yoga, and whatever way you put it, I've never taught it. So I managed to agree with myself that I was going to suck and be okay with it, and that's the whole point, for her. Ana keeps repeating to us that we're not going to get it perfect, we just won't, so just do it.

I was nervous that Ana, and her intensity, would be hard on me, but so far I'm okay. I've been explicitly warned that crazy emotional shit is going to bust up all over, though, so I guess I should be prepared to have that panic attack somewhere along the lines anyway.

I didn't get enough sleep last night, only 6.5 hours, and I'm feeling it today, and I look it. We now have nightly reading, and I needed an hour or so of decompressing and talking through the day before my mind would quiet down to concentrate again. Gonna need some extra spiritual strength to get me through the intensive, for sure.

Love,
MM

A real quick on before I leave for day one with Ana.

The last few days have been amazing -- but in the two hours between when I get home and when I have to go to bed there is only time for cooking, eating, bathing, and sleeping. After the first day I felt really charged up. All of the information was exciting and helpful and mind-opening, and I reremembered my relationship with the scientific disciplines -- I like them, despite all this Englishing. After day 2 if anatomy I felt awful. After learning so much about the way the body can be injured, and the serious repercussions of postural incorrectness, and knowing where I have pain in my body, I felt like a broken body. Third day, yesterday, I felt better again. Ellen Heed gave me information on how to work with a condition I have, on the muscular level, that nobody else has anything to say about, really, besides that it's a syndrome and it'll probably be there forever and that I should always medicate (I don't). She's really into women's sacred anatomy and whatever the price I think I'd like to take her class: women's health! Sexual health! I've always felt passionate about those things. I wish I could share in the five minutes I have before I have to get my things together what things I have learned about muscles!

I was surprised to be categorized as someone with more elastin than collagen naturally in my connective tissue. I've never identified with "those flexible girls", always with strength and muscularity. But I have certain tells: collapsed arch in the foot, overextension in the knees, twisty elbows. This means I'm less get-up-and-go than collagen types (yep), and that I also do more poorly in a heated room, that practicing day is especially hard on my body and I should take breaks, and that I have much greater risk of dislocation injuries.

This is important: I took out my septum ring. Ellen says, "no metal on the middle line," because it interrupts chi flow, and can cause trouble all along the central line. I feel very attached to my septum because it makes me part of the piercing community and expresses something I'd like to express. I've had it for almost five years and without it my face seems 'without.' But I had the impulse to take it out myself a few weeks ago (which was quickly quashed by my attachment to it) and maybe it is just time. It seems smart to give it a try in a healing and energy-working environment like this training.

This also is important, and I repeat it for the sake of certain THC-and-chi enthusiast friends of mind: apparently THC lives in the fatty tissues of the fascia -- moreso in people with less dense connective tissue -- and won't leave without a deep cleanse (sweating helps). It interrupts the pleasure respons, and Ellen says she's put her hands on asana superstar, heavy-meditating, liberated raw vegan youths who should be moving chi like they're electrical wire but don't because they smoke dope every day. What about the Rastas, I wonder? But she said she just speaks the truth from her own experience, and this is it.

I think she has become an extremely important teacher for me.

I have to go. I have conquered my first fear, this day, of sleeping in too late.

Ana walked in the door yesterday and filled the room with an orange, tingly fuzz of electric energy. WHAT will this be like!

Big Love,
MM

Day 1

It's 5:44. I was out of bed by 5:10, which will be cutting it close in a few days. Today is Ellen Heed's anatomy workshop, which starts at 8. I'll find out of my roommate wants to do the 40-minute walk, or if she wants to walk alone.

I left my house at about 2:30 Sunday. I was traveling with my friend Peter, a poet, and two of his poet friends who were going to do a reading at Pilot Books, an unbelievable heaven-on-earth of a small press bookstore, owned by a rad 25 year old woman entrepreneur! On our way to pick up Emily we encountered all manner of people hanging out of honking cars waving Canadian flags, by which we gathered Canada won the hockey game. We boycotted honking just like we'd boycotted the rest of the Olympics. We were late getting out, so it was a real bummer when the border guards took issue with my "status" (yoga teacher training) and took us all in to talk to us. I guess I was pretty niave about this border business. I didn't have any documentation proving I'd only be staying a month -- granted, nobody sent me any documentation that would prove such a thing. All of my correspondence was through email, and I hadn't printed it. They let us through begrudgingly after about a half hour. Everyone else in the car was really kind about it and commented on the fascinating semiotic politics of the experience, and called it educational. We thought we'd make up time on the not-too-busy highway until we ran into collision warnings. Halfway through a crawling detour we found out that someone had apparently been hit by a Greyhound. Our journey so far had been late, hassled, and brushed with tragedy, so there was a small air of foreboding. I blame the full moon.

We finally got to Seattle about ten minutes after the reading was supposed to begin. There were only four people at the bookstore, including the owner, the event organizer, and I think some staff. Emily and Chris launched into their wicked collaborative feminist poem series, and after they presented their poetics all of us participated in a long and involved and passionate debate about feminism and language. Everyone was about to leave for dinner when Peter said he'd like to propose that I read. Flustered and unprepared (and dehydrated), I managed to pronounce 5 poems, and then he read about 5. I haven't read at a poetry reading in it seems years, and usually only friends and teachers see my poems, so I was astounded and thrilled when the owner of Pilot (her name is Summer) said she really enjoyed my work and that she'd like to have me read there again! We'll see . . . .

After dinner I finally got around to trying to figure out my sleeping arrangements: no dice. I couldn't get through to my backup and it was too late to try the place I'm renting. I ended up sleeping on Summer's floor, which I feel no end of embarrassed about -- irresponsible! But I suppose it was pleasantly bohemian of me to roll in, throw down a few last-minute poems and trust the universe to provide me with a place to sleep.

I conquered the bus and arrived at the place I'm staying, which is a beautiful large old house. I have a bigger, comfier bed than I've ever had, and there were fresh flowers waiting for me when I arrived. The owner of the house is friendly and helpful, and I discovered this morning that she gets up before 6am, too. I met my roommate, Fatima -- another Forrest trainee -- who is stylish and personable, and we ventured off to see if we could find the studio where we'll be practicing.

I feel like I'm on the right path when my journey to Forrest training brings me smack, first thing, into artistic opportunity: my intention for this summer is to concentrate on art and become involved in artistic communities. I have found that I need both artistic expression and yoga practice in my life to maintain my peace of mind. In the first week here I'll have found both.

This poem, one of my mom's favourites, was on my fridge for a long time when I was a kid. She'd ripped it out of an outdated university textbook anthology of hers. On the side of the page facing it, was an image of autumn birch trees with blue sky peeking between them. I read it every day, and it is one of two poems I can still dictate on command.

A Vagabond Song (Bliss Carman)

There is something in the autumn that is native to my blood --
Touch of manner, hint of mood;
And my heart is like a rhyme,
With the yellow and the purple and the crimson keeping time.

The scarlet of the maples can shake me like a cry
Of bugles going by.
And my lonely spirit thrills
To see the frosty asters like a smoke upon the hills.

There is something in October sets the gypsy blood astir;
We must rise and follow her,
When from every hill of flame
She calls and calls each vagabond by name.


(Obviously) I took my blog name from this poem. I often feel vagabondish. I don't like to stay in one place; I feel pulled by seasons. Not necessarily to go somewhere new -- though sometimes to go somewhere new -- but always emotionally. Seasons pull me back to previous selves, or into new phases where I do or do not want a partner, or I do or do not want to be an academic, or I want to throw away all my posessions or I want to gather new ones and decorate myself differently.

Autumn gives me spiritual stir. Asters are flowers, but that line gives me images of the grey branchy trees on Mount McKay driving out to Vanderwees farm to pick a pumpkin near the end of October. They look like smoke upon the hills (and I feel more spiritually moved by trees than flowers). The deep quiet and day-brightness, night-blueness, and metallic smell of winter stir me. Especially the quiet. The process of spring-into-summer winds me up like a spring, cranking my smile wide, and puts me into adventure mode. I think it's supposed to be passe in poetry to be overly moved by nature (it's a projected romantic construct etc. etc.) but that doesn't bother me. I think it's real and amazing that the body moves in tandem with the seasons, feeling them, and that the seasons can massage the mind and body in such ways as to effect growth and change. I like the idea of being called by October.

Anyway, I arrived in Seattle yesterday, after almost a whole year of living in the same city, which hasn't happened for the last 5 years. I remember why I like to move around so much. This is the call of vagabondism, the tactile experience of expansion of self: I am feeling boundless gratitude for the thousand small challenges of a new city, many fears. Because everything is new and uncomfortable, every step is an expansion out of fear and unknowing into knowing and triumph. About to go into training, I feel that I am about to spend a whole month in a perpetual state of high (performance) anxiety. This is my vagabond song.