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