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.

Hello, internet.

In one week to the day I set out to Seattle to do the amazing Ana Forrest's 200-hour yoga teacher training. This blog is about sharing that journey with YOU.

I learned about Ana Forrest only this summer. I began the summer with a 10-day Vipassana meditation retreat, in Merrit, BC, and the intention of making it a summer of spiritual growth. I have found that summer is a fruitful time to dedicate to a personal intention, probably partly because I've been a student for so long that my rest-of-the-year is always swamped, and my summers correspondingly empty -- but I think also that summer is in and of itself a season with an obvious beginning and end, and abundant energy, in which experiences can be felt perhaps more concretely over time than at other times of year. I expected that after the retreat I would find a job slinging coffee and spend a lot of time in sitting meditation. Instead, the recession hit, and I found Unity Yoga. Though Vancouver is full of wonderful studios, each with their own best features, I haven't found anywhere that more effectively fosters community among its practitioners and teachers than Unity. Practicing asana with others is an emotionally, spiritually, and physically intimate act, and every time I leave a class at Unity, I feel like I know and love the people I have just practiced with in a deeper and more special way than I have felt anywhere else. Especially since there is always tea to share while chatting (and embracing) in the tea room after. Some of the most important and influential friendships in my life right now have started there.

Once I had resigned myself to funemployment and dedicated myself to taking every one of Reno's classes I could, our mutual friend and One Love yogi Joe invited me to come share a personal practice, along with, Reno, Charlie, and Andria and Tyler, (who cannot be captured by a mere web page, and must be experienced in real life only). It was a style I'd never heard of: Forrest. Soon we were charging into a 40-day sunrise sadhana, and I experienced any and all of unreal blissed-outedness, exhaustion, superhuman strength (or it felt like it anyway), surprising leaps and bounds in the development of my practice, injury when I got sloppy with my Ashtanga, always-educational confrontations with ego, and a lot of emotional turmoil. Summer of spiritual growth, indeed. Charlie signed up for Ana's October training in Denver, and then I heard about the Seattle training.

A little seed of an idea kept popping up, but I didn't feel physically ready, or like I had enough yoga street cred, you could call it, to teach; I expected to be finished school and back in my hometown by March, where Seattle would not be a feasible distance away. I also, still funemployed, didn't think I'd be able to afford it. I asked Shakti to let me know when registration opened, and I watched the date come and go. I went back to school, Charlie went to training, Joe moved all over the world, Reno moved to Whistler (but then he came back, lucky for me!), Andria went traveling. I didn't finish my thesis. It took until the end of January for me to answer the nag at the back of my head and make a coffee date with Charlie to talk about how his training was, but one day things fell into place. We had coffee, I asked about training, and when I said "I ask because I was thinking about taking the March training . . ." Charlie said something that can be roughly paraphrased as, "YES! I'M SO EXCITED! DO IT! HOW CAN I MAKE IT HAPPEN! WHAT DO YOU NEED TO KNOW! ASK ME ANYTHING! I'LL DRIVE YOU THERE! DO YOU NEED MONEY? HERE'S FIVE BUCKS!" He said as soon as the words left my mouth he could see it unfolding in front of him -- most importantly, he gave me his sincere vote of assurance that, yes, I could do it. It was a weird day. A lot of things that has been out of focus sharpened up quick. Within ten days I had applied, registered, paid, informed my thesis advisor that I was going to finish by March, found a second reader, and written a draft. My life came into focus, and I found focus. I'm still working on the paper, and I might not be able to defend before I leave, but here I am, a week from training, and my second draft nearly done. In the spirit of focus... I'm going to get back to it, justifying this blog entry as a good way of getting today's writing flow going and pumping up my motivation, and hand it in tomorrow. This is the beginning!

XO
MM