The Creative Act. Step One: Just F-ing Do It.

When I first got back from my honeymoon, I was so overwhelmed with the desire to DO something, that I promptly bought a bed, a desk, two rugs and some curtains and went right to work rearranging our entire apartment.  (It looks good, y'all).  And when I got done with THAT...I had a minor meltdown about my utter lack of additional things to do.  

For about a week I decided I was going to quit everything.  

I was going to quit teaching yoga, quit this blog, quit most of the things I am currently doing, and get myself a nice well-paid job producing movies....  I even went so far as to start sending resumes.  Overly earnest resumes with doubly-overly-earnest cover letters, warning the recipient of said letter not to be swayed by my long and storied past as an actress...that I was done with all of that!  That I had gotten real!  That I had wised up and settled on this very sensible path of climbing the ladder from assistant to studio head. 

Heh heh.

Luckily, following some very wise advice from my very wise husband, I held myself at bay.  I was not going to quit anything, not right away at least...I was just going to wait.  Because maybe the desire and the fear and the anxiety about what I was and was not supposed to be doing with my life, would pass.  Or calm.  Either way, I was not going to quit.  (Yet.)

Had I been 21, instead of 31, I would have--as soon as I'd felt that fiery itch, as soon as I'd gotten even a whiff of the terror that I might be In the Wrong Place...I would have taken a giant hammer to the vase of my life and smashed it.  I would have closed up shop and scrambled my way into some new (and eventually equally fear-provoking) situation.  Thank god for age.  

But, because I didn't do that...because I wasn't going to allow myself to do that, I found myself...well...stuck.  Stuck with the feeling.  Unable to relieve said feeling by just tossing my life up in the air and giving it a good swift shaking.  And so I had to utilize some other skills, ones I didn't even know I had.  The main one being the ability to just keep moving.  I made a promise to myself (after wasting a few days feeling terrible about everything) that I would not waste any days feeling terrible about everything...that I would just continue.  I would continue to teach and continue to write and continue to live my life and I would not, as is my wired way, try to run away or fix or drastically alter...anything.  

And as I began to do that, this crazy thing happened.  I began to realize how much room I actually had in my life.  Without spending so much time examining and reexamining how things are going (All. The Time.) I could actually start to feel the mysterious forward movement of things.  And it felt--spacious.  And full of possibility.  

Maybe some of you don't have this problem, but I am the kind of person who needs to clean the kitchen in my apartment, before I can sit down and do anything.  And I try, almost always unsuccessfully, to apply this same way of working to my entire life.  MEANING, if my proverbial "kitchen" isn't "clean", I don't do anything.  This means, because I'm talking about a mind and heart and thought-kitchen (instead of a physical one), that what I end up spending all my time doing...is constantly cleaning the kitchen.  And always in my head is this imaginary someday, when the kitchen will finally be clean, and then I, finally, will be able to get to work.  

But that someday, never comes.

And so what I discovered, because I made myself leave the f-ing kitchen alone for once...was that, the problem isn't the mess.  The mess is never going to be clean.  The mess, probably, doesn't even exist.  What matters is doing what you want or love or feel compelled to do, in spite of the mess.  What matters is taking action anyhow. 

And I feel this way on a micro level, even about something as small as a yoga class...you know, there's a million reasons in a day, not to make it to class.  Too busy, too tired, too grumpy, wrong timing, wrong teacher, wrong outfit...etc., etc..  But what happens is, if you can just take that FIRST step, if you can just put your yoga pants on and get in the car or get on the train...the rest of it takes care of itself.  The creative act has its own motor.  So, as soon as you start the thing a runnin', it will just take you with it.  And suddenly class is over, you're lying there in savasana, and you did it.  And usually, you're so grateful to yourself for having done it. 

All it takes is the will and the courage, to get your pants on, and get in the car...

Scrubbing My Way to Freedom...

So, in order to pay for my many, many yoga classes, I clean my yoga studio once a week. It's a sweet gig, just a couple hours of elbow grease yields me unlimited free classes, and makes me feel a bit more part of the community, to boot. And there are worse places to clean than a yoga studio, let me tell you what...

I do my cleaning either in the evening after everyone has gone home, or early in the morning, before everyone arrives. Both have their pluses. The evenings are serene in their isolation--the city is dark and hushed outside the windows, and without the threat of imminently arriving yogis, I can relax into my work, secreted away on the third floor with my vacuum and toilet brush. However, it can also get a little creepy--late at night, me the only one around, in a building that is rife with noises of banging radiator pipes and a settling foundation. I have freaked myself out on more than one occasion with visions of "robbers" scaling the side of the building and crashing through one of the studio windows. (What a disappointment to someone looking for wads of cash to come tumbling into a yoga studio...).

In the mornings, however, I am waking the studio up, as opposed to putting it gently to bed (as it sometimes feels I am doing at night)...I make tea and get all the loud cleaning done before anyone arrives, and the rest of the morning finds me scooching around the early-morning yogis with my roll of paper towels in one hand and a bottle from our selection of "natural" cleaners in the other. There is another kind of peace these early mornings, but it is a bit more electric, and because of the solitary nature of the work, and the quick action which my mind tends to leap to immediately upon waking, I am a bit more prone to...um...shall we say...flights of fancy? Or rather...whirlpools of fancy? Sometimes muddy sucking quicksand voids of fancy? There's something about those early hours and the unconscious repetition of toilet brush in toilet bowl, three sprays of glass cleaner to every mirror and a backwards-forwards vacuum stroke that lends itself to...obsession.

Lately I've been cleaning a lot of mornings.

But this week, I tried a little experiment. Instead of letting myself sink into thought thought thought endless compulsive thought while absently scrubbing away soap-scum, I decided that I would try my best to pay attention to what I was doing. Fully. With totalness of mind.

While visiting home my mother told me a story, which she has told me many times before, about her days as a youth, working in a bank, before the days of computers, where her job consisted of slipping many many checks into many many check-sized slots--a job which, no surprise, became a feeding ground for a variety of worries--and how she one day picked up a book all about the Japanese tradition of the "tea ceremony" and how it changed her life. The Japanese tea ceremony is, apparently, all about the triumph of aesthetics over the mundane, and so she--my mother--began to apply these principles to her check-sorting. She began to give the checks and the slots and the sorting of the checks into the slots her full and total and beatific attention and according to her, it changed her life. She even said that one day, while the checks were flying into their proper places, and her hands too, were flying, she looked over to see a customer hanging around her area of the bank. Assuming the man was lost, she asked him if there was something she could do to help and he shook his head, no, and said:

"I was just watching you do that."

Why? Because it had become beautiful. Why? Because she had become fully and wholly devoted to it. And watching anyone do anything fully, is a beautiful sight. So, it was by this principal that I attempted to operate this week while vacuuming rugs and cleaning toilets: Japanese tea ceremony, baby, Japanese tea ceremony.

I can not say that I found any yogis hanging over me, watching me spray cleaner on the sinks, delighted by my beautifious concentration, but I can say that I had a more enjoyable morning of cleaning than I have had in quite awhile. I attempted to be gentle with myself, and every time my mind wanted to go rampaging off in this or that direction, I just softly guided it back to the task at hand. I tried to notice the small beauties of the room: the gleam of a cleaned handle, the brightness of a light, the juxtaposition of two colors, the feel of fabric and paper in my hand. And I began to ask myself questions about what exactly I was doing: why was I doing it, for whose benefit, how good a job could I possibly do--was I willing to do? And all of these things led me deeper and deeper into the task at hand.

Which is, ultimately, the only thing that is at hand anyhow. Always. No matter what. Now I only have to master this for every OTHER MOMENT OF MY LIFE. And then, finally, I will be perfect. (hehheh)

Valentine's

Class: 8:15-9:45pm, Lotus Flow 2/3, Sheri.

Synchronicity. Coincidence of events that seem to be meaningfully related.

Example: walking to yoga class, feeling wide-open and full of breath and thinking "today I am going to dance through class--that is my intention--to dance dance dance" and to get to class and have your teacher weave Dancing Shiva throughout and in-between the asanas and to hear her call out, "Dance! Make the asana your dance!"

Those are the moments when I realize that the universe is big and open-hearted.

Still I am resisting handstand--there is an electrified fence in my consciousness, just beyond it lies that big chasm Out-Of-Control. I want to get there, but am still tender to the fence's little zaps.

It was Valentine's Day and I was struck by the monument of that holiday--for me it has never been much to fret over--but Sheri spoke at length about having to let go of her distaste for it. I never much worried over love, not until I found it, that is. Now the day means more to me, though for the last two years, P. and I have officially celebrated Oregon's Birthday (also February 14th) instead of Valentine's Day. I bake a green velvet birthday cake in the state's honor, and this year we even blew out one tiny candle and sang Happy Birthday Oregon--pulling down our smirks all the while.

My shoulder seems to be healing, though it still tweaks a bit in Upward Bow, and I'm trying to watch out and be tender with it, as I don't want to risk a more serious injury. I have this entire diagnosis in my head and feel that I am strengthening and then resting the tired muscle--over and over--in order to both heal and advance. I have no idea if this is physically sound, but it seems to be working so far.

I clean at Laughing Lotus now, once a week, in order to subsidize my classes, and so thursday nights, after Sheri's class, I stay late and scrub bathrooms and vacuum floors. When I first started doing this I would get very tense and nervous once everyone had left and I was in the darkened studio all on my own. I found myself jumping at the bangs of the radiator and the various creakings of the building settling after hours. But now, I have come to look forward to this time in solitude. The smells of the studio are so soothing--I'm pavlovian in my response to it now--and silence descends so quickly once the closer has locked the door behind her. As I clean and vacuum I feel I am somehow bonding with the space--solidifying the bond I have begun as a student--but now more intimately, with a silence that is private and, somehow, feminine. Many nights I have been tempted to stay and practice once the cleaning is done, to take advantage of the wide-open empty studios and to see what comes, but I am nervous. What if it's not allowed? What if I hurt myself? What if, what if, what if?

Once I took out a block and sat on it to meditate for a few moments, but I felt rushed and obligated--knowing that P. was waiting for me at home and fearing the fickle subways. One night I will do it. One night I will tell P. I won't be home until late and I will stay and see what comes. And I will keep my fingers crossed that what comes is not the Bogeyman.