Where I Been, Where I Be, Where I Be Goin...

Enough said?

NOTE: This is not MY pregnant belly. This is a random internet image of a pregnant belly. I just liked it.

NOTE: I am, however, pregnant.

NOTE: It is, also in fact, a girl.

Oh, wow, you might be saying, that's great, did you just find out? Is that why we're only hearing about this now?

Um....

Weeeelll....

The truth is, I'm due soon. Increasingly sooner and sooner-er. Mid March, to be specific. So, no, I did not just find out. Have I been thinking about posting about it here for quite awhile? Yes. Have I been encouraged by others to write, in particular, about the pregnancy in this space? Yes, I have. Have I done any of that? No, I have not.

Oh, Shanti Towners...what can I even say for myself?

I will start with this...early on in the pregnancy I spent one tearful afternoon telling a very close friend (who is a new mother) all about how much trouble I was having getting work done...how I had made a commitment to myself this year to take my creative work more seriously and now, with the due date looming like a giant measuring stick (you must have gotten THIS much done in order to ride this ride), I was feeling...lost.  What exactly was I supposed to be focusing on? Where exactly was I supposed to be putting my energy? And who, for the love of ______, was I exactly, anyhow?

Said friend listened very politely to my struggle and then reminded me, as gently as possible, that I was currently involved in the biggest creative project of my life...the creation of another human being...and that it made sense that perhaps I did not feel like I had as much out in my output these days.

So I have allowed myself, Shanti Towners, a bit of a paring down, these last several months.  My creative energies have been going to projects outside of this blog, and that includes, in large part, to the creative project currently taking place in my belly. Hence the prolonged absence.

Which I can not promise you will not continue, but hopefully even the continued absence will be punctuated with some shouts and giggles from the other side.

As for now, as the due date moves closer, I find myself in the midst of a necessary shedding...a space-making, a time-taking, a head-clearing. Which sounds, I'm sure, very lovely and maybe even easy to some of you...but trust me, for this lady, it's not. It's not at all easy. It's confusing. And on certain days, it's hard to know exactly what I'm putting down, and for how long, and how and if and when exactly I will pick it back up again.

It is a time, for me, of learning (re-learning) how to trust the process.  What happens when you let something go? What happens when you trust that just because you're not actively worried about/working on/obsessing about something, it does not mean that something will disappear from your life or your heart? What happens when you give yourself space to just breathe and to be and to connect, whether or not you think you've "earned" it? What happens then? Does everything fall apart like your busy brain tells you it will...or does something else happen? Does something get clearer? Does anything?

For the moment...I'm not sure. But I'll let you know what I find out...

Until then, Shanti-Towners...sending you lots and lots of love...

This is the Space I Take.

My teacher training starts in a little over a week, and I am busily reading my assigned books (oh, to have assigned reading again, thank you o' gods of structure) and taking as many classes as possible so that the sudden upgrade to 8 hours of yoga/day, 5 days/week doesn't kill this faithful blogger.  I am so looking forward to it, I can't even tell you! (But I will, over and over again, you can be sure.)

But that is not what I want to talk about today! Today...today I want to talk about space. 

Not personal space, not outer space, not even spa-cious-ness...but the space that one takes up in the world.  My thinking about this has been percolating for awhile, and was inspired by a little leap my practice has taken over the last weeks, a leap that was instigated by (how appropriate!) my legs. 

My legs...my strong-on-the-outside/weak-on-the-inside legs...able to hold me in chair-pose, propel me skyward in balance poses of all stripes, make me queen of warrior poses, but also able to make me tremble like a child in hanuman, and scream injustice at any kind of wide-legged seated pose...they have been a repository for both grandiosity and extreme humility.  I have been trying to open my hamstrings for going on 5 years, and my progress has to be measured in milimeters. 

My inner thighs are, it seems, the most powerful grounding force on my easily-inflatible ego.

This has been a cause of frustration for me, as you can imagine, but I have tried to work slowly on those sensitive parts (been forced to, really, as a too-quick opening of my hamstrings makes me burst into incomprehensible sobs) and this month my slow work has begun to pay off. 

That's right people, I had a hamstring break-through.  (This is not to be confused with a hamstring tear-open...a much more painful and less yogic kind of breaking).  And like all breakthroughs--or at least every one that I've ever had--it came, not via a NEW kind of teaching, but via a teaching I must have (am certain I have) heard thousands of times but never actually HEARD...until now.

I finally, finally, have learned to E  X  T  E  N  D.

Now, here's the thing...when you have tight hamstrings or groins or inner thighs or, like me, all three, it takes every bit of will and grit in you to move into poses that tax these areas.  These parts vibrate, they quiver, they quake...they're sensitive, like bright electric rods, and for me they are places of great vulnerability.  And because of this (and unbeknownst to me until now) I have had a tendency to hug in and pull away from the opening of them, more than to extend into it.  My hamstrings feel like two taught rubber bands ready to snap...you want me to stretch them tighter?! I don't think so, oh well meaning teacher.

But what I have discovered is that to extend, does not mean to stretch.  It doesn't mean to over-do, to clench, or to exaggerate.  Extension has a sweetness.  It's like an early morning stretch.  Extension is energetic, it's subtle, it happens deep within the tissues and from end to end.  And, it feels not like struggle, but like sweet relief.  Imagine to stretch is aerobics, to extend is ballet.  To stretch is spandex, and to extend is silk. 

I'm not sure what did it for me...maybe it was all the attention that one of my teachers is paying to feet lately, maybe it is all the attention I've been paying to my pelvis and to the grounding of my lower body, maybe I'm just sick of thinking about my shoulders...all I know is that one day in class I decided, in some hamstring stretch or another to really and truly "extend through my heel" (an instruction I have gotten a half milliion times) and low and behold,  not only did I find an extra inch of length from hip to heel, but a call and response of delight and release rippled through my extended leg.  And it did not feel effortful...it felt natural.  It felt, in fact, like what my tender hamstrings had been calling for all along...not a pulling away, but a reaching out.

How many times and in how many ways will this same lesson be illustrated?  How many times must I learn to recognize resistance and then give in? 

But this feeling...this sweet silken extension began to have repurcussions throughout my entire body.  Where else can I extend?  I wondered.  How much more space can I take up? Where else am I shrinking back instead of filling up?

And the answers began to come in strange places.  In class, yes, but also in the world...I began to notice, in certain situations, a physical pulling in and down--particularly when I am nervous or uncomfortable--in situations as simple as standing in an elevator among strangers, or as complicated as walking past a group of ogling men--there is a shrinking.  And the physical shrink, the dipping down of head or rounding of shoulders or clenching of stomach, it was communicating, I could suddenly feel, to my nervous system--I'm small, I'm scared, I wish I were invisible.  As if by lowering my eyes and dropping my head I could somehow disappear, or at the very least, take up less space.

So I began to try and bring extension to these moments, and the words for it came immediately.  "This is the space I take up in the world." I heard a small voice say.  "I am taking my space."  And in response my head lifted, my shoulders dropped down my back, my stride strengthened--eye contact was made.

"This is the Space I take."

And as I began to do this...to notice when I was beginning to shrink down and away, I started to feel more...well, just MORE.  Bigger.  Brighter.  Visible.  Those of you who know me personally know that I'm not exactly, um...quiet.  But I can be timid...and I can definitely make myself small in certain situations.  And to challenge that tendency is, while tender (just like those vibratory electric hamstrings) is also a great relief.  I just have not noticed, until now, that what is being asked for is not a muscularity...not a holding or pulling away, but just the opposite.  The tenderness wants to be reached out to...it wants extension.

Silk, not spandex.