The Rest: What I clearly don't practice...

I overslept the alarm on my wristwatch today, this funny plastic watch with all these features whose sole purpose really is just to get me out of bed super-duper early in the morning.  I heard the first set of beeps at 4:30 and pushed the off button, meaning that I disabled the little 5-minutes-later reminder and opened my eyes again just before 5.  Still early, but not my favored Fuck Yeah Early-Early wake-up time...

I'm up now, but not my usual happy squirrel self. I'm still chattering and typing furiously, but not as bright-eyed, not as bushy-tailed as I could be.  As I'd like to be.

And this dullness means only one thing: while I may be persevering, beady-black squirrel eyes trained on writing, reading, and all that other jazz I wrote about yesterday, all those goals for 2012, I'm forgetting something.

I'm forgetting to sleep.

Oops.

All of this -- the getting up early, the being productive in the wee hours -- all of that hinges on getting enough sleep.  And sleeping is something I'm not so great at.

Two years ago I had to retrain myself to sleep.  My anxiety and insomnia were so bad then -- and who could blame me, in 2010, after a year of cancer in our friend Alex, my sister, our Jasper, then Joe, if I felt just a smidge too freaked out to sleep -- that it honestly was my Goal #1 for that year to re-learn how to sleep through the night.  To get enough rest.  To be able to close my eyes and snooze without Ambien or any other crutch.

Last year, 2011, we launched a new initiative around here, to get to bed by 9:30, to support our shared need to get up early.  That was before I even started with the aforementiond FYEE wake-up time, when we both just got up at 5:30, which is, for most people, quite early enough.  The getting to bed early is essential, really, when you're committed to early-bird ways, when you have a ton you want to get done before punching the clock at your job or your business, whether it's putting in 60 miles with your team or blogging and hiking with your dog.  And anyway, I love the early morning.  When Joe suggested that perhaps he get up at 4:30, too, I bristled a bit.  I love the early morning with some alone time in it.

The getting-to-bed-early deal is genius.  It works because we're both devoted to it, in support of our next-day routine.  It especially works because Joe has a tendency to fall asleep in front of the tv by 8:30.  Getting to bed by 9:30 means I can still squeeze in some reading time, book propped open on a pillow on my chest, while Joe and Mr Burns snooze by my side.  A little night time with some alone time in it.  Perfect!

The problem right now is that my herniated disc, and associated nerve pain, is not with the program.  That sucker makes it so hard to sleep at night. Finding a comfortable position is more and more impossible, even as I wait for the prednisone they've put me on to take effect, to reduce the inflammation, to bring me some much-craved comfort.  In two weeks or so I will have an epidural, which promises to erase the pain, but we'll see.  I've been here before.  In 1998 I herniated a disc, tried everything with no success -- including epidurals -- until surgery fixed me up.  I'd love to avoid surgery this time, but am not eliminating any options.  All I want is to get better.

All I want in the meantime is to sleep.

I'm just not sure that sleeping at night is going to get me the rest that I need.  Being supine for hours is Not My Favorite right now, so I suppose shorter naps would be ideal.  And that, my friends, is well nigh impossible for someone with my disposition (it's daytime, go go GO!) and my job.  

So I'm feeling a little stuck: committed to all my plans and a little tired today, bushy tail a little droopy, less pop in my figurative jumps.  And marveling a bit at my response, two months ago when I first saw the doctor about this pain.  She looked up from the computer monitor and asked me, "Do you need some time off work?"  Without even thinking, I answered, "Oh no, I couldn't take time off work."  But that's probably just the rest I needed then, with a doctor's note to back it up, and what I truly need now: the being-home all day, with the access to afternoon napping.  I am absolutely the worst at resting and need a little impetus to work on that.

Resting.  And of course, 'cause that's how things work, there's a whole section in Martha Beck's book about resting, about how important it is to Rest until you feel like playing, then play until you feel like resting.  Never do anything else.  Basically, if you're doing Your Thing, the thing you're meant to do, then there is no work: there is only play, alternating with rest.  It looks like this:

Seriously, I need some rest.  I'm trying to figure out how to get it, with all of the insane unrelenting deadlines at my job and the way I generally feel like I can never miss even an hour.  Holidays like this past Monday (Presidents Day) are a mixed bag -- the result being that in exchange for a three-day weekend, five days of work get to be completed in just four days.  It's pretty insane.  And it means that I never feel like I can take time away.  Ever.

But something's got to give. I am going to need to figure out how to get some sleep, work in some rest, or this whole infinity loop of play + job and not enough rest is going to put this squirrel down. I'm unwilling to stop working toward my personal goals, so I have to keep this FYEE wake-up time and all of the hours of creativity it allows me.  The lottery is not a financial plan, so I'm feeling kind of stuck.

And super-tired.  

This squirrel needs sleep. Any ideas on how I go from where I am now -- go, go, GO -- to this? 

What do you practice?

monday practice: ginger snaps

Lately I've been thinking a lot about practice.  It's just been this perfect confluence of inputs lately -- one part the whole Anusaga; an equal, if not greater, part reading -- and so I've been stirring these questions of what I practice around and around in the bowl of my mind.  I'm feeling particularly lucky that on top of the book I just finished, there have been so very many blogs and posts recently reminding us, exhorting us, to just practice.  Just unroll our mats, take our seats, inhabit our steady practice and breathe, making like Sri Pattabhi Jois:

Practice and all is coming.

I hold this truth to be self-evident: Practice doesn't make perfect.  Practice is perfect. 

A favorite blog this week was from the School of Yoga, the new home of Christina Frosolono Sell, Darren Rhodes and now Noah Maze.  In Please Practice, Bridgette writes:

Time to get back to the mat. Roll out our mats alone, with friends, with strangers. Doesn’t matter where, with who or what we call it. But, for the love of God, please practice.

I've been getting a lot of reading and writing done in the past couple of months, as I live through my second herniated disc and as I've not been practicing on my mat.  This continues to be such an adjustment, really, since for years now I've devoted hours and hours each week to being in class, to taking my place with my friends and teachers, to sitting , moving, breathing and laughing together.  It's amazing how much more shit you can get done when you're not in 5 classes a week + travel time, how much more clarity I can sustain about my larger goals and plans when I'm at home so much, doing a very different practice.

Even though for the past 9 years my most visible practice has been that of asana, physical yoga is not the only thing to which I've been devoting myself.  And now that my mobility is impaired and I'm in pain, bam, I'm so much more aware of my other areas of practice -- thank goodness for those.  Who says yoga is all the body, anyway?  

Towards the end of Martha Beck's latest book Finding Your Way in a Wild, New World, she includes a section on the 10,000 hours, aka Tracking Your True Nature. You know this idea, the one that Malcolm Gladwell popularized a few years ago, that true mastery of anything requires the investment of on the order of 10,000 hours.  A neurological study Martha references, of the brains of truly adept music students vs. regular ho-hum students, revealed absolutely no biological basis for this difference in skill -- the only difference is practice.  Passionate, deep practice for years and years and years: 6 hours a day for 5 years, 3 hours a day for 10 years, 1 1/2 hours a day for 20 years, 12 hours a day for 2 1/2 years.  I think I've written about this before, since it's an idea that entrances me.

I love that the book includes exercises, invitations for me to write in the margins and fill in the blanks.  I knew, from the start, that this was a book I'd be keeping, never surrendering, so have been annotating all along.  And behold, the opportunity to think about, then write down Things I've Deep-Practiced for Ten Thousand Hours.  Oooooh, a List.  You know how much I love those!  Even better: the point is that the items on the list constitute "hot tracks" left by your true nature -- these are "part of your art, the way your true nature expresses itself in the world of Form." Looking at where you have invested 10,000 hours of your time gives you crucial clues to what you love, what drives you, what you've been practicing.  Who you are.

Because yeah, what you practice is who you are.  As I wrote last week, what you do is who you are.  Your practices make you in this steady accretion, like corals secreting layers and layers of skeleton, all the while building the reef of You.

What, you ask, have I been practicing all these years?  Check it out:

I know, I know, I'm kind of a scribbler, so in case you can't read it, it's pretty simple 1) yoga; 2) writing; 3) reading; 4) hiking, walking, being in the woods.  5 - 8 (not pictured) go like this: loving, watching, learning from dogs; gardening; social media; and finally, animals, animals, animals. Of course yoga is #1 on the list, since it's the item commonly referred to as a practice and it's the area where I seem to apply my nerdy counting skills the most, keeping a running tally in my calendar of how many hours a week I've been on my mat.  When I'm on my mat, that is.  

But the rest, really: those, except for social media, are all things I've been deep-practicing for ages -- being obsessed with nature, with dogs, with animals, with being in the woods, with going to the zoo and staring at tigers, feeling the lion's grumble in every fiber of my being.  The gardening is an extension of this same essential passion: to be outside, to be inside the workings of the outside, to recognize the pattern that's on my insides, too.  That's what I practice.  That's what I am.

And that's the point.  What I am is what I should be doing. Not just as hobbies but as the essential work of my life.  The good news is that I feel as though for the first time ever, in a way I've been growing toward for years and years, I'm doing it.  Finally.  Even though it takes getting up at 4:30am (Fuck Yeah Early-Early Wake-Up Time!) in order to have enough time to read and write and hike and think before the job-day begins, I'm doing it.  Finally, finally, I'm doing what I've known I needed to do all along, the thing that Paul Greenberg told me, long before he was the author of the James Beard Award winning New York Times bestseller Four Fish, when we both worked for the same non-profit mentioned a few days ago.  Sitting in our shared apartment kitchen in Sarajevo in 1998, in his suit and tie, early early in the morning, at his laptop, cup of instant coffee at his side, he said, when I commented on his discipline, on his devotion to his practice, despite the work-day ahead of us: "Writers write."  

Amen, brother.  That they do.

Also lately, though it's not on the list above, making cookies.  It's possible I've spent a total of 10,000 hours in my lifetime making cookies, experimenting with recipes and flavor combinations and ensuring a steady supply of this sweet dietary staple in the house.  It's such a friendly little food, the cookie -- the perfect delivery system for just the right amount of delight.  And, in times of trial, of challenge, of misery and death, oh really, the cookie is just right.  So I've been practicing that a lot lately, too.

What's most wonderful for me right now, even as I am benched and unable to play yoga with my friends, is how much I can re-direct that time and energy into my other practices, and the way I feel them growing in strength as a result.  How satisfying to devote the non-asana time to words, to the blog, to the newsletter, to the idea of the book, feeding all that fuel to the flames of a different practice.

Flames fueled by deep-practice.  And always cookies.

I wonder what you practice, what you have devoted 10,000 hours to, what it says about who you are.  Think about it, write it down, comment below. If it helps you to make cookies first, like it does me, then go for it.  If not, I've got enough to share over here, and anyway, come tomorrow, I'll bake more.

XX

You! You! You!

I heard Martha Beck speak at an Oprah Winfrey event, O, in San Francisco in October 2008. Two of my dearest friends and I made a weekend out of it: we booked a hotel, got in Friday night, had a shopping blitz, dinner, drinks and amazing conversation with strangers at our downtown SF hotel, where we barely slept a wink thanks to the almost constant sound of sirens. It didn't matter. Those were the heady days pre-election 2008, when we were so excited about the possibility of Obama as our president, our eyes wide with excitement watching history unfold around us, being a part of a historic and momentous change. And we were going to see Oprah and all of the Oprah people speak, live, in the flesh.

I'd probably watched the Oprah show maybe five times at this point though one of our party is known to fill up her family TiVo with the show. I have nothing against Oprah, but went into this, not as a fan, but more like an eager passenger being taken to a place everyone had been many times. The excitement was palpable, as we walked in the door, the lines of chattering happy women waiting to check-in long but fast-moving. What would happen? I had no idea. I had a full dance-card, having signed up to hear all these different people speak. I was most excited to go see Stacy London of What Not To Wear, since that is a show I've been known to binge on, crying at the end of each one as a precious person's life is re-made thanks to Stacy and Clinton Kelly. It's such a simple formula and it gets me every time.

And of course, Stacy was wonderful, funny, lovely and transformative.

Transformative.  That was the point of the whole weekend, and so it was moving for me to look around at all these glowing female faces of all races, everyone hungry for and open to transformation.

Those were heady times, right?  We knew we were on the brink of an enormous national transformation.  We could feel it coming.  So how not to transform ourselves, too?

I had signed up to hear Martha Beck mostly because my girlfriends loved her and I wanted at least one session with them.  I had some skepticism about her as a "life coach," even though I'm a person who loves coaching, who did a 6-month professional coaching of my own once, a coaching that profoundly changed not just Professional me, but Me me.  Duh, since it's pretty much always Me me.  From the moment Martha Beck opened her mouth, I had goose bumps.  I cried.  I felt this insane recognition of her like I'd known her all my life, like I'd been missing her without even knowing I'd been missing her.

If that sounds crazy to you, consider that that's not the first time that's happened for me.  In fact, it has happened for me with greater frequency since I started yoga 9 years ago which gave me the opportunity to meet more people.  It doesn't mean I fall in love with each person I meet -- far from it.  But sometimes, sometimes, there's this prickle, there's this strong knowing within the first 15 seconds of meeting someone.  It doesn't matter where he or she is from, what they do for a living, what they wear or drive or do in their spare time.  There is a *something* about that person and we're fast-friends, true friends, locked together like magnets from the moment we meet.  It happened when I met Michelle, it happened when I met Kristin, it happened when I carpooled to John Friend with Trixie.  It happened with Martha Beck.  Unfortunately, I haven't had the chance to tell Martha this, until now, in this way, but I told the others.  I remember telling Kristin, within 10 minutes of meeting her, sitting in a tiny cafe in Oaxaca drinking cappuccinos with a bunch of other yogis, looking into her eyes and saying, "ohmygodiloveyousomuch."

I'm reading Martha's new book, Finding Your Way in a Wild New World, and the chapter I'm jumping around about the most so far is the one entitled, "You! You! You!"  She is describing the experience of meeting someone for the first time and hoping her expression "looks relatively normal.  Linky, beautiful and brilliant, sardonic and fierce, is not someone who seems easily disturbed, but if I showed what I'm feeling right now, it might alarm her."  Martha is having what she calls a strong bout of "You! You! You!" -- that feeling of "having inexplicably emotional reunions with dear friends I've never met before, who live all over the world and seem to have nothing in common with me."  Later on she says, "It's as if there's been a Linky Nkuna-shaped absence in my heart since I was born, a missing piece of my own soul's puzzle, and that piece is clicking deliciously into alignment."  It's that feeling of wanting to take that new person you've met by the shoulders, that person you feel you've always known and will never have to live without again, and delightedly exclaiming, "You! You! You!" Or, in my case, "ohmygodiloveyousomuch!"

This is, naturally, exactly what I've been experiencing, and what I hope you've been experiencing, too, along your way, making new friends you feel like you've always had, filling out the corners of your heart.  Martha calls it being part of the Team, meeting other Team members -- all of us on a mission, with our own role to play in saving our own lives and saving the planet.  When I heard her talk about this idea of the Team the first time, live, I got goosebumps all over.

You!  You!  You!

So anyway, that's all.  That's what I'm thinking about this morning in these spare moments before I have to get ready for work and another day of dealing with a sourpuss boss and tasks I'm not really crazy about, tasks that make me feel stupid, that bring me down from the high of the weekend until I'm standing about half my real height, which means I can barely see over the top of my desk.  I'm tucking this delicious feeling I'm having right now into my pockets, hoping I can reach in all day and remember, stay standing tall (that's a relative term, obvy), thinking of all the great friends I have, the way we are all part of something so great, the way we love each other so much even if we don't see each other enough, how we're changing the world by just being who we are and getting better at it all the time.

I'm girding for the job, but it's OK because I've got you in my corner.  You! You! You!  ohmygodiloveyousomuch!

XX