Refashionista ramblings

I have been very busy again, hence the intermittent postings and random poetry. Here's a little about what I have been up to.

Friday, Saturday and Sunday were yoga filled. On Friday I attended two yoga classes and then went to "practice teach" in the park with a group. This meant doing even more yoga. I was so beat I went home and slept for over 12 hours.

On Saturday I spent some more time at yoga. First, I took a class and then I went to teacher training for three hours. It was great but when I finished, I was exhausted again. I met some friends for dinner and when I got home I passed out for another 12 hour stint.

Sunday was no different. We met at 9:00 pm for teacher training and then did a "Moon Flow." It was advertised as "restorative" but it was actually an hour and a half of hip and heart opening stretches (ouch). After that I practice taught with a small group for a while and then I took another yoga class. Class was followed by another 3 hours of training that included even more yoga. By the time it ended, I was pretty fried. In fact, I have been rather tired ever since.

Since Sunday I have gone to a yoga class every day but the good news is that after tomorrow, I will have finished all my class hours. By the end of Sunday I will have completed 200 hours of teacher training in 2 months. My mom says this is amazing. I guess it is. When I started training I still was fighting the tail end of an exacerbation and still having some issues with bladder control and balance. Now, although I'm tired, I seem to be symptom-free. This is probably one of my greatest physical accomplishments of my entire life. It is definitly my greatest spiritual accomplishment.

I am really glad to be finishing up but I also feel fulfilled by my experiences. I think this proved one of the best coping mechanisms I could have found during the time I adjusted to being diagnosed with MS. I still have moments of fear about the future but mostly I am just trying to enjoy each day and not concern myself with whatever pitfalls the future may hold.

I'm not Promising the Moon

The quiet, cool of city streets,
A deep January night.
Pavement crawls away beneath my feet,
As the soles of worn shoes
Tap out the beat,
Of the music playing softly in my soul.
I close my eyes,
Feel the movement of gently rushing air,
Lift me up on pointed toes as though to fly--
And I sigh,
As my body sways to the sound,
Of the growing crescendo
Rising off the silent ground.
Pale and lovely,
the full moon, cracks her smile,
Before I have trudged another mile--
I feel her sweet breath on my neck,
And the way she calls my heart,
Makes me start--
To let the tiny jewels of tears,
Condensed behind my eyes release,
A storm of blue that unfolds--
Unabating 'til the deluge is spent,
And all the tatters of my dreams are rent.

Bhakti- The Yoga of Devotion

I was drifting somewhere in the space between this world and that. I floated in a thick grey mist but I could hear sounds. I followed the sound until I found myself in the yoga room where I often practice. There was beautiful music playing and I felt my heart open and move. A voice caressed me and said, "Now flow to the music however it moves you." I poised myself to dance in that space but suddenly I was awakened by my alarm. I lay back disappointed. I was moved to follow that voice into the flow.

Today I found myself in that space again but this time I was awake. At first we chanted, led by the voice in my dream. Then, we moved into a practice accompanied by music like that which I remembered in my dream. We moved as one and then the instructor said, "Now flow on your own however you are moved." My skin prickled with deja vu and I embraced that alluring moment again. Now I did indeed flow as I wished, a yogic dance to the music.

A guru may be a teacher but if you put a comma into the word after the "G," and then repeat the letters of the word you hear. "Gee, you are you." Long before I entered the room today to engage in Bhakti (the yoga of devotion) I knew deep down that this was what my soul craved. I awoke from my dream but my dream came to pass in my waking life. It gives me chills just to know this.

I have been living in a state of self-doubt. I often think I see myself through the eyes of others and I do not like what I see. But this is a trap. Even if I see clearly what they see, it is a voice inside me expressing the distaste. I deem myself unworthy of regard and loathe parts of myself and yet in yoga they tell me that, "Inside, you have everything you need for a beautiful life." They say that our best teacher lives within us. If this is true then I must forget what I believe others see and decide for myself what parts of my behavior and modus operandi that I despise. Then, without judgement I must decide what changes, if any, I should be trying to make. This is all so clear to me in moments like this, moments where I truly find myself awake and living that which I have dreamed.


Joan of A Short in the Cord wrote about affirmations yesterday. I commented on her blog that in yoga we use "mantra" (a repeated word or phrase) to calm the mind and to self-affirm. That is what Bhakti is all about. We chant various sanskrit mantras for so long that at times we seem to become one with each other and with our words. There is an electricity in the air. Sometimes I fight these feelings of union because they remind me of a past I have chosen to leave in my past but at times I embrace the feeling and I am lifted outside myself. Gone are my worries, obsessions and self-doubts and I am left with a feeling of pure bliss.

Update 7/26/08

I have been quite occupied recently, mostly with yoga. Yesterday I attended a total of three classes. Boy was that overkill. Today I feel like a truck ran me over. I intended to go to class at 8:00 am today and then go to the park to practice teach but instead I lay in bed and groaned. I am trying right now to get psyched up to hit a class and then attend teacher training but I am still not sure about taking class before training. I guess during training we have a class today too and I am fried.

On a different note, I have had some good things happen to me over the last few days. Physically, I have felt good until this morning and I have felt very strong in yoga. Financially, things are really looking up. On Thursday I learned that the insurance company for the driver who hit my husband and I in our car accident was ready to pay out. The accident was in March and I fractured my sternum and missed three days of work. I expected to be paid for the missed work but I was delighted to learn that I was also getting a sizeable payout for my "inconvenience." At first that sounded crazy but now that I think on it, my sternum is still a periodic cause of discomfort so the accident did prove incredibly inconvenient. Little did I know at the time that my first relapse would be far more difficult and painful than my sternal fracture...

I also had some new students in my Yoga 4 Kids program on Thursday and so I actually made some money. The class went great and it was really nice to get paid.

After class on Thursday I went back to Urban Peak (a place for homeless youth) and took a dish for the kids. All of us who volunteered got to have dinner there again. Doing this karma yoga always makes me feel great.

Today and tomorrow I have teacher training. My husband is camping with friends for the weekend so I am just chillin'. Last night I had two invites to go out but I found that I was so exhausted that I just wanted to be alone. I did some sewing and refashioning but I hope to at least get dinner with a friend tonight. Tomorrow will be a long day and this will be a long week of yoga but we finally finish next Sunday. Yeah, it's been great but I'm ready to move on.

Behind the clouds there might be a rainbow

Samadhi, a feeling of exquisite esctasy where we realize that we are one with the divine and we enjoy a feeling of complete bliss. We stalk this elusive state. We may not call it Samadhi but our souls yearn to find this peace. Everything we suffer pales before Samadhi. Would we know this perfect state if we were never tried?

I used to think that Samadhi was only for the mystics, those who pursued and mastered a spiritual life. Since I was afflicted with my first relapse, I have experienced this state more than once. The first time was when I was near delusional with steroid-induced insomnia. At the time I did not label the experience "Samadhi" because it was so much more than that as well but I remember several lucid moments from that night where I was outside my body. I spoke to those both living and dead. I communed with spirits and beneath it all was the joy and certainty that I was going to be alright. I no longer judged myself or others. I voiced prayer after prayer for mankind, even the ones I formerly disliked. The veil of this plane was lifted and I could see the "divine" nature of everyone and everything. I accepted myself and my place in the world without doubts.

Since that day I have sought that state again. The day after I actually felt for a time like I was becoming "enlightened." Alas, enlightenment and Samadhi are more elusive than that... Yet there are moments where I again forget the reality I am chained to and I experience several moments of perfect bliss.

You cannot be the same after you have tasted Samahdi. You look for it behind every bush, in every experience and you try to avoid the unpleasant people and situations that make you turn your back on Samadhi. At the same time you know that Samadhi can be found again, even as you face the path you must tread every day, like it or not. I struggle behind dark clouds of my own making and yet beyond them I can see the rainbow that is Samadhi.

Today is a good day. For the first time in a really long time, my body feels strong and great. My mind is at peace. When I went to yoga, for a moment, I was near the rainbow. I felt my heart fill with joy. The music filled me. So complete was my content that I almost cried with the pure beauty of that moment. I was reminded that behind the clouds there just might be a rainbow.

Karmic crap

One of the hardest things for me about yoga teacher training is when we do things that remind me of my upbringing. I was raised in a spiritual community (some might call it a cult)and my dad was/is the leader. About a week ago I got an email from my dad regarding some "tests" he had been doing regarding my MS. In his email he asked me several questions. One of them was along the lines of "what do you think I actually do?" This gave me some pause because throughout my childhood I was surrounded by the members of his community and I had at least a partial lens into what I thought he did. Color me crazy, but maybe I am completely wrong about the work he does.

Anyway, I do certainly remember snippets of my childhood that involved my dad's work. One of the things I remember was the body work he did and that he trained other sto do. The person being worked with would strip down and then both stand and walk around in the nude so that my father or whoever was working with that person could see the subject's posture. I am not sure what they did with the data that was gleaned or how the subject was then worked with but I do have a distinct image of the work in my mind.

Yesterday morning at yoga teacher training was reminiscent of this childhood memory. A woman came in and worked with our posture. First we worked with partners and noticed things about their bodies and posture. It was a "non-judgemental" environment. The teacher then selected a few of us to come up front and she asked the group what they noticed about us. I was selected to come up front. The woman had several things to say about my posture. One of the things she noted was that they way I held my hips was usually associated with bad menstrual cramps. I laughed and told her we should talk but on the inside I was already sobbing.

One of the hardest things about me getting MS has been trying to answer for myself and sometimes others why I got this disease. I look at other people who have always had unhealthy lifestyles, spewed negativity into the universe and never excercised a day in their life and they are not sick. I read all this yogic literature and books about energy work and am informed that we hold all the crap that happens to us in our bodies. This crap often manifests as an illness. I see those who have abused their bodies be fine, I read about how we create our illnesses and then I feel like shit. If I choose to believe that we create our own illnesses then I am filled with horror, sadness and guilt. What did I do so wrong that I should find myself not only karmicly punished with MS but with cramps and the possibility of rheumatoid arthritis and allergies to boot?

On the one hand, I want a spiritual life. On the other, I don't want to believe these things I am being told. It seems fraught with judgement and the judgement seems to be that I am somehow bad.

I told this to one of the other girls in my teacher training and she said, "Maybe you are just imagining the judgement." Perhaps she is right. I thought that I was now beyond fear but I guess that it must still haunt me. I have always noticed many things about others just from their body language but I think I sometimes overimagine their opinions of me. I speak and I see myself through the imagined eyes of another and I am an ugly thing. I am all my faults. I talk too much, I'm conceited, I'm not centered and I speak too much and too quickly. Am I even grounded in reality anymore? Is this really the way that I am perceived? Does it matter how I am perceived?

For a short time I quit caring about pleasing others. I stopped caring how people saw me. I really believed that I am my own best teacher. Now I waver, a fragile stalk in the wind. Some moments I am certain I can find my own route back to Samadhi (the recognition that I am one with the universe and everything in it, outside time, place and space). At other times I find myself weakening and believe that I am indeed being punished or that if I don't listen to my father and/or the other teachers in my life and follow their advice, my health will surely get worse.

I want my personal power back. I want to believe that I can handle this and learn what I need to learn all by myself. Sometimes I think that there is no one I can even talk to about this whir of thought. I am torn between my old beliefs and my new ones. I am conflicted by new ideas that reflect how I perceive my past and my father's work. There is an enormous primal scream hidden behind my lips, my soul is an abyss. I howl into the darkness of my questions and only my own voice comes back to mock me...

Community

The thing I like best about blogging is the sense of community. I have been welcomed and found by other MS bloggers. Now that I have been on here a little while and I have regained my health, I really enjoy reading the blogs I have discovered. The comments section on each blog is a treasure trove of information and resources. I keep finding new bloggers who intrigue me. I also like actually knowing a little bit about the people reading and commenting on my blog. Now when I get a comment from a regular blogger, I remember who they are and what they have been writing about. I can actually take the advice I receive and consider the source. I love getting into comments from other MSers because I feel accepted. I feel like other people with MS get where I am coming from and judge me less.

I am also having a similar sense of community at my therapeutic yoga class. People are warm, friendly and non-judgemental. It seems like many of us are on the same page when it comes to treating our MS. Today we went to lunch and I learned several important tidbits. No one in the group I joined for lunch today is on DMDs anymore. I also learned there is a possible "cure" for some allergies using a type of acupuncture. It was also nice to hear other MSers reiterate the importance of living in the present and enjoying life. The rest of the group is a bit older than me and they have a lot more experience with both life and MS. It feels good to have their acceptance and to listen to their insights and advice. I am blessed.