Inspiration Location

Category: Writing

December 31, 2012

A Time to Pause and Reflect

I am getting ready to go to the studio and set up for this afternoon’s Yoga Nidra class. Every New Year’s Eve I lead this deep guided meditation called Yoga Nidra, and then offer people the opportunity to stay afterwards and write a letter to themselves.

Here is what happens: Unlike my normal classes where people arrive and chat as they take off their coats and set up their mats, today they will be greeted with signs on the doors that read: Please Keep Noble Silence.

They will enter the warm yoga room, find a mat and settle in. There will be a bowl of stones outside the yoga room door and each person will be invited to take a stone as they enter just as a way of letting other people know how many spots are still left in the room as they arrive. This is a free class, but I only have room for 16 mats.

At each mat will be a piece of paper explaining what is going to happen in the next hour. There will be a half hour of Yoga Nidra which is like a guided savasana. At the end of the Yoga Nidra experience, I will ring the bowl 3 times and people are then free then to leave, still in silence.

I will then increase the light in the room and invite those who wish to stay to take paper, a pen and an envelope, and move to any place in the room, or even into the lounge, for the letter writing part of this experience.

People tend to be in a very introspective and open place in their bodies and their minds after the Yoga Nidra experience, so it is the perfect time for some deep listening.

I invite them to start their letters by writing on the paper: “Dear (their name)” and then write: “I have been waiting for this opportunity to talk to you for a long time. Here is what I want to tell you.”

And from there, to just let their inner voice speak.

When the letter is finished, they fold it, place it in the envelope, seal it, and address it to themselves and leave it with me. I will then mail it to them so that it arrives in their mailbox on the first day of spring.

I have done this for a number of years now, and I think it is both a beautiful and a fitting way to end the year that is passing, and begin the new one that is dawning.

Happy New Year everyone.

Namaste.

 

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October 12, 2012

The Return to Interiority

Even though I get melancholy when the season changes from summer to fall, and even more so when it changes from fall to winter, I have to admit that I really do love the return to interiority.

I just read a piece in Elephant Journal by a woman who went to a retreat at Kripalu and decided that she didn’t want to be alone with her “Self” after all.

That’s not me. Not at all. Me? I need solitude, a strong daily dose of it. When I am too much the “social butterfly” I become lost and scattered and my “self” starts pixelating beyond recognition.

In the Stephen Cope book I am reading now, I underlined this: (he is talking about Robert Frost here.)

“He intuited that he needed a life set close to nature–nature, which had always been his muse. Frost was intuitively aware of an important principle: In the cultivation of dharma, there is nothing more important than understanding what conditions are needed, and relentlessly creating them.” (p.81-2)

This has made me think about what conditions I need, and to try to actively create them. Do you know what conditions make you feel like you are living like your True Self?

As a result of reading this, I have instituted a new morning routine. I now get up a little earlier and make myself a cup of decaf . But instead of sitting down at the computer and checking email and Facebook, which was my usual habit, I now take my cup up to my Space Chair, turn on the little heater, and settle in with my book for an hour.

Winterized Space Chair

I can’t tell you how cozy and delightful this is! It seems like I’ve been whining forever about how I need  more time to read, and here it is. Now, instead of leaving my book to the end of the day, when I am toast, I am reading in the front part of the day, when I am rested, alert and receptive.

After an hour’s read, I go and make myself some amaranth cereal and bring it back up into my cozy lair and start alternately scribbling in my journal and shoveling cereal into my mouth.

When another hour has passed, I am good to go: ready to be physically active and socially engaged.

These may not be all my “conditions” but they are certainly key: solitude, reading, and writing.

Do you know what yours are? Care to share?

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October 11, 2012

Homecoming

I put the velvet comforter on the bed the other day and and I’ve been craving gingerbread, and ginger snaps, pumpkin spice lattes, and pot roast.

This weekend we had a fire in the fireplace for the first time. The cat, who has not slept on my bed since I put the cotton comforter on it back in June, has now made my bed hers again.

Lulu loves comfort

In the weeks and months I have not been writing here I have:

  • Done a 2 month cleanse
  • Attended a 5 day program with Yoganand at Kripalu
  • Started doing The Ultimate Yogi cds

Then, the other day, in response to my last post, one of my yoga students gave me a fountain pen. I uncapped it right then and there at my desk in the lounge and scribbled a few “test” words on a Post-It just to try it out, and I fell madly, deeply, hopelessly in love with it. I swear, I could hardly teach my class that night so anxious was I to get my hands on that pen!

It’s a Varsity disposable fountain pen made by Pilot (my fave pen company to begin with) and it writes like a dream. I feel like I have come home again.

I really want to love writing on the keyboard, I do.  I really want to love Scrivener and all the linking and research filing it lets me do, but I can’t seem to get my ideas out of the box there the way I can with fountain pen and paper.

It’s so weird because I am such a geek for electronics and I love all my gizmos. I am lusting for an Iphone 5 (even thought I hate phones and do not need one.) I love my Kindle. I adore my Ipad. My MacBook Pro is showing some signs of age (which makes me a little crazy because it’s not that old) but when it comes to writing, I’m completely old-fashioned: just a fountain pen, and a plain, unlined Moleskine notebook (the 5 x 81/4 size) turned landscape, and a quiet morning in my space chair.

Last week I was so excited because I thought I could have the best of both worlds: Evernote came out with a Moleskine specially designed to be able to store and search your scribblings!

Here’s how it works: You open the Evernote app and click on the camera within the app (it works with Ipad, Iphone, and Itouch w/camera) and take a picture of whatever you’ve written (or sketched) in the special Evernote Moleskine and then it saves your scribbles in the cloud where you can even tag them and search them.

But oh god, it is so clumsy. I found I did not like it at all for what I do and the way I write, but I think it might work for little things, like my daily log, but not for my long morning write.

I am thinking about doing NaNoWriMo again this year. (Do you remember I made a go of that last year? Got it all set up in Scrivener and everything, but then got hopelessly behind in my daily word count and abandoned it at the 10K mark?)

Okay, so this year I am going to take another stab at it and try for 50K words in a month doing it longhand, with fountain pen, in my (regular) Moleskine. I’m nuts, I know, but I am going to attempt a memoir. A spiritual memoir. I know…I know…such a cliched meme of the times, but I am curious about what I might learn about the trajectory of my life by writing down all the “dots” and then attempting to connect them.

This weekend is Homecoming and we are going to have a houseful of softball players doing their ritual, “Telling of the Stories of the Good Ole Days.” They are so sweet, so ridiculous, and they have such a good time, I can’t help but love them, but I will spend most of the weekend hiding from them up here in my room, finishing Stephen Cope’s latest, The Great Work of Your Life.

Today is a beautiful, blue October day. I plan to spend most of the afternoon cleaning up the yard, throwing out frost-bitten plants. Then I think I will make a big batch of my famous macaroni and cheese and eat it in front of the fire tonight.  In honor of homecoming.

 

 

 

 

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October 1, 2012

The Pen Is Mightier. The Computer Has No Pulse.

This morning I made a cup of de-caf, took out a pen, found a lightly used Moleskin and started writing. With a pen. On paper.

I wrote a letter to my muse, asking her to come back to me. I told her that I saw her as a kite that had gotten so high in the sky that she was only visible as a little dot in the sky. Even the kite string that attached her to me, disappeared after a while so I wasn’t even sure we we tethered any longer.

 

I told her that she was like a big fish that I had hooked, but couldn’t seem to reel in. She was strongly in control of our destiny, pulling the little boat of me way out into the pathless sea.

 

I’ve been trying for well over a year, to get my muse to go digital. “C’mon Muse,” I write, (actually, I call her Stella). “C’mon Stella,” I scribble, “You know my handwriting is atrocious, and if you say something wonderful, I will only have to transcribe this into Scrivener anyway, so why can’t we learn to relate to each other on the keyboard?”

 

“No,” she says, “I hate the keyboard. The electricity mucks up our vibe. I need your pulse. It activates the ink. Actually, I wish you would go back to your old fountain pen. I really liked that fountain pen. Gel ink? It’s so processed.”

Image of a modern fountain pen writing in curs...

Image of a modern fountain pen writing in cursive script. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I am going to draw the line at the fountain pen, I don’t even think I have one anymore, but I am going back to the ink pen and the paper because I need her. I can’t do this alone. When I do have a pen in my hand, and an open notebook, I can feel her getting closer. My brain starts to fire in a different way, my thoughts have a different voice. It’s as if she is in my head,  whispering: “Loosen your grip, Kath, let your eyes go out of focus, let ME write.”

 

I know she’ll come back to me eventually, but only if she sees me holding a pen. It’s killing me that we have to do it like this because typing is so much more efficient: cleaner, faster, and infinitely more edit-able.

 

But I need her.

 

 

 

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April 12, 2012

Liebster Award

In case you’ve been wondering where I’ve been, I have de-camped over to Virtual Yogarians for the month of April.

(Virtual Yogarians is a multi-user blog I set up for people to blog about how the April Yoga Challenge is going. I post there every day (from the seat of the teacher) but so do a whole lot of other people who are practicing in April, but not in the studio.)

Please feel free to check it out if you like yoga talk.

I thought I could keep these 2 blogs spinning on sticks while I taught 3 classes a day but I really could not, so when The Inspiration Location plate fell and smashed, I stepped over the shards and concentrated full time on Virtual Yogarians.  But I will get Inspiration Location up and spinning again once the Challenge is over in May.

Out of the blue the other day, I got a note in my inbox from a new blogger I just found and have been enjoying immensely. Her blog is called The Bliss Project and she has made a personal goal for herself to try 100 new things and write about them. (Hey Tim! If you are reading this post, this girl could be the poster child for Try Chips!!)

Her latest Bliss Project is yoga and she’s doing a yoga challenge (not mine) now and writing about it. She is my people, for sure.  She is adorable, takes pics of herself and her buddies doing stuff, and I just love her.

She passed on this award to me the other day:

What is this, you ask?

This is the Liebster Award, and from what I understand, it’s kind of a way for bloggers who are new on the scene, or like me, old on the scene but have less than 200 followers, to let each other know about one another. It’s a way of finding new blogs, new voices you may not have found otherwise.

It works like a chain letter. If you get one, you can then “pay it forward” by giving it to 5 bloggers who you like, who then can pay it forward, and by so doing, more of us can know about each other.

Cool, no?

When I tried to think of who I would nominate, so many blogs came to mind. Most of the ones on my blog roll are pretty famous and have a bizillion followers. What I always wish is that more of the people who I know IN REAL LIFE would write blogs.

Blogs  are like a peek into someone’s diary, or a daily/weekly/monthly letter you get from a friend. Blogs let people know about your life: what you are caring about, obsessing over, even cooking for dinner. I really want to know these things about certain people in my life, so I am always encouraging them to blog.

Very few do, but I do know some who are, and these are the ones I have chosen to nominate. Some of them have just started and are trying to get their blogging legs under them. If they got a comment, some acknowledgment that they are being heard in the blogosphere, they would freak. Others have some followers but really deserve more.

So here they are, my nominees–in no particular order.

Liberez Vous This is a new blog written by a young woman I first met when she began practicing at my studio. She writes about her yoga practice, and her life, and her cats, and food, and whatever is currently buzzing on her radar screen. She reminds me of my daughter a lot, so I have kind of adopted her.  She posts about once a week. This is a fun read. Oh, and she’s a good photographer, too!

Goodbye Ordinary- This is a brand new blog also, by another of my students who has had other blogs in the past, but started this one to talk about her new yoga practice. She is the young mother of 2 little kids and is trying to do the life/work balance dance and is extremely good at it. She’s a really good writer and deserves more readers. Check her out.

Em Likes Food - This is my daughter. She started this blog when she had an ailing computer and so had to do most of her posting from her Iphone! (I think). Recently, she has acquired a new Mac, plus an Ipad which should make posting lots easier. She manages a Starbucks in Portland, OR., works ridiculous (and many) hours, and likes to cook. She also likes good wine, and good coffee, and is very picky about her gimlets. She has a husband and a chihuahua. Her life is kooky. I want her to post more.  I miss her. (encourage her, k?)

Zee Zahava This is my best friend. I have known her since her Smedley’s days in Ithaca when she owned that bookstore. I have been writing at her studio for a long, long time and she is the most inspiring writing teacher/encourager/praiser on the planet. Simply phenomenal. A treasure. If you live in Ithaca, you know Zee. Her writing is hilarious, her conversation, sparkling, her haiku, enlightened. She will most likely not keep this chain letter going because she is brand new to blogging and it kind of scares her and freaks her out. But hers is a blog to subscribe to.

A Measured Word  I met Natalie at Zee’s. We were in the same writing circle for a few years and her writing used to blow me away. When I learned she was blogging I was so happy because then I could READ her and have her words to savor long after writing group was over. She loves language and gardening and taking pictures and cooking (she used to bring goodies from her kitchen to our writing groups occasionally–yum!). She’s in the middle of a move (from one house to another in Ithaca) and I can’t wait until she starts blogging again because this new house is going to inspire so much good stuff!!  Hurry back, Natalie!!

So there are my five.

If you receive the award, you should:

1. Thank the giver and link back to the blogger who gave it to you. 

2. Reveal your top five picks and let them know by leaving a comment on their blog. 

3. Copy and paste the award on your blog.

 4. Hope that the people you’ve sent the award to forward it to their five favourite bloggers and keep it going!

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February 21, 2012

Lent, Mallo Cups, and the Resistance Monster

Raise your hand if you ever gave up candy for Lent.

(My hand did not go up.)

But even still, I always find myself craving Mallo Cups this time of year because every kid in my Catholic school gave up candy for Lent.  And Mallo Cups were the big Lenten sacrifice.

We were told we should give up something we really LOVED for Lent, and for most of the kids I hung with that was candy.

Not me, though.  I took this Lent thing to a whole new level of suffering and austerity because I secretly liked Lent.  Lent was a dark, minor key kind of time on the liturgical calendar, and I was a sad, minor key kind of a kid. I actually liked it when the statues got draped in purple and there were Stations to go to every Friday.

So instead of Mallo Cups I gave up my pillow for Lent. Because even back then, I loved my sleep, and all the accoutrements of sleep: fluffy pillows, quilts, nice sheets, etc.  So I put my pillow under my bed for Lent and slept on my mattress for 6 neck-kinking weeks. And to make it even more painful, I also short-sheeted my sleep time by getting up at 5 and walking to 6 o’clock Mass every morning. And as if that hair shirt wasn’t itchy enough, I put little stones in my saddle shoes so my feet would bleed as I walked  After all, if Jesus could hang on the cross for me, it was the least I could do. Right?

(I needed serious counseling.)

Yessiree, I made those Mallo Cup giving-up kids look like total pussies.  (They, of course, had no idea I was doing this, or I would still be eating lunch by myself.)

But here I am, decades later, on the eve of Lent, still thinking about what I might give up for the next 6 weeks.

Turns out I don’t get into pain and suffering the way I used to. And self-flagellation? Eh. Over-rated.

What I am thinking of giving up this year year is my resistance to doing stuff I want to do, but because of some strange virus in my operating system I can’t bring myself to do.

That make sense?

Like this blog. When I write here regularly I feel good. I especially like going back into the archives and looking at what I was obsessing about a year or 2 ago on a given date. But when I go back and I didn’t write, I’m disappointed. I think when you start something like this, you ought tend it.  Or else kill it humanely and be done with it.

So I’ve decided that this year for Lent I am giving up not writing here. For the next 6 weeks I am going to put the stones in the saddle shoes, as it were, and just post something everyday.  It will take courage to vanquish this ugly little resistance monster who has been sitting like a threshold guardian at the gates of Wordprss, pointing and laughing at me, telling me I don’t have anything to say.

Mardi Gras Buddha Dog

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January 1, 2012

The First Post of the New Year

It’s been a slow day. Kind of introspective. Spent a lot of time going back through archives just to see what I was resolving to do this time last year.

This is the day of resolutions and I like resolutions, but I always wind up not doing them. I don’t feel bad about that mostly, because I end up doing other wonderful things instead.

Who can know in January, how things will be in June? So I am getting more relaxed about resolutions and goals, thanks in large part to reading Zen Habits and really resonating with Leo.

But to briefly recap: The two things I am happiest about this year are my ongoing and unbroken streaks: 400 days without a miss in 750 words, and nearing 100 consecutive days of personal yoga practice, not teaching yoga.

I just got back from a 5 Day training at Kripalu with Yoganand, and the training and the timing could not have been more perfect. I left the day after Christmas and returned the day before New Year’s Eve.

I now feel de-toxed from all the butter cookies and other holiday indulgences, and am happily back to my usual diet of kale, brown rice and lemon water.

I have decided not to make resolutions this year, but instead, try to envision the psycho-spiritual place I would like to be in next year and figure out the steps and behaviors it would take for me to get there.

Here’s what I have come up with thusfar:

  • I want to continue to deepen my yoga practice and add a consistent meditation practice to it.
  • I want to continue with 750 words and also with the writing in my Scrivener Project
  • I want to read at least 12 books and write about them here.
  • I want to finally learn my camera and take more, and hopefully better, pictures.
  • I want to gradually change the focus of this blog so that it reflects more accurately, and vividly, my real life. In line with this, I also want to post more regularly, but keep the posts to 200 words or less, (but include more pictures, and maybe even video.)

That seems like plenty, given the hours in the day.

Care to share what you have up your sleeve for this year?

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December 1, 2011

One Year of 750 Words

Warning: Horn-Tooting to follow

Yesterday I got my Pegasus Badge on 750 Words. This badge marks 365 days of posting without a miss.  Here’s a screenshot of my page as it looked this morning when I logged in:

Pegasus Badge! One Year of 750 words!

I was never a Girl Scout so I never had the satisfaction of earning Merit Badges, but this is what I imagine it must feel like to finally finish crocheting that last damned  potholder, or squire that last widow safely through the intersection.

Holy wow.

The Pegasus Badge.

I must say, it feels sweet. And now, on to the Space Bird! (that will come at Day 500.)

But as happy as I am about 750 Words, I did not win NaNoWriMo. Not even close. I got to about 15K words and bonked.

Spinning plates smashed.  Shards everywhere.

I kind of knew it last week when I posted here, that I had about a snowball’s chance.  All week I have been dreading having to confront the reality of my failure. I have been trying to figure out what lessons could be learned from the wreckage, and what my response should be.

One good thing that came of NaNoWritMo was that I finally learned how to use the software program, Scrivener after a year of having it lie dormant in my Applications folder. I did not learn  every feature of Scrivener lord knows, — that will take years. But I learned a lot.

So what I did yesterday in response to the NaNo failure was open a “New Project” in Scrivener. I created a separate folder for every day in December and I set up a “Word Count Target” for each of those folders, and a “Project Target Word Count” as well.

(See? This is why I love Scrivener. You can do all kinds of stuff like this.)

And I now plan to do in December what I tried, and failed, to do in November: Write 1,667 words a day for 30 days.

I learned a lot about myself as a writer this past year doing 750 words a day, and now I plan to apply this knowledge to this “New Project.”

Here is what I now know:

  • If I think what I write has to make sense, I won’t write.
  • If I think what I write will be evaluated or graded by someone, I will resist and procrastinate endlessly, until I am forced to write at gunpoint.
  • If I think it has to be informative or witty or interesting, I won’t write.

The only way writing gets done for me is if I approach it as an amusing pastime, like doodling. And the only way it can be amusing for me is if I take myself totally off the hook as far as quality goes. If quality happens: Surprise!  But in order to even start, I must give myself carte blanche to scribble (or tap out) complete and utter nonsense.

I will, however, happily write to a specified volume of words, as long as I have time and those words don’t have to make sense or be “good” in any sense of that word.

I will also write daily, and not miss a single day (see Pegasus Badge above) as long the writing is permitted to have the smell and texture of cat vomit.

And as for this blog. I still don’t know what I am going to do with it. I changed themes yesterday to give myself the illusion of a “fresh slate” but I’m not going to make any commitments here yet. I’m just going to see what happens.

Till the next time!

 

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Image | November 20, 2011

I just realized that it’s been almost a month since I’ve written here and there are actually few people who still subscribe to this blog who may be wondering WHY they do, given that there is clearly nothing happening here. I’ve been seriously considering blank-slating this blog and starting all over because I don’t think […]

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Image | September 7, 2011

Take me, for example.  Not the best writer in the world.  A reluctant writer.  A shy writer, but I cannot seem to stop doing it. I have tons of journals in the basement; I am writing a book or trying to. I tried high school teaching once but couldn’t stomach it.  I Teach yoga instead, […]

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