yoga

Trippin’ Creatively
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Tuesday, Beach

Going on vacation, just as I have started to putz around again with paints and galkyd, new canvases and fresh ideas is just a bit upsetting.  I’ll take the sketch pad and my mat, but I know from experience that the mat will stay rolled up and the sketch pad will contain lots of surreptitious drawings of bodies like the one I found in an old sketch book as I was packing up for the trip.

I remember this day well.  It was incredibly hot and the kids, who were young, were whiny.  The sun was harsh and created so little contrast.  Most people in their right minds had left the beach, except for these women. What drew me to this pair was the big toes stretching to the sky.

Funny how I am still drawn to feet and hands, especially in my yoga teaching and in my own practice.  Grounding all four corners of the feet, all the knuckles of the hands into the mat lock us into the earth where we are supported and from where we can breathe and balance.  The hands channel energy from the earth to lift and fly into arm balances.

So, as I leave my “work” with my recovering creativity, I will remember to that it isn’t where I’m drawing — it is what I am drawn to drawing.   To watch for toes stretching to the sun or any other thing that catches my imagination.

“Whatever your eye falls on – for it will fall on what you love – will lead you to the questions of your life, the questions that are incumbent upon you to answer, because that is how the mind works in concert with the eye. The things of this world draw us where we need to go.”  ―    Mary Rose O’Reilley,    The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd

Parental Creativity


…and protected them when the world outside was cold…

My youngest will leave for college in a month and a half.  Part of why I’ve taken up an intentional and active practice in creating art and teaching yoga is because I’m about to release one of our last human creations out into the world.  My “parenting” (how I really hate that word — but nothing seems to work as well in this context) will now happen on text and in email and during holding-back-tears conversations on the phone on Sunday nights.

This might be why in a moment of peaceful clarity I had an idea about writing a children’s book about a couple who raise pumpkins and raise children.  Where the text flowed out into my sketchbook in an evening, I’m now taking my time with the drawings, which I then plan to take my time translating into colorful oil paintings.  I want this creative process to be like raising my children.  Like raising children (or raising pumpkins) good things come to those who take the time, who are truly present, and who let love and positive energy flow through them to help growth. Because what is the goal of being a parent but the process of learning to love profoundly and deeply?  What is the goal of being an artist?  A yogi? Through parenting, creating art, practicing asana we learn that even when things do go awry and they will, they will…  we can always return to the grace of the practice of time, presence, love and positive energy.

Similarly, teaching yoga takes time too.  I’ve just signed on to teach Tuesdays and Thursdays at 6:15 am at a studio near my home.  (See the Classes page for the exact details.) I’ve only been there two weeks, but already I find myself blessed with the seed of love taking hold of me — thinking about how this asana might be interesting for one or fun for another or good for them all. We don’t get to choose our parents or our children, and in many ways our yoga teachers are luck of the draw too.  I pray I can continue to take the time I need to be truly present to the students who are that dedicated to their practice to show up early in the morning, and to let the love and positive energy flow through me to them.  Especially in the winter, when rising at 5 am will be a bit more difficult!

From Judith Lasater’s Living Your Yoga: Finding the Spiritual in Everyday Life

Sometimes I notice my yoga students practicing their less than favorite poses with a ho-hum attitude.  At these moments, I remind them that although yoga is powerful, it cannot transform us unless we love it.  When we love, we are receptive to the “other.”  When we love, we are vulnerable.  Although being vulnerable can be frightening, it is also the doorway to the ultimate freedom written about in book four, verse twenty-two of the Bhagavad Gita…   ‘Content with what is chance-obtained, transcending the opposites, without envy, the same in success and failure, though performing actions — he is not bound.’ 

Here, Krishna explains what life is like when you are not bound by the attraction of opposites, and that when this state is experiences, there is no reaction to the vicissitudes of life.  When you react, you are not in a state of love.  When you can love without expectation, you are in a state of pure love.  Mostly what is declared to be love is not.  Rather, it is need, or fear, or the desire for power over another person.  Love in its purest sense is not based upon what you get from the relationship, but on what the relationship allows you to give.  The depth of your love is not reflected in what the other makes you feel, but in your willingness to give of yourself.  Love’s job is to lead you to intimacy with what is enduring in yourself and in others. Whether this connection lasts for seconds or decades, love is not wasted.  Through it, you have been transformed.

On being a recovering creative

ImageI had lost my artistic mojo.  After a burst of creativity, sitting down to paint had been almost painful.  Nothing flowed.  I was just grasping for ideas that would fade before the paint reached the canvas.  Occasionally I made myself complete a painting but eventually I didn’t even bother squeezing the paint on the palette, since I would lose interest and waste the paint.  But I had my yoga, my family life, things to do.  I was as empty as these dried seed pods.  (I completed this painting during this time — it took me, no kidding, a YEAR.  Every time I look at this painting, I’m amazed at how tortured it was for me.)

On the advice of some very wise people at Tranquil Space, I picked up Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way:  A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, (Penguin/Putnam, 1992) and I am now recovering the joy and spontaneity that my creative life had been until I got in the way of myself.

Practicing art and practicing yoga demand that you turn yourself off — get yourself out of your own way.  My art had become all about ME.  What did I think?  What did I want to say in this painting?  What did I think was interesting?  It’s just like how a pose becomes all the more difficult when I find myself thinking about what I look like or how much better I am at this pose now than I was in the past. The lesson is just to do art, not think art.  Just practice.  Be like a transistor radio.

So I get up and do art.  I let the ideas flow from somewhere else.  I just transcribe them. Thanks to friends at the studio and Julia Cameron, I am a recovering creative.

Yes, Cricket, you can be lost AND found

The Garden Gate

I painted these two pictures — the one on the banner and the one in this post — during a time in my life when I was terribly lost.  So I found myself in front of a canvas.  Then I found myself on the yoga mat.  Eventually, I found myself engaging in life in a whole new and joyful way, despite the fact that I was hopelessly lost then and that there will be other lost times ahead of me.

There should be a map for these times in life that says “I don’t know.  Try a left?  Then perhaps a U-turn?”  That’s what I hope my site is for you:

A map with no discernible direction.

I’m tired of strategic plans and goal setting.  I just want to be.  To let things happen.  To do some yoga and create some art. To go for a journey.  So join me.

This is a good reading to start with, from Zen Flesh, Zen Bones by Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki (Tuttle Publishing, 1985).  (Shout out to Rebecca Bell Curlin for the great grad gift!)

Zen Dialogue

Zen teachers train their young pupils to express themselves.  Two Zen temples each had a child protegé.  One child, going to obtain vegetables each morning, would meet the other on the way.  

Where are you going?” asked the one.

“I am going wherever my feet go,” the other responded.

This reply puzzled the first child who went to his teacher for help. “Tomorrow morning,” the teacher told him, “when you meet that little fellow, ask him the same question.  He will give you the same answer, and then you ask him: ‘Suppose you have no feet, then where are you going?’ That will fix him.”

The children met again the following morning.

“Where are you going?” asked the first child.

“I am going wherever the wind blows,” answered the other.

This again nonplussed the youngster, who took his defeat to his teacher.

“Ask him where he is going if there is no wind,” suggested the teacher.

The next day, the children met for a third time.

“Where are you going?” asked the first child.

“I am going to the market to buy vegetables,” the other replied.