The power of retreat

October 30, 2007

Earlier this year, I took a week’s vacation and came back with a realization.
I went to Austria with my husband and friends in March. I left behind my cell phone, my laptop, email, IM, everything.
Just before I left, I feared my family was about to bust apart (stepmother and sister and I were in some deeply [...]

Yoga for Scoliosis workshop

October 7, 2007

I travelled to Cleveland to attend Elise Browning Miller’s yoga for scoliosis and yoga for the shoulders, neck and upper back workshops at Evolution Yoga. In lieu of a real post, here are some factoids:

4 - muscles involved in stabilizing the rotator cuff
~40 - the number of women attending the workshop
2 - males attending Saturday [...]

Make it suck less

October 4, 2007

So, I did it again. I have spent much of the last two days trying to edit a technical document into something that I can understand and that exceeds my standards for clear and informative writing. I’ve been line editing, I’ve been working on organization, I’ve been pinging subject matter experts for examples and to clarify points that do not come across well to me, I’ve been excising passive voice. Essentially, I’ve been a tech writer again. And I’m struggling. The document is due, I’m not happy with it, and I don’t think I can line edit my way to nirvana.

I came home tonight frustrated, needing a break from the document, but fretting about the looming deadline. And then, sitting on my yoga mat starting my practice, I realized that I was trying to grope my way through this document towards the perfect document. And, I realized I was wasting energy beating myself up for not knowing which thread to pull or which angle to pursue to get there.

Becoming a yoga teacher in Ann Arbor

September 4, 2007

Today I went to a yoga class in Osterville, MA with my mother-in-law and her neighbor. After class I had a quick chat with the instructor, who out of the blue asked me what type of yoga I studied and whether I was considering becoming a yoga teacher. I had a hard time answering the [...]

Carless -> Careless?

June 6, 2007

Car-free for a week now. Not going too badly.
Getting to the “distant” yoga studio has been easy. Once, I used my Go! Pass and made it to my yoga studio from work faster than it would have taken me to walk home, get my car, drive, and then park. Another day, I walked the 2 [...]

Gratitude and Giving

May 28, 2007

Last fall, Susan invited me to consider taking on Seva as the Dakshina coordinator for my local meditation center. This means that I am the point person for giving to our center and SYDA, the foundation that supports the global mission.
Now, this made me deeply uncomfortable for several reasons: I tend to avoid sharing about [...]

Letting go

April 15, 2007

So, the theme of the last month has been getting rid of stuff: trying to align my current possessions and situation with who I am now and who I intend to become, rather than who I have been.

I have gotten rid of my old stamp collection - bartered it to a friend making and selling [...]

Business process and … reincarnation?

January 29, 2007

So, I’ve owned a copy of Michael E. Gerber’s E-Myth Mastery for about a year and a half now. Something about its size (over 400 pages) and the grandiose subtitle “The Seven Essential Disciplines for Building a World Class Company” put me off.
I think the timing was also bad. I purchased it near the end [...]

My current favorite spot

January 22, 2007

The sauna at A2YogaWorks after a nia or yoga class.

Yoga trance dance

January 7, 2007

In late summer, my friend Victoria and I followed an ad in the Ann Arbor Observer for “yoga trance dance”. It brought us to an unfamiliar yoga studio on a Saturday night. No one was there, but the door was open, so we let ourselves in. Excited and unsure, we and another stranger waited in [...]