Creating A Happy Kitchen

Happy, joyful, centered, mindful—these are some of my favorite words. They guide me through my days and help me keep my head on straight! They’re also words that weave their way into the fabric of two important aspects of my life: food and yoga. In my yoga practice, I strive to let the world melt away, to be present and centered in my body. I try to allow my joy and happiness shine through. I do the same when I cook and eat. As a chef, this has helped me grow and succeed.

While happiness can come from anywhere, the majority of my happiness comes from food—from enjoying a meal with others, from preparing food for my clients, from seeing a group of friends eating together and laughing. But others have a more ambivalent relationship to food. Many of my clients, for instance, are juggling food allergies and illnesses; others are picky eaters. Food, for some of these people, is a stressful topic. It’s something they contend with, rather than enjoy.

Here are a few simple ways that anyone can find food happiness: 1. Make the time to cook. It can be simple. Learn how to roast a chicken and then throw some potatoes and carrots in the pan. Learn how to make a simple marinara sauce or how to properly roast vegetables. 2. If you’re allergic to something, most likely there are 10 things you can substitute—don’t let allergies scare you away from enjoying your food. 3. Get inspired by food, whether it’s trying a new restaurant or allowing yourself time to flip through a new food magazine.

I’ve found that many of us are simply too busy to sit down for breakfast. But even if you just share a cup of coffee with your partner before you run out the door, you’ve now started your day with love. Try to take the time to enjoy your food and make meals an opportunity to connect.

Let’s shift how we see mealtime. Give yourself the pleasure of taking a few extra minutes to savor your food, of having a conversation with someone you care about, and I promise you will start to feel more joy and happiness.

The Trusted Friend

Recently, Yoga Shanti teachers and staff members gathered for a meeting in preparation for the new fall schedule. We welcomed new teachers, introduced ourselves, and engaged in a discussion about our shared purpose as teachers at Yoga Shanti.

I asked the group, “What connects us to ourselves, to our students, and to each other as teachers?” Without hesitation, the response was, “Self-inquiry.”

Have you noticed that a question begets another question? It may take several more questions to extract the answer to the original question—to clarify, to penetrate, to arrive at a place that resonates with truth. This is one way to describe the process of self-inquiry.

Let’s explore this in an exercise. Recall a time when you were speaking to a trusted friend about something very important. Re-create the whole picture: see yourself, your friend, where you were sitting. Remember as many details as possible.

As your conversation began, you may have shared the context, some of the necessary details, but you both knew this was just the set-up. Then you started getting closer to the heart of the matter. You laid it all out. There, you said it. Then what happened? Did your friend ask you any questions? Did their questions allow you to go deeper into the subject? What was your response? Were you surprised by it? Were you able to see something or understand yourself or your situation better? Did it lead to further questions?

I asked you to choose a “trusted” friend. Why? What do these two words, “trusted” and “friend” imply? Does a trusted friend allow you to be more open, willing, and honest? Does a trusted friend listen generously with curiosity and empathy? Does a trusted friend create time and space just to be together? Does a trusted friend hold steady as the truth is revealed?

In self-inquiry, we are both the storyteller and the trusted friend. Have you noticed that most of the time when we are telling ourselves a story, the “enemy” starts barking orders, criticizing our every move, judging other people, placing blame, etc. But wait, what happened to the trusted friend? How does the trusted friend listen? How does the trusted friend ask questions? How do we feel in the company of our trusted friend?

As we practice yoga, we have an opportunity to create a new relationship with our mind—to cultivate the trusted friend within ourselves as we learn to see, feel, listen, and skillfully move our body. It is within our power to start asking ourselves important questions with openness and honesty. It is within our power to listen with curiosity and empathy. In class, each teacher recognizes that you have taken the time to be with yourself and there is space for you to defy the critic, to slay the judgment, to disarm the enemy, simply by asking questions that encourage new understanding. It is a worthy process that leads us toward truth. The trusted friend is our closest companion, our guide, and the resting place for our mind.

Opening Up to the Gifts of the Universe

September literally stormed in, forcing us to get into fall mode, quick. I like to set professional goals in September. I answer questions like: What can I do this year to evolve as a teacher? What can I focus on to help grow my business? And a new one that has popped up this year: How can I nurture and strengthen my relationships with my community? I sit with these questions and come up with all sorts of answers and strategies. I edit them down, devise a plan, and then—the hardest part—I let it all go. It doesn’t mean I don’t do any work. I continue to work toward something, but I let go of the results. Or I try to.

A common goal for yogis is to do a handstand in the middle of the room. So we show up to the mat, day after day, hoping to one day look like a gold medal gymnast. One day it will come, we think, or not. As human beings, especially ones living in New York City, we want to know that if we do A and B, it will look like C. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work out that way.

So instead of feeling frustration, despair, and hopelessness that we can’t, say, do a gold-medal handstand in the middle of the room, can we see it as an opportunity to practice letting go of a desired result? Can we find grace and equanimity when things aren’t going our way? We have such a finite view of how we want things to be, but when we relax into the flow of the universe, we open ourselves up to an infinite realm of gifts and possibilities.

In The Book of Joy, the Dalai Lama says that “there are different aspects to any event.” “For example,” he says, “we lost our own country and became refugees, but that same experience gave us new opportunities to see more things…. I had more opportunities to meet with different people, different spiritual practitioners, and also scientists. This new opportunity arrived because I became a refugee. If I remained in Lhasa, I would have stayed in what has often been described as a golden cage.”

With the political climate being as it is these days, as well as the global pain and suffering we consistently bear witness to, it’s easy to fall into a state of despair; it can seem like nothing good is happening, no matter what we do or how much we organize, pray, or meditate. But if we change our perspective just a little bit, we can see that times like these bring people together. Times like these give us the opportunity to become better informed, to wake up and stay woke.

Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist monk and peace activist, explains that suffering—dukkha—is one of the biggest problems of our times. He says, “First we have to recognize this suffering and acknowledge it. Then we need to look deeply into its nature in order to find a way out. If we look into the present situation in ourselves and our society, we can see much suffering. We need to call it by its true names—loneliness, the feeling of being cut off, alienation, division, the disintegration of the family, the disintegration of society.”

If the disintegration of society is a root cause of the suffering in the world, we can create or gravitate toward community as an antidote. A yoga studio is a great place to connect with others who feel the suffering of the world every bit as deeply as we do, but who are also building an inner resolve to get through these challenging times. I feel fortunate that I have a community that I can share my fears, my goals, and the gifts I receive in the process.

Let’s all introduce ourselves to someone in class, gather with fellow yogis and like-minded people, and seek and give the support we all need when it feels like nothing makes sense and things aren’t going our way. Together we can receive the gifts of these otherwise tormenting times.

Life is What Happens to You While You’re Busy Making Other Plans

John Lennon Said It Best; “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”

I did my first teacher training at Yoga Shanti fifteen years ago. That was back when the studio was on Main Street next to Kites of the Harbor. If you’ve been around long enough, you’ll remember that space—womb-like as it was—all of us packed in there. We didn’t even have a computer system then. I would sign people in using index cards. You can only imagine what it was like during the summer when people were certain they hadn’t used as many classes as I communicated they had! Those were the days.

Much has changed since then—with me, the studio, the world. My teacher training was the first-ever at Yoga Shanti: a long year spent together at Padma’s old space in Wainscott. That’s no longer there either.

I had no intention of becoming a yoga teacher—but my grandmother was dying, and I was living with her in Southampton while taking care of her, and I became the manager at Yoga Shanti. My yoga practice really helped me through that time. When our teacher training ended, I was encouraged by Colleen to start teaching, and so I did. So much of my life has been that way—thrust into opportunities that I wasn’t quite sure I wanted to have…and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

The most magical experiences I’ve had in my life weren’t planned. They happened as a result of being willing to go exactly where I was led. I had never intended to teach yoga, but that path has offered me so much success, taken me to many amazing places, and connected me with so many incredible people.

I am not just grateful for the triumphs. I’ve been in a lot of accidents out here on the East End and they have taught me a lot of lessons that I needed to learn. I got smacked in the face by my surfboard, after nearly colliding with another surfer. I got in a car accident on Route 114 that would have killed me, except for the fact that my ‘87 soft-top Cabriolet convertible ricocheted off the trunk of one tree and landed squarely upside-down, balancing perfectly between two trees so I wasn’t crushed under the weight of the car. There were others too. And what about the countless decisions I’ve made over the years, that I might have chosen differently if I had the experience I do now? But isn’t that always the case?

I have been so many places these last fifteen years. But as I look back from where I sit now, I can see most of those places have come to me.

Ten years ago, when I was on a retreat in Northern California, I stumbled upon a spiritual teacher who helped me connect the dots of what seemed like all unplanned happenstances in my life. He revealed to me a path that required courage, willingness, and determination. I started to see myself as a hero—and saw that in order to discover more of the story I was meant to tell, I had to follow the clues…and recognize all the beliefs I held that interfered with that authentic expression. As a result, I have become more and more willing to follow the path that appears, despite my best-laid plans.

We each have a destiny that is singular and unique. Uncovering and expressing it is the most noble act we can take in our lifetimes. All this and more, I’ve learned on my journey—by saying yes to opportunities that I probably wouldn’t have even considered, if life didn’t take me there at its urging.

So now, I urge you: may you be brave in your own exploration and go where no one dares to go—into the heart of your own humanity. May you not be afraid of what’s right in front of you, and may you pause long enough to let life interrupt your plans. I don’t know exactly where I’ll be fifteen years from now, but there’s much I hope to accomplish: mostly discovering more of who I already am, and letting go of that which I am not. We are all a part of the great whole, consciousness itself…but to have that awareness, I know I have to stop and listen to those urging clues, and have the willingness to go wherever they may lead.

This is true heroism. And true heroism takes courage. It means that we must live without fear and judgement, and that we must take complete responsibility for the experiences we create for ourselves and others. Imagine what the planet would be like if we all did that.

The Gift of Surrender

In June, I signed on to do a 10-day yoga retreat in Ladakh, India, led by Nikki Costello. This was to be my very first retreat, and the days leading up to it were fraught: I hadn’t been away from my three daughters for more than a couple of nights since they were born, and now I was about to jump on a plane, cross a few times zones, and park myself on a mountaintop in the Himalayas.

I wanted to back out.

About a week before I was set to leave, I was working at the front desk at Yogi Shanti, thoughts swirling around my head, when Nikki appeared. My reaction? CRY. Nikki said, “Yes, this is big. Your feelings are valid. I’ll be there for you when your plane lands in India.” So I breathed again, trusting.

I know it takes an act of God to change the course of your life. Sometimes these acts are baby steps, and other times they’re grand gestures. India for me was that grand gesture.

Fifteen hours after taking off, our plane landed in Delhi and my heart cracked open. We spent three days in that city, which was a good transition for me. I had cell service to talk to my husband and daughters, great food, Balinese massage, and a king-size bed—all the comforts.

BUT. The night before our 6am flight to Ladakh, the “I cannot do this” set back in. It was as if I were standing in a line I couldn’t get out of. Nor did I want to: I want to cultivate individuality in my lifetime. I want to be authentic. But spiritual growth, for me, is scary most of the time. I can’t determine if it’s pain-filled joy or joy-filled pain.

Ladakh is 12,000 feet above sea level, and it takes several days to acclimate. In the first 24 hours of this retreat, I cried, laughed, panicked, and prayed. But I was there, and I was in it a hundred percent.

When I woke up each day after that, my heart was filled with gratitude. I’d look out my window at the clear view of a monastery built on the side of the mountain. I’d hear the engine of the local school bus start up outside. (The bus driver lived with his family behind my building). The majestic mountains surrounded me as I walked to the temple for morning puja with the monks. Their chanting pulsated my heart. The novice children in the monastary pouring tea, banging the drums, looking up at their elders, rebirthed me. That sacred place welcomed me fully.

I surrendered, and felt free. I had nothing to hide. Those mountains could handle and protect me even in the darkest of nights. It was magical and amazing. Each day was filled with community, asana, and refuge.

As we neared the end of our time together, we were told that a rare meeting with His Holiness the Dali Lama was organized for our group. When His Holiness spoke with us, his first words were, “We are all the same.”

I’m sure I’ll be unpacking this experience for many days, weeks, months, and years. But I leave you with this, from His Holiness: “We are visitors on this planet. We are here for 90 or 100 years at the very most. During that period, we must try to do something useful with our lives. If you contribute to other people’s happiness, you will find the true meaning of life.”

Found and Lost

I hate losing things. I still mourn the loss of a white sundress that went missing on my honeymoon, and a pair of pink Gucci sunglasses that the ocean swallowed one Fourth of July weekend.

Two months ago, I was at a pharmacy on the upper east side picking up medication. I remember feeling anxious and unsettled, like I’d had way too much coffee or was about to take an important exam that I wasn’t prepared for. It was only 7:45 a.m., but I’d already been to the doctor and battled my way across town to get to the one pharmacy on the island of Manhattan that had what I needed. I left the pharmacy clutching my paper bag of drugs, and I was walking toward the subway when I realized my sunglasses—my favorite Ray-Bans—were missing. The case was empty. I checked the little side pouch of my bag where I sometimes hastily throw them, but they weren’t there. I turned around and raced back to the pharmacy.

“Hi,” I said breathlessly to the woman behind the counter. “I left my sunglasses here.”

“No, Miss…” she began, but I cut her off.

“I’m sure they’re here. I know I just had them, and I must’ve put them on the counter or something while I was paying, because they’re not in my bag or…“

“No, Miss, they’re…”

“They have to be here!” I said. “I know I was wearing them when I came in, and I haven’t been anywhere else and…”

“Miss,” she said sternly, silencing me. “They’re on your head.”

“Oh,” I said. My face got red hot. I reached my hands up to pat my head, and, sure enough, there were my sunglasses. “I’m sorry,” I whispered, and skulked out the door.

There’s a phrase in Sanskrit, praaptasya praapti, which means, “acquiring that which is already acquired.” The woman at the pharmacy didn’t give me anything—she didn’t have my sunglasses—but she guided me to the realization that nothing was lost.

So what does all of this have to do with yoga?

The yogis say that our true nature is limitless joy. Not that we have joy, but that we are joy. Can you even imagine?

It’s a tough idea for our limited little egos to grasp. Also, our daily experience belies this concept of unconditional happiness and peace. We’re so used to conditional happiness: I will be happy when I have a healthy, happy baby; I will be happy once I make more money; I will be happy when I lose 10 pounds; I will be happy when I can hold handstand in the middle of the room. I don’t know about you, but just looking for parking on Main Street on a Saturday in summer is enough to make me feel agitated and stressed out. So much for being eternally at peace.

Some yoga texts explain that the reason we feel unrest or anxious is because we’ve forgotten who we are. We wrongly believe we’re separate from one another and feel isolated in the human experience. We carry around shame, disappointment, guilt, and resentment, and those things are heavy—it’s no wonder we’re exhausted all the time! We’ve lost our connection to our deeper Self, that part of us that’s always joyful and divine.

Patanjali tells us that even when we’re in darkness, or working through tremendous grief, our true Selves are limitless, eternal, content, happy, and peaceful. But what good is all this happiness and peace if we can’t feel it? Why have we forgotten? How can we remember again? How do we recover what’s lost?

Last year, at Ramanand Patel’s suggestion, I started studying Vedanta remotely with a teacher named Vijay Kapoor. Kapoor says that 80% of the Bhagavad Gita, that seminal Hindu scripture, is sadhana. I’d always thought sadhana meant “practice,” or even “an ego-transcending practice,” but Kapoor defines it as “positioning yourself”—positioning your life and your mind so that you can better understand your true nature.

Sounds easy enough, but finding your true Self takes sustained practice, hard work, and continuous study. It’s not an easy veil to lift, but the Gita gives us clues that it has to do with alignment.

How are you setting yourself up? Are you positioning your life in a way that allows you to access joy, or do you keep banging your head against the same brick wall and then wonder why you can’t find peace? As a head banger myself, I’ve been questioning my own alignment lately. Why do I continue to reinforce patterns that deplete me? Why am I reluctant to shed habits that make me anxious? Why am I still my biggest obstacle to experiencing lasting contentment? Why is it so hard for us to live our best lives?

Pema Chodron says, “You are the sky. Everything else is just the weather.” The habits that diminish us are the clouds passing through. Sometimes they congregate into violent hurricanes, thunderstorms, or blizzards, but the sky remains the sky: vast, open, blue, radiant. I sometimes think I have more fun identifying with the storms, because they’re powerful and dramatic. They can shake the very ground beneath me and send bolts of fire from the heavens to the earth. They’re beautiful and awe-inspiring and exciting and badass. But I’m no more the storms than the waves are the ocean. I know this, but I also forget it. I lose it.

How do we find our way back to our true selves?

I think it’s different for everyone. I’m learning that for me it’s a combination of rigorous exercise, sitting quietly, being near the ocean, chanting, spending time with my son and my mom, rolling out my mat, reading Mary Oliver, traveling, walking in the woods, and narrowing my to-do list. Then I find myself again.

Then I lose myself again.

So the bad news is, you’re the problem. The good news is, you’re the solution. You’re both the disease and the cure. The poison and the tonic. You’re the only one who can start paying attention to how you can better align yourself so you have access to the well of joy and peace that you already are. You find a way to acquire that which you’ve already acquired. Your favorite sunglasses that you fear you’ve lost are right there… on top of your head.

Pause and Reflect

I recently read the book, Thank you for Being Late: An Optimists Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations, by Thomas Friedman, the New York Times Op-Ed columnist. His take on the world in which we live today inspired me to consider how yoga translates into our “accelerating” age.

Friedman posits: “The three largest forces on the planet: technology, globalization, and climate change, are all accelerating at once. As a result, so many aspects of our societies, workplaces, and geopolitics are being reshaped and need to be reimagined.”

A few examples that come to mind are: social media, the new “shared economy” (co-working spaces and Airbnb), and the current state of our government (just consider our new president). These are all cycling at such a rapid pace that we have less time to adapt and respond; we feel constantly disoriented. Haven’t we all thought, “I can barely keep up”?

Many of us have gone through periods when we just have to step away from it all. I personally have stepped away from Instagram for weeks at a time, and I’ve stopped using Facebook altogether. I suppose we do this because we are seeking a sense of stability and grounding that is quite elusive when things move at such a rapid pace. It’s why many of us come to yoga, right? To practice stillness and being in the present moment. This brings us back to the title of Friedman’s book, “Thank You for Being Late…”, which is what the author found himself saying to people if they arrived late for a meeting, because their tardiness had given him time to pause and reflect.

About this “age of accelerations”, the author writes, “…opting to pause and reflect, rather than panic or withdraw, is a necessity. It is not a luxury or a distraction – it is a way to increase the odds that you’ll better understand, and engage productively with, the world around you.”

But of course, what matters most is what you do in the pause. I’m pretty sure binge watching your latest Netflix guilty pleasure doesn’t constitute pause and reflect.

Friedman’s friend and teacher Dov Seidman says,“When you hit the pause button on a machine, it stops. But when you press the pause button on human beings, they start. You start to reflect, you start to rethink your assumptions, you start to reimagine what is possible and, most importantly, you start to reconnect with your most deeply held beliefs. Once you’ve done that, you can begin to reimagine a better path.”

Seems like a much better use of time than reading Trump tweets.

In this most modern of circumstances, we can still call upon ancient yoga scriptures. The importance of “pause and reflect” calls to mind Yoga Sutra 2.1: “Tapas Svadyaya Isvarapranadanani Kriya Yoga,” which translates to “discipline, self study, and orientation towards the universal, constitutes yoga in action.”

As we pause and reflect (rather than withdraw) and assess, and possibly challenge the assumptions and beliefs we’ve formed, we can then redirect so we are less disoriented. The pause gives us an opportunity to become better aligned with both our true nature and the world in which we live. This practice of yoga in action may actually accelerate our own adaptability. After all, not many of us plan to retreat to the caves of Tibet to live in isolation! As human beings, we are not meant to be static, and we live in this age of accelerations.

How often do you pause and reflect? Are there beliefs or perspectives you’ve formed that need reshaping (in order for you to adapt as the world around you changes)? Can you connect with that which is universal within you and consider how it moves you?

Would you thank someone for being late?

Align, Flow, and Inquire

Yoga Shanti’s aim is “to offer the perfect combination of alignment, flow, and Inquiry.” In the spirit of inquiry, I often find myself reconsidering what this phrase means.

I can best speak to “flow.” For me, a good flow class is poetry. It’s as enjoyable as reading Shakespeare or Keats. It’s the rhythm, the timing, the repetition, the musicality, and the humanity that brings enjoyment.

This analogy occurred to me the other night after reading Dr. Seuss to my little guy. If my son stops and says, “Why?” after every line in The Sneeches, he misses out on the humor and joy of the story. Yet if he never asks, then he may miss out on the deeper meanings of prejudice that the tale is really about. So both his inquiry and his ability to sit back and go with the flow of the story are important to his overall development in the arts of language and humanity.

Likewise, if you go to see a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, you may not understand every quip, but you go with the flow, and the story reveals itself to you. The mysterious parts you don’t entirely understand intrigue you, as you are carried along by the rhythm and rhyme of the story. What puzzles you makes you think. The more it puzzles you, the more curious you become, and the more you may begin to wonder, “But, why? But, how?”

So you dig deeper. You pick up the play to read. You find an essay about iambic pentameter. You take a course. You study with teachers and other students who are unpacking the play. In other words, you dive into the alignment, the bones, the anatomy of the play.

But, you don’t stop going to the performances. No! Now you can enjoy them even more. After slowing the passages down and consulting the OED, you go to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the park, and you follow along more fluidly. Now the subtleties speak directly to you.

This is all to say that I believe alignment and flow go hand-in-hand. To be growing, evolving, healing, learning, and caring, we must pause, ask why, dig deeper, seek, inquire, align our minds with knowledge and our bodies with our minds, and then keep flowing with the tremendous river that is life.

What I’ve realized is that offering “the perfect combination of alignment, flow, and inquiry” can be a group effort, led by all of our teachers collectively. In this way, the burden doesn’t fall on any one teacher to strike this perfect combination for their students in every class. The students who tap into the breadth of our offerings are really enjoying and benefiting from the various ways of wrestling with the mysteries of life and unlocking the rubik’s cube that is yoga.

Groundlessness

Kinetic molecular theory (also known as particle theory) states that all matter is made up of particles and these particles are always in motion. Guess what? WE are made of particles, and so WE are always in motion.

If you’ve been to my class you have probably heard me reference Pema Chödrön. In my mind, she accurately describes this phenomenon as “groundlessness”. Groundlessness is the idea that long term security, a permanent solution to a problem, or even predictability just don’t exist. The more we attempt to hold on to things and ideas in this world (that just so happens to also be in constant motion) the more we get dragged around. The struggles we encounter are not because we don’t have a solution, but rather because we are always looking for one.

I have been teaching this idea in class for many years. After all, what is more groundless than balancing on one foot or standing on your head?! I’m comfortable with the idea of groundlessness in yoga, or in small parts of my everyday life. But I’ve recently been presented with an opportunity that will really test my ability to follow this teaching and practice. My husband and I are taking a LONG sabbatical. On May 31, we will pack up all our belongings, put everything in storage, and start traveling. We plan to come back sometime in March of 2018.

Those of you who know me know that I love to travel so naturally I’m excited. It’s the opportunity of a lifetime, right?! But now as I’m being faced with the reality that I am not going to have a “home” for almost a year I am freaking out…

It started with realizing I won’t have a home base. Then I recognized I won’t have my regular routine. I have to give up my teaching schedule. I realized how much I am GOING TO MISS MY STUDENTS! I won’t have my cozy bed to crawl into every night. I won’t have my pups to cuddle with on the couch. My plants will not get to hear me singing nonsensical songs to them every day (maybe they’ll be better off…). Additionally, I’ve recently (well, sort of recently…) developed a pretty bad shopping habit. The more I think about giving up all my stuff the more I’m clinging on to more and more stuff. Then I realized – this is just me trying to find ground.

Now I am taking the opportunity to catalog my belongings and purge what is unnecessary. Doing this is making me feel lighter by the minute. Maybe this is what groundlessness really means? That the more we let go of the less we have that weighs us down. Feeling groundless means feeling untethered. Finding freedom in the weightlessness and learning to fly.

So am I saying everyone should to quit their job, move out of their apartment and sell all of their belongings to practice groundlessness? YES. HA! Just kidding. Not necessarily. But if you’re ever in a situation that feels life changing, ground shaking, or unsteady remember that we’re already in constant motion and the tighter the grip- the bumpier the ride.

Enjoying The Process

As of now, I’ve taught seven classes here at Yoga Shanti. I like teaching, but I’ve also been flooded with feelings of inadequacy. The truth is, I don’t feel good enough. I’m just not there yet. But what does being “there” mean? As if “there” were some kind of final destination. The fact is, I don’t feel like a great teacher yet. I don’t doubt my knowledge, but I know my delivery has some room for improvement.

In “When Things Fall Apart”, Pema Chodron says:

“Out of nowhere, we stop struggling and relax. We stop talking to ourselves and come back to the freshness of the present moment. This is something that evolves gradually, patiently, over time. How long does this process take? I would say it takes the rest of our lives.”

I feel like a beginner and I don’t like that feeling. In my mind, I want to be one of those amazing teachers (you know the ones). But Pema’s writing helps me focus on the process of it all. It helps me remember to try to enjoy being right where I am: I do have knowledge to share with others, even as a new teacher with room for improvement.

Yoga has changed my life. Something about connecting movement with breath has been powerful for me. I’ve learned the power of turning inward—something completely foreign to me before being introduced to yoga. Turning inward, allowing myself to feel vulnerable, allowing feelings to bubble up—these things take courage.

Putting our bodies in different shapes—forward bends, backbends, twists—can help with releasing pent-up emotions. Mr. Iyengar says, “Our body is our road map,” and I think he means our bodies hold on to past traumas, both physical and emotional. I’ve found that yoga is an amazing tool for releasing these pent-up emotions, and creating new space in my body.

It’s up to me how I fill that new space.

For now, my focus is teaching, even with all the feelings that being a new teacher brings up. With practice, I’ll get better.

I have a tremendous amount of respect for Colleen and Rodney. It’s an honor and a privilege to be asked to teach at Yoga Shanti. Yes, it’s a yoga studio, but to me it’s more like a healing center—a magical little spot nestled in the village of Sag Harbor. It’s the perfect place to turn inward and let the magic unfold.

Here’s to enjoying the process.