Yoga | Open Space Practice, (AKA: A Thousand Shades of Gray)

Today is a strange blend of grief and joy, sadness and celebration. I am graduating from yoga teacher training this afternoon along with 10 of my friends. We’ve spent nine months studying together, and while I feel so content, happy to be done, to finally become a certified teacher, so lucky to have spent this time falling in love with my fellow students and teachers and deeper in love with yoga, it comes with heartache because it is also an ending.

At the same time as our graduation ceremony, they are holding Ann’s memorial. As I’ve said before, Ann fought cancer so hard and for so long, but it finally got to be too much. She’s one of the strongest, toughest, and yet softest people I’ve ever met. She’s the reason I kept practicing yoga, showed up to class at 6:30 am three times a week for years. Even if I was too busy or tired or the weather was bad or I didn’t feel like it, I went because I knew I’d get to see Ann. She made me laugh, made me try harder. And now she’s gone. I’m teaching my first yoga classes and she won’t be there. And because my graduation is scheduled for the same time as her service, I’m going to miss saying a formal good-bye, sharing my grief with others who loved her — and yet, I know that she would understand.

Life is just this, staying open to whatever arises and knowing when it’s time to let go, a mix of grief and joy, sadness and celebration. As the always wise Pema Chödrön says, “The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.” May we make room for all of it, let it be what it is and let it go when it’s time. May we make our way towards a healing space today.

This is the cover of my binder that I use for yoga pose cue sheets. As part of my yoga teacher training, after each weekend we are supposed to make cue cards,

…an index card for each asana with the English and Sanskrit names and an image of the pose (stick figure drawing or cut-and-paste image)…Larger index cards are helpful…to include more notes. As you cover each pose in class, note key actions, alignment, anatomy details, breath cues, imagery, and other insights on your cue cards. They should be easy to read for reference during practice teaching. This is a tool to facilitate your learning process…Cue cards are a dynamic record of your training and a great reference during and after this course.

I quickly discovered that index cards, even the larger ones, just weren’t big enough. I needed full sheets, entire pages, and a binder. I’m not sure if it’s because I need more support, more help learning this, or if it’s just how I always do things — going above and beyond the stated requirements. I know for sure that one reason is I am serious about this, I want to do this well. It matters to me.

P.S. A beautiful soundtrack to a lazy Sunday, any day of rest is available from NPR’s First Listen: Tycho, “Awake.” Besides old school R&B/funk and singer/songwriter’s like Aimee Mann, this is my absolute favorite kind of music, the sort equally good for writing or sitting in the yard in a lawn chair with a book or napping or going on a run.