I don’t really have time to add something else to my plate. I’m someone who likes to actually plan time to lay in the hammock and read, or stare at the sky, and experience pockets of rest during my day. And yet, with new kid schedules and lots more driving, and new weekly engagements, I also added a yoga teacher training to my schedule. As a part of my seemingly constant invitation to surrender and accept life as it unfolds, the online YTT came to a surprisingly quick ending, where the company went out of business a month before I was to finish my training. Bye bye to that investment of time and money. But hello to the acknowledgment that I REALLY wanted to be a certified yoga teacher. Onward and asana-ward.
There’s a hefty dose of reading that aligns with the new teacher training. One of the books is The Wisdom of Yoga by Stephen Cope. I have been devouring this book, while struggling through the Anatomy Coloring Book. My apologies to all the important ligaments and joints. I promise to learn about you at some point. The Wisdom of Yoga is a super accessible guide to the yoga sutras, or the foundations of yoga from ancient wisdom, and meets me right in the heart space where I tend to spend all my time. 
Sutra 2.51-53
As realization dawns, the distinction between breathing in and out falls away.
Then the veil lifts from the mind’s luminosity.
And the mind is now fit for concentration.
I have been on a journey to discover how to carry my stillness of mind from my mat, from my meditation, into my day-to-day activities. How do I stay in the place of stillness, communing with Grace, when I’m late to pick up one of my girls, or trying to cross off things from last week’s To Do list, or cross something off from next week’s To Do list, or make a dinner that someone (anyone??) in my family will eat, or just try to keep the monkey mind at bay? After a weekend of introspection, I came to realize that often, it’s my own mind that complicates everything else. All I’m really called to do is: Still my mind. Focus on Mama Grace. Breathe. I crave the stillness I find on my mat, and wonder how to find it in the real world. This mantra brings me right back there. And then, as if it was all divinely orchestrated, I read this passage:
In craving, we vainly attempt to possess the object, to devour it, to have it. In savoring, we find pleasure in simply knowing the object.
Yogis saw that human beings wish to devour, to possess, to have objects of pleasure — people, places, and things. They saw, too, that objects cannot really be possessed. However, objects can be known. And it turns out that it is knowing the object that creates happiness.
In the experience of savoring there is no time pressure. There is no pressure for more. There is no pressure to possess the object. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and passage is sweet.
The Wisdom of Yoga, pages 221-222
So … what if instead of trying to possess stillness, I savor it? What if instead trying to own the clarity I so desire, I rest into the pleasure of knowing it at times? It carries such a difference resonance for me. It allows me to breathe deeply, instead of hyperventilating in the paper bag.
Stillness. Eyes on Grace. Breathe.
And sometimes, in that stillness, the distinction between breathing in, and breathing out, falls away. Maybe Grace is breathing me in those moments. And maybe I can savor that, on and off the mat.
Rooting and Rising 