Month: January 2010

Present Tense with Taylor Wells

It is my honor to introduce the wonder woman I am featuring in today Present Tense conversation: Taylor Wells. Taylor and I met in August 2000 at a yoga retreat in Montana. It was a trip that changed her life in enormous ways, and I have had the privilege of watching those changes and of experiencing first-hand the growth of a person into their dharma.  Taylor absolutely radiates peace. I asked her to participate in the series because I know she has thought deeply on the issue of consciousness and her answers affirmed this. More than anyone else I know, Taylor takes concrete steps and makes specific decisions to support this path. The peace and sense of being centered that she gives off is testament to how effective this practice is. Read and learn:

1. When have you felt most present? Are there specific memories that stand out for you?

Every single day after my yoga practice

When painting, playing, and/or reading with my three children. Whenever I’m in nature – especially hiking up a mountain or at the ocean,

When cleaning and organizing. Very Virgo! So our home is very organized – effortlessly. A nice perk for my husband and kiddos!

When writing.

2. Do you have rituals or patterns that you use to remind you to Be Here Now?  

Yes. I do them every day faithfully. It’s a practice, and I’m very disciplined and I practice daily. I cultivated this discipline at a very young age – when training for the Olympics in ice skating at age five and up, and training for the pro circuit in tennis while living at Nick Bolletieri’s at age twelve and thirteen.

I practice prana power yoga every single morning – first thing. While practicing, I read flash cards I’ve written with inspirational, spiritual, be here now, and be grateful quotes. My two year old son, Phoenix, puts them out in front of my mat for me – about 6-8 of them. He knows the drill. I have hundreds of them and I choose them at random each morning. Those are my lessons/my mantras of the day. This is my way of setting the energy/the template for the day, much like putting twigs into a fire that burns all day long

I put only raw high vibration vegan food into my body. This keeps me in the now. Cooked, processed and animal foods cause our bodies and minds to go on auto pilot. They cause us to zone out and exist like the “living dead.” Food really is a drug. Use it wisely

Very first thing in the morning – when I open my eyes and before I get out of bed – I thank the universe for everything I am grateful for. This takes a while! I have a lot of gratitude. I cultivate an attitude of gratitude first thing in the am. Then I visualize my day, going exactly as I ant it to go. It’s mostly energetic – things flowing beautifully and easily, lots of smiling and laughing, efficiency, joy, and love.

3. Do you have specific places or people that you associate with being particularly present? Who? Where? Any idea why?

My children are my biggest teachers – my three children and the twins in my belly. They are totally present all the time, effortlessly. They know nothing else. I learn from them every moment. They remind me constantly. They bring me back. They are gifts from the universe. That’s why I keep having them!
My yoga mat. Also a gift from the universe. No matter what’s going on, I always feel better and am more present and grateful after a practice. Always.
Being in nature. It always brings me back to the moment and quiets my mind. The birds, the wind, the trees, the chill in the air. It’s magic.

Talking with my soul mate/husband, Philippe. We are very in sync and very connected and just talking with him brings me back, if I’ve drifted off somehow. I remember years ago, when we were first dating, telling a dear girlfriend how Philippe and I would lie on the couch together and talk for hours – like three or four hours. She smiled and was happy for me, and said gently and sweetly that that would probably change with time, as our relationship evolved and responsibilities accrued, etc. I’m happy to say that we can and do still talk for hours, amidst all of our co-adventures and responsibilities (Prana yoga centers, Prana cafe, consulting, co-parenting, homeschooling, etc). And the reason why we can and still do is that when we talk, I truly let go of everything and am totally present. I’m not thinking, “Oh, I have 200 emails to respond to, so I have to go now,” I’m just there with him. That’s a blessing that I always cherish.

4. Have you ever meditated? How did that go?

I used to meditate daily – twice a day. Now after studying a lot of Abraham-Hicks, I’ve learned that “we didn’t come here to be on pause.” 🙂 So instead I’ve trained my mind to think positive thoughts – things that I want and aspire to – instead of blanking my mind out. Abraham says that meditation is great if your mind is negative/racing/etc, but with the time and practice, it’s best to learn to train your mind to think positive thoughts – to create what you want, using your thoughts. I’ve gotten pretty good at this, with time and practice. It’s called manifestation, and it’s very fun.

5. Has having children changed how you think about the effort to be present?

OMG Yes. The day I had my first child, I changed forever. And with each child since, I have continued to transform. I also transformed during my first yoga practice, and continue to transform each time I get on my mat. However, having a child is a slam dunk. My children are my biggest teachers (as I said above) and also they are a reminder to be present so I can teach them to do the same. We are so blessed to be able to spend a lot of time together (my husband and I homeschool and don’t use nannies or day care because we are able to do so – since we run our yoga centers and cafes out of our home), and they watch every move I make and mimic me. That’s a lot of responsibility – the biggest ever. And I take it seriously – and with joy and honor.

6. And just cause I’m curious, what books and songs do you love?

I love all Krishna Das and Loreena McKennitt. I also love James Taylor and Elton John! They are classics.

I love most every spiritual book I’ve ever read, especially all Sanaya Roman (have read most twice or more), Louise Hay, Deepak Chopra, Marianne Williamson, Wayne Dyer, and Stuart Wilde. I am not a fan of fiction. Can’t get through a page. My spirit only likes spiritual books and nonfiction.

******

What Taylor’s answers tell me, most of all, is that
presence is a practice. As she says. This is something you can commit to, and with effort it can become more of a habit. I am inspired by all of the things you do, Taylor, by your discipline and commitment to living an engaged and aware life. I remember visiting your old house, years ago, and seeing index cards taped up around the kitchen with inspirational quotes. I turn to my own quote books (hand written, filled over the years) almost daily; it is only a small leap to make these an explicit part of my everyday environment.

Your answers about meditation remind me of what Danielle said, and both make me recall Thich Nhat Hanh, whose writings I’ve long admired. The lesson I take is that life itself, even (especially?) in its most mundane moments, can be a meditation. It is in our attitude, in our own minds, that the meditation occurs. Perhaps to cultivate a mind that is capable of this we need to
formally sit and chant, but the end goal seems to be actually engaging in our lives with the kind of mindfulness we might bring to a traditional meditation session.

Taylor, thank you. For those of you who want to learn more about Taylor, you can read her blog at www.super-mom.com, learn about the yoga studios she and Philippe founded and run at www.pranapoweryoga.com, and about their raw food cafe at www.thepranacafe.com.

Abide with Me

I read Olive Kittredge in November and fell in love with Elizabeth Strout’s writing. Kathryn suggested that I read Abide with Me, claiming that it was even more beautiful. The book has been sitting in my stack for a while, and contributed no doubt to my having that hymn in my head in December.

And, wow. The book is, as promised, beautiful. It’s sitting here now on my desk next to me, a used copy with slightly beaten-up pages, and I keep looking at it, wondering at the marvels that can be contained in a slim volume of fiction. In many ways the book reminded me of Gilead. Maybe that comparison is obvious, since both describe in detail the inner lives of religious men, but I think it goes beyond that. Like Marilynne Robinson, Strout’s prose somehow manages to be straight forward and exquisite at the same time. She doesn’t tangle herself in wordy sentences, but her images rise off the page with the power of mirages: I can’t stop thinking about certain lines (“…by summer he seemed like a big tractor being driven by a teenage kid, slipping in and out of gear.”)

Abide with Me draws vivid parallels between the New England seasons of its small town setting and the internal landscapes of its main characters. We go from the splash of late-summer sun on a barn, to the heartbreaking blue of the autumn sky, to the barren, bitter spiderweb of bleak winter branches against a steel gray sky. The book is about nothing so much as it is about the transformative power of grief: the way that loss can change us. The main character, Reverend Tyler Caskey, moves from loss to numbness to powerful redemption. He navigates his relationships with his lost wife, his daughters, his mother, his housekeeper, and, perhaps above all, his committed and challenging congregation.

The book reminded me, actually, of Kelly Diels’ post yesterday about relationships. My favorite lines in her post:

We are all, fundamentally, mysteries to each other. Sometimes we are mysteries to ourselves.
But, I believe, we want to be known. To speak the same language as our loved ones. To be heard. Understood.

This confusion, the deep loneliness bred by the inscrutability of even those closest to us, animates Abide With Me. And when those intimates pass on, leaving us alone with our confusion and loneliness? Then we are left to parse these emotions, often blinding in their mute, dense power, all by ourselves. How to forgive someone when they can’t answer our questions? This is the challenge of Tyler’s life – and, by extension, of all of ours. How can we free someone from the prison of our expectation, of the snap judgments we form about them? Especially someone with as critical and larger-than-life presence as the minister of a congregation? It is not simple, Strout asserts, but it is critical: it is the only way to truly know and be known.

Abide With Me is a melancholy book, shot through with moments of brilliant joy and truth. Strout’s vision of the world is about forgiveness, and about how the inability to give those we love room to be fully themselves hurts us most of all. It is about wounded people struggling to look each other in the eye, and about moving to a new kind of joy once life has handed us great pain and disappointment. A set of lines in the last chapter say it better than I ever could, in Strout’s incomparable language:

Finally, George said, “No one, to my knowledge, has figured out the secret to love. We love imperfectly, Tyler. We all do… I suspect the most we can hope for, and it’s no small hope, is that we never give up, that we never stop giving ourselves permission to try to love and receive love.”

Sugar Doll: Ten things

In December, Kristen of Motherese generously handed me the Sugar Doll Award.  In turn, I passed the award on to Becca at Drama for Mama.  But I was remiss in listing ten things you don’t know about me, as specified by the award. 

I’ve already listed ten things here, and truthfully I find myself unsure if there are other interesting things to mention.  Hell, even when I release myself from the need for the facts to be interesting, I’m hard pressed to mine my very ordinary life for ten surprising things!  But I lack inspiration on this first day back in the rhythm of regular life for anything meatier than randomness, so here I go.

1.  I move fast.  I talk fast.  I write fast.  I make a lot of careless errors.  I’ve never taken the full amount of time to finish a test, ever (sitting for the final hour of a three-hour O Level exam: super stressful) – I left my GMAT 40% of the way through the allotted time (perhaps this was an early hint at how not-very-inspiring I found the content … hmm).  I find typos in this blog all the time, and have never received a school report that didn’t refer to my needing to check my work better.

2. My mother, my daughter, and I all have the same middle name.  It was my mother’s family name, and I hold it dear.

3. I go through phases where I listen to the same song over and over again.  Particularly in the car, which is actually the only time (other than when I run) that I listen to music.  Right now, they are: One (Bono/Mary J Blige version) and Kite (U2).

4. I am utterly, wildly obsessed with Anne Lamott right now (ok fine this is something you ALL know about me)

5. I love throwing things away.  I get really into it, to the point that I threw away our tax returns one year.  Not popular, that mistake.

6. For about three days as a child I wanted to be a Marine.  Then in college I decided I wanted to be on the Supreme Court.  One hitch: I didn’t really want to go to law school.  My father, unflaggingly supportive of any of my crazy-ass schemes, responded to that idea with, “well, Linds, that is going to be a tough road.”

7. I am stationery obsessed.  My mother was devout in her commitment to teach us to write thank you notes, and to this day I write them for everything.  As a child I always had all of my thank yous finished by bedtime on Christmas Day.  My children now write their own (well, Whit scrawls his name on the back of the card that I write).

8. I would much rather be cold than hot.  I hate being too hot.  I am such a wimp I don’t think I can live without a/c ever again.

9. In college I was assigned to the furthest-flung residential college, with a roommate named Lasagna.  We did not have a ton in common.  Sophomore year, my three roommates and I drew the very last room draw and wound up in rooms so small we had to take out all four desks to un-bunk the beds.  Junior year, I was the very last person off of the single room waiting list, and ended up in a converted broom closet (again, no desk.  not even a chair).  Senior year, the three people I drew with and I were at the very top of the entire school’s room draw.  #1.  Amazing karma.

10. I have to have a fan blowing on me while I sleep.  And I can’t sleep with anyone touching me.  Ever.

Snow falling, sticks rising, in a new year

I don’t like New Year’s. I never have. It’s not for the same reasons that most people complain about – the pressure to have a good time, the overwrought celebrations, etc. For me it’s the same reason that I dislike birthdays: this day marks the passage of time in an unavoidable way. I generally go to bed before midnight and try not to think about moving from one year to another. The anxious feeling of being balanced on a fulcrum haunts the days before New Year’s for me, and in the same way that I feel a hundred pounds lighter the day after my birthday, dissipates immediately after it.

Despite this anxiety, I love the time between Christmas and New Year’s. The week hangs like a slack hammock between the two holidays. The days feel removed from reality, and in the last few years they have been brilliantly lovely for that. A respite from regular life, some time to breathe, think, sleep, wonder. I haven’t come to any meaningful conclusions, or made any decisions, but the week held some joy, some space, and that is a gift.

I don’t make resolutions. Maybe this is all part of my dislike of what feels like an obnoxiously loud transition to another year, a maudlin and inescapable reminder of another year gone. Maybe it is a lack of commitment to self-betterment. I don’t know. Whatever the reason, I don’t have resolutions to share.

I told a friend a story recently that comes to mind often when I think of the way things bubble up in my mind. When my sister and I were little, we often visited my dad’s parents on Long Island. They lived near the beach, which had a long pier that extended into the water. At the end of the pier floated a wooden dock. Hilary and I, along with other kids, used to play a game with our popsicle sticks. After we had sucked all of the sweet ice off of the sticks, leaving only the stained wood to remember what flavor we had had, we headed to the dock. One of us, wooden stick clasped in his or her hand, would dive as deep as we could. The other children would stand lined up along the edge of the dock. The first person to notice the stick rising from the deep water would dive in and grab it, and thus win the round.

This is how I often think of thoughts and truths coming to my mind: slowly, bobbing irregularly, swayed by invisible currents. Sometimes I think I see the paleness of the stick deep in the murky darkness, and it’s not really there; other times I am surprised by its sudden, obvious appearance and can’t believe I didn’t see it on its way up. Either way, there are things percolating in the ocean of my head. Not resolutions, not answers, but truths. Unavoidable feelings. Perhaps it is my spirit, turning over in its sleep, waking slightly only to fall back into slumber. Whatever it is, there is something under my breastbone, something in my head, making itself known.

I look forward to welcoming these truths in 2010. To making the space to feel and know them. To learning of how to trust them. For now, I sit and watch the snow outside the window, falling softly, like grace. Rendering the world new. White, and quiet, and peaceful. And, for now, it is enough.

Rusty bent old tools

It’s funny: I always imagined when I was a kid that adults had some kind of inner toolbox full of shiny tools: the saw of discernment, the hammer of wisdom, the sandpaper of patience.  But then when I grew up I found that life handed you these rusty bent old tools – friendships, prayer, conscience, honesty – and said, Do the best you can with these, they will have to do.  And mostly, against all odds, they’re enough.

-Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies