Big Surf

4 AM. I look at the clock and think to myself that this must be my new bewitching hour as I've been waking consistently around this time for the past week. And I know why...I have many things happening, seemingly all of them at once. But in reality, it's not all at once, it just feels that way.

As I mentioned in a previous blog, our house is in escrow and we're buying a condo. We are undergoing a massive downsizing, from 3200 SF to 1400 SF.  We have items for sale and have been clearing, sorting, packing, donating, taping boxes together, trying to figure out what will work in the new place. Fortunately, we have less stuff than we had three years ago when I stepped onto the path of simple living and decluttering.  Nonetheless, at the moment it feels like a superficial pass over a bigger challenge. We've lived in this house for 18-years and I've come to realize that my "storage and saving" methods are similar to what was modeled by my Mother (who literally didn't throw anything away). Although we're definitely not at that level of keeping things, we have drawers and boxes that haven't been opened or used for quite some time. I've also realized that with technology certain things like CDs, hanging files and videotapes are now obsolete space hogs.

As we sort through our personal piles, we also decided to hold a "pre-loved" sale at the yoga studio since we're not allowed to have a traditional garage sale due to our HOA rules. This translates into an added layer of hauling and pricing to prolong the life of many items, avoiding the dreaded landfill option. All of this is taking place in the open spaces of my week, which just narrowed as we launched into the next 200-Hour Yoga Teacher Training and Mentorship programs. 

Just to be transparent...I'm not complaining. I'm actually really excited about this purging transition. We set the intention a while back to begin to travel more lightly in the world, putting our house on the market and beginning the process of letting go of material objects. These are things we've chosen and now it's coming into manifestation, it just seems as though time is a valuable commodity and we're under the clock with a deadline. 

Then life happens during all of these best-laid plans.

Just before the first session of Module One of the YTT, my Mom got ill and ended up in the emergency room six-plus hours.  Thankfully, my husband was the support crew and I joined them at the ER after training finished for the evening. Again, thankfully a pesky urinary tract infection was the culprit and Mom was released to go home. We all know the saying, "the straw that broke the camel's back" which isn't "the brick that broke the camel's back", meaning it may just be the addition of something that seems relatively minor to knock you off your surfboard.

We all have moments of great intensity and pressure in our lives, and it may seem that the smallest of things added to that pressure pushes us to a tipping point. What our yoga practice teaches us, is that all of this is impermanent and transitory. Our personal practice becomes the touchstone for steadiness, no matter how big the waves pounding at our feet. For me, it's been my daily meditation practice, the non-negotiable in my life. And this week in class we've been practicing five steps to help us navigate high-intensity times:

Breath, Relax, Feel, Watch and Allow. Take a deep breath and relax any tension in the body. Feel the sensations in your body from moment to moment. Watch your reaction to the situation at hand without judgment and allow it to be what it is, without the temptation to fix, change, or run away from the present moment.

My thought for the week is about learning how to surf the unpredictable waves of life.  It's as though I've been standing in the surf being pounded by multiple and seemingly endless waves.  At times they seem to last forever, wave after wave.  But as I surrender to the process, the waves still come but get further apart and less intense.  They are still coming, most notably in the quiet hours of the early morning or when I awake in the middle of the night. I then tap into my practice of conscious breathing trying to coax myself into relaxation and a return to sleep.

Breath and relax...it works in any situation!