For my 40th birthday, my husband bought me a set of Goddess Guidance Oracle Cards. Now, I’m not a straightforward believer* in tarot or anything like that, and he didn’t buy them for that purpose. He thought I would like the beautiful images on the cards (he was right!)and that the information about the goddesses would be useful for me in my storytelling – as sort of a jumping off point.

I have looked at them from time to time and enjoyed the information presented, but a couple of weeks ago I was looking for a ritual to start my day and decided that I would like to start with some yogic breathing and an intention. Because I can be a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to these things, I decided to take the intention setting a little out of my hands. I decided I would follow the instructions to attune the deck, and then, as per one suggested use, I would shuffle the cards each morning and ask ‘What do I need to know today?’ before selecting a card that seems to jump out at me in some way.

The answers have been interesting so far and I have been using the card of the day as a kind of touchstone. When I have a decision to make or when I feel a bit of confusion, or whatever, I think about the card’s message and use that information in my decision. On my first day of yoga, my card was Hathor – and her message was receptivity – so when I got on the mat, I used that to guide myself through my poses.

Today, I was struggling a bit. Last night at Taekwon-do, I found out that the belt test for the group had been delayed a week. Unfortunately, I have an unbreakable commitment that next week and as a result I won’t be able to test with my class.** This sat heavily with me. I have been testing with this group since we started, and I wanted to be there in the metaphorical trenches as we went through this test together. I wanted to be celebratory when we were done. I wanted to be there for that experience. I feel like I am missing out and that has made the idea of the test a little less exciting and a little more nerve-wracking. I’m grateful for the chance to test at a different time (see **) and I respect why the change had to take place, but it’s a little sad to be outside of that experience.

So, I had a heavy heart this morning as I sat down for my ritual. I took a deep breath and sat in the patch of sunshine on my bed and started shuffling the cards until one seemed ‘right.’

Here’s what I got:

Seems damned appropriate to me.

* I’m not being dismissive here, not at all. I believe there is a lot of energy in the universe that we can’t process yet and that many now ‘woo-woo’ things will become more accessible and better understood as time goes on. I think tarot readings and the like can tap in to some of that energy, but I don’t want to get into whether an individual practitioner is doing something valid or not. Decide for yourself and spend your money carefully.

**It’s okay, my instructors are graciously letting me and The Boy test on the original date with a group testing for a different belt (including The Man and TLG).

So, TLG, my 9 year old, has a loose tooth. It’s been loose for the better part of a month, but because the kid is part shark* his old tooth is jammed up against the new one and it won’t come out yet. It’s causing him a lot of grief because he can’t eat his beloved Golden Delicious apples, and, it aches a fair bit overall.
I feel really bad for him, and I spent a while yesterday convincing him to let me try to pull it out. Now, for adults, enduring short term pain for the long term gain in that context (I’ll be able to eat again? Okay, drag that tooth out.)is a no-brainer. We’d hardly have to think about it. But when you’re nine, those few extra seconds of pain are a huge big deal. He doesn’t have the experience to imagine the time beyond when it hurts, it hardly seems real to him.
I was puzzling over that for a while yesterday, trying to think of ways to explain it to him, to use examples from times in the past where the trade-off was worth it. I was mostly stuck though because if memories of our own pain can be described as blurry at best, then memories of someone else’s are practically obliterated.** Eventually something got through, and he gathered up his courage and let me try.

The damn tooth is seriously wedged in. It caused him a lot of pain for me to pull on the tooth and there as no gain. The plan backfired.

He’s still struggling with his tooth this morning, and I’ve been giving the whole thing a lot of thought.

Sure, most adults would trade the small pain for the large gain in that context, and we’d know to keep trying after the first experiment didn’t work. But how about in other contexts? How many other things do we try, only to stop when things get a bit painful, a bit difficult? How good are we at translating our successes in one area to motivation for another? How much discomfort are we willing to endure to accomplish something we really want?

A lot of the time, I think we give up after that first bit of discomfort, taking it as a sign that we weren’t meant to do the task at hand. I wonder how much we’d gain if we thought of more situations like that loose tooth – requiring a spark of intense discomfort in order to gain improvement?

I figure anything has to be better than the sort of limbo you are in when the metaphorical tooth is giving you grief and you try to live with that low level, constant discomfort rather than taking a risk that might make things a lot better. I think, from now on, I’m going to ask myself ‘Is this something I should live with, or is this a tooth that needs to be yanked out?’

Then I’ll think of TLG, gather up my courage and pull.

I’ve been re-reading Kara Leah Grant’s ‘40 Days of Yoga’ . I bought and read it last year, and while it was thought provoking and very interesting it wasn’t the right time for me to put it into practice.*

Last week, I started re-reading it. It’s really profound while being profoundly simple. I’m not even finished reading and I decided that it was time to take action. Time to start my regular home practice.**

The thing that tipped the balance for me, timing-wise, was when she said that a time period of 40 days has a spiritual element to it, as well as being a length of time you can wrap your mind around. I can easily wrap my mind around 40 days AND Lent – that infamous 40 day event- starts today.

Religion is no longer a part of my life, but some of the cultural aspects remain in my consciousness. Doing something different, making a sacrifice or taking up a new practice during Lent is one of them. I don’t DO it every year, but I think about it every year and if a meaningful idea arises, I follow through.

A home yoga practice feels particularly meaningful for me this year, so I started today.

I usually like to follow a yoga video or sequence designed by someone else*** but in her book, Ms. Grant explains how to put parameters on your practice so you can kind of go with what your body needs. I would normally be very nervous about that whole idea – How do I know what I’ll need? How will I be sure I do the ‘right’ thing? – but this time the appeal of the parameter idea won out over my nervousness (And her writing about yoga is so friendly that it helped create a space for me to be a bit experimental).

So, at 11:20, I lit a candle and then got on my mat for 20mins. I knew that I would start with an intention, do some child’s pose and cat/cow to ease into the practice, and that I would end with some Savasana/meditation. I didn’t know the middle. This is huge for me, to not know the middle and to start anyway.

It was the most enjoyable yoga I have ever done. I was focused and tuned in. My body told me where it wanted to go next and I moved it that way. It felt fantastic. I was expecting some mental pushback about whether the poses were ‘effective’ or not and whether I was doing them in the ‘right’ order but I got none of that. I just got directions about where to go next until suddenly I had no more directions and I realized it must be time for Savasana.

It was weird and it was marvellous, and I kind of wanted to start another session right away.

I have a good feeling about this practice.

*2013 was much more of a think year than a do year for me.

**I do yoga in bits and pieces all the time, but this is a focused, purposeful practice intended to put you in touch with your deeper self.

***Taking yoga teacher training so I can design my own is part of my long term plan

Sometimes I freak myself out with my writing.

I don’t mean that I am so good that I can hardly believe it. I think I am a pretty decent writer, and it comes fairly easily to me – at least the early stages do – but I know I have lots of room to improve and I know that an editor will make me vastly better.

What I mean is that sometimes I come up with an idea or a character that totally unnerves me. And sometimes they resonate so hard that I wonder if I should consider bringing them up with a psychologist.

Today was one of those days. I was just doing a writing exercise* and suddenly my character was talking about the difficulty of dealing with the past – how you can’t engage with it, you just have to bury it, but sometimes it won’t stay buried.

The image I chose was fairly ridiculous – a pool noodle, and the way you can’t keep one under water. Yet, somehow the image became more and more ominous as I wrote. My character went on to try and metaphorically bury the memory in the dirt and suddenly this pool noodle, in my mental image, was that black-green mold colour. Sitting on top of the ground, slimy and cold, as the character frantically scraped at the dirt to create a hole big enough to put it in. She feels like her efforts are in vain though, because there is going to be a way for that slimy memory to surface again.

Putting myself in the character’s shoes gave me chills. It felt horrible to think of trying to escape that memory and that’s the point where my empathy for my character creeps me out.

Why can I conjure up that feeling? What do I know about trying to suppress a horrible memory?

My imagination just goes wild. Do I know how to suppress a memory? Have I done it already and now I am going to conjure it up by writing about this character’s desperation?

Obviously, that’s foolishness, but my body doesn’t know that. My body travels more slowly than my brain does, and when my body feels the dread and anxiety of the character – even when my brain knows better – it’s damn hard to shake. I have to consciously stop and move around, and sometimes literally shake it off.

I can’t decide whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. But it’s definitely a thing.

* I know some people don’t like writing exercises, they consider them a waste of time, but I like them as warm-ups and to me they feel the same as when I practice my patterns for Taekwon-do – it’s a time to work out some kinks, to get my muscles ready for the task ahead and to really understand the process I am trying to use for the bigger work. Writing muscles are different than physical muscles, obviously, but the comparison works for me. The more writing exercises I do, the more easily other writing comes to me.