I kid all the time that I am just waiting to hear of someone teaching Yoga and Beer Pong. It’s funny, but also…likely. Perhaps, I should go trademark that right now.
A downside of yoga’s enormous popularity in the U.S. combined with the swell of yoga studios is that you have people who are really good at business, but lack a depth of knowledge and experience in yoga, opening studios and then offering yoga teacher trainings as a way to stay afloat financially. Buyer, beware!
I am a banshee this morning.
Banshees keened to announce a death. Their stories come from old Ireland. They were the first ones to know that a death happened or was about to happen. The wailing, the keening, might have been the first knowledge that a family had of a beloved’s death.
My keening comes from an old place inside of me; the ancient part of me. I’m not announcing a death. It already happened. It happened almost three months ago. My friends would laugh and say that it is typical of my lateness in all things. But, today, finally, his death is being acknowledge in the most raw way. I’m not trembling, I’m not sobbing. I am keening. Loud, long, and ancient.
I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Diamond Reynolds. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about her daughter.
I’ve been thinking about her courage, her sanity in the face of insanity, her freak out, her voice, her terror, her daughter saying, “I’m right here.”
I think about what I would have done. I imagine myself being a screaming lunatic. How could I not be?
In March of this year, I made a somewhat last-minute decision to travel to Montreal and study with Kam Thye Chow again. It seems that many of my decisions surrounding my 12-year study of TYM have been last-minute, but they always seem to turn out well. It's a little more difficult to be spontaneous while raising a child and running a business than it was without these beloved chains (and, really, last-minute these days is anything with less than a month's notice), but fates aligned and it worked out. Kam is teaching in Canada, the Bahamas, Austria, and Thailand this year. If I wanted to catch him, I knew Montreal was my chance.
I’m nearing the 15-year marker for teaching yoga, and for almost ten of those years I’ve lived right here in our good ol’ cowtown of Columbus, Ohio. As I near that 10-year anniversary, I am thrilled to look around me at the yoga community in this area and see it thriving. From new teachers to experienced ones, Cbus has so very much to offer those wanting to learn. While it may be wonderful to take a vacation to Bali or Greece or even California to study yoga, the quality of teaching here in Columbus is as good as any I’ve seen nationally or internationally. Here are my tips for finding the right yoga teacher for you.
I expected 20 more years.
As my mom’s death approached, I thought and thought about this moment and what I could say to all of you, people who have loved Diana, been touched by her presence in your life. She was your friend, your mentor, your aunt, your grandmother, your sister, your wife. What can I possibly say that you don’t already know or haven’t already experienced with her? She was bold and intelligent. She was fair and kind and beautiful. She was an extrovert who loved other people and believed in them whole heartedly. Then, I realized that I can tell you what it is like to be her daughter. There is only one other person that can tell you what it was like to have her as a mother; but, if you know my family at all, you know that you’d be hard-pressed to find two people that come from the same genetic stock and are more different than my brother and I. And in any case, he is a son, not a daughter.
It’s 2015 and I’ve never written a blog. A quick internet search reveals that weblogs began somewhere between 1994 and 1997. So, at the most modest estimate, I’ve had 18 years to jump on this train as it’s been zooming by me. In other words, my first blog would be graduating from high school this year had I birthed her at the conceptual period of blogging.
Speaking of birth, periods, and conception, I’ve decided that the best place to start a blog is with a mother. All mothers in particular and my mother in specific. Above is a photo that we took a few days ago.
My mother is dying. That’s an oxygen tube that is running around her ears and entering her nose. Diana, my mom, was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer about a year & a half ago. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epithelioid_hemangioendothelioma)
