Tag: Proverbs

artist residency

When you are where you’re not quite there.

by ErinLeave a Comment on When you are where you’re not quite there.

I shared on my IG a couple months ago a stream of consciousness doodle about how growth isn’t about arrival but about progression and how the fragmentation you may see or recognize in yourself is actually the art of being whole.

The past two weeks have involved a high level of change for me. My basement study, adorned by a water heater and directly below one of the kids’ bathrooms (making for excellent water sound effects in meditation recordings, let me tell ya) evolved to a study in a neighborhood boutique yoga studio, OM Old Orchard.

With an exposed brick wall and space for two chairs, a microphone and a yoga mat, I moved in on Friday, starting a new chapter of assuming the growth / arrival / progress combo. Of being there and not yet here.

I think it is important to remember the balance of alignment. The sanskrit term “samatva” is about an even state of the mind regardless of what is going on around you – it’s not about indifference, but about stability. I have found myself very aware of this, this past week.

Part of the reason is because – like most people – the courage to take creative freedoms & initiatives rarely comes without at least one darkish night of the soul where you feel the failure of the work you were enthusiastically calling your mom about the day before. If not that, you wonder who are you to do this work – you see other people with similar work and think they know more, they have already done and given the world what you were thinking about. You could stop.

And so evenness / stability of the mind in this sense requires the self control to recognize this is a pattern of the mind, this is a survival (risk averse) technique of the mind and to take all of the energy relative to being forlorn or lost and assume it right back into the root belief that powers the inspired thought. And to have an evenness / stability of the mind in such case also requires one believe in their work regardless of what transpires. The notion that you cannot be wrong unless you’re trying to be right comes to play here. Be authentic.

Be authentic.

Be authentic.

So – one of the deals I am working out right now is how to take some of my innovative ideas for how to offer restorative yoga to people and test them out in OM Old Orchard / from my new study. Already, we have hit brakes and gas / gas and brakes and I could feel a sense of need for control rise up. The need to explain. The need to convince. The need to protect. The need to establish.

Sattva. Evenness of the mind. I think it is so easy to be in something new and recognize that it is not what you thought without really crediting the fact that it needs time to grow. How many times I have seen folks in the yoga world give up on an idea or a model because it didn’t seem successful right away, when the seed was definitely in fertile soil, when the listening was nourishing iterative change & positive growth.

I recognized the need for control and threaded it into the integrity behind the ideas. Remembered that the only control needed was self control. To be thoughtful about what I felt God has put on my life. To listen well. To iterate wisely. To suggest. To tend to. To direct, ultimately – and to offer.

“Commit to the Lord whatever you do, and your plans will be established” Proverbs 16:3 was a key for me this past week and will continue to be so… we only get like this one shot and being who we are, where we are and how we are. We only get one life with these stories, these parents, these people.

Using the body to notice our intuitive voice & align our actions and interactions with a motive we willingly surrender to be examined I think is the one thing I have learned that gives me peace of mind every single day. Every single freak out. Every single clutch of “will this make money”. I go back to the body.

Back to the breath.

Back to my yes. My no.

And proceed.

Till next time. Thanks for listening :)

PS: Enjoy these pictures from move in weekend. That is my dear friend Jan, who did not know she was coming to my new study but had serendipitously brought me a gift of a singing bowl & perfect fall leave & bundle of palo santo. One of the first projects is to bring the recording of Words that Rhyme to completion!! Praying for that because Lord knows I have been dilly dallying.

Words in Sentences

May Current. My Tide of Wondering.

by ErinLeave a Comment on May Current. My Tide of Wondering.

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Waiting for a flow waiting for a flow

(Three Days Later)

I wonder sometimes if I will always remember this season of my life. Mugs of coffee, walking Ranger in my North Webster neighborhood where there is both litter and progress on the streets, family and friends nearby.

I wonder if the feeling I have in my heart when I contemplate where I go to church, feel gratitude to who helps and prays for my family and scan my life for new paths I have to help and pray for others will stay or if the feeling (it feels like newness and curiosity mixed with patience and acknowledgement) will evolve into maybe some wise old woman type heart.

You know – like the kind of woman who knows how to cut and trim the herbs just right and what kind of Psalm to sing to her roses to keep them from getting brittle.

Is that a stretch?

I wonder, of all the friends in my active circle, who is the one with the next thing to teach me.

I wonder, of all the people I haven’t met yet but will meet in the future, who will validate the choices I am making now. In my near 37 years, there is always the validating stranger who comes in and says “yeah – that’s great – that’s like what they do in <name region of the world> to <name thing that I was also trying to get to>” and then they usually add something “you should read” or “you might like” or offer a deeper reason for said thing they are validating which helps me understand how a prayer was answered in my decision to do something.

The Pastor at AME Blackwell Church said “Don’t look for what you think the thing you asked God for looks like, look for the thing you asked God for – period.”

“Don’t look for what you think the thing you asked God for looks like, look for the thing you asked God for – period.”

Like the people that will come in and validate, there will be the storms that come in and expose me. My vulnerabilities, what is unhealthy about the things I do. I wonder when that next storm will be. And then I wonder and survey my life and see if there is any obvious place to reinforce, any obvious tool I need, any obvious gaps to close.

I wonder that about my emotional and spiritual life like I do about my house, my land, my motherhood.

I wonder how many times I will be afraid for the lives of my children and pray for a shield over them and how many times I will still – even after experiencing relief from this fear – I will be hit in the head with the practical wisdom of Proverbs and prayers of Psalms to remind me how much more power good has over evil. How my words matter. How my time matters. How the stories I tell my daughters matter. How the food I cook them matters. How the way I filter guilt and shame and speak in clear language matters. How my listening to them matters. How my hugs matter, my patience matters, my certainty and servant heart matter.

I saw the mint expanding today in its golden yellow pot (which I will likely have to move once it gets taller than the roses) and thought “I’m not going to move the pot yet”. This awareness of timing is something that has matured in my heart. The patience. The willingness to see how it goes but the proximity to be the right kind of proactive; there when the next step is ripe.

I offer all of this – a journal of today – in hopes and in prayer that we all recognize the seasons of our life, the way the day feels – and get some power from knowing it is all a part of the process.

XO, Erin