Here are the photos that prove we are not living a life of sloth and indolence. Everyday there are jobs that call to us. Creating garden beds has kept us well-occupied for months.
Daniel and I spent this lovely sunny afternoon working on our acreage. After cleaning up after the horses that we agist on our back three acres, I had a wheelbarrow-ful of manure – just the thing to top up the extended no-dig garden below the shed. […]
Over the last week I’ve been writing about the ways yoga teachers are expected to behave by their students or the general public. Paragons of virtue and purity, it would seem, is what is wanted, not adulterated weaklings.
In the spirit of coming clean, I’ve been revealing some of my frailities.
Here’s another way I can prove to you I’m human. I get grumpy when tired. Yoga teachers are not even supposed to get tired. To add crankiness to the bargain must certainly threaten the paragon’s credentials.
The problem is I get tired every day. Since my surgery Feb. […]
Yoga and coffee go together like your two interlocked hands. A good yoga class builds thirst and appetite for a good cafe latte, or some version of that delicious brew. Why is that? And, does it matter? The stimulant loosens people’s tongues and makes them want to stay around chatting for hours. It’s the stuff of community-building.
I started drinking coffee when I was 16 because I thought it would help wake me up for my early morning summer school classes. I’m embarrassed to say it was instant coffee, but what did I know of the world of coffee. […]
Did you know there is a past tense of the word forego and it is forwent? Just so you don’t think I’m being showy when I say, I forwent my regular yoga practice this morning. I substituted 18 minutes on the stationary bike and two hours of cleaning the yoga studio.
Once you’ve seen the 72 squares space I practice in, you’ll wonder how someone could spend so much time tarting it up. Well, the usual dusting and vacuuming was de rigeur, as well as shifting spiders and skinks to the garden. […]
Do you feel like you’re too much in your head sometimes, perhaps even most of the time. I have a great remedy. Make compost.
Take several wheelbarrow loads of grass clippings, throw in a couple of buckets of kitchen scraps, and mix liberally with shovelfuls of horse poo. Deposit the mixture in the compost bed, cover with a tarp and let “cook” for some time. […]
As of today, I’m announcing to the world I’m back on deck teaching – in the Yoga Shed at Mitchells Island.
Yesterday was exactly 3 months since my surgery, and I’m fit and well. Certainly beach walks, fresh air, green vistas, and daily yoga practice have gone a long way towards my feeling reconstituted. Life is good. […]
I’ve never been properly appreciative of growers, being basically a city girl for most of my life. Produce was always something that you bought at the grocery store. These days you get designer or heritage or organic produce and it tastes like the real deal. […]
It’s not often that someone beats me to the yoga room, but Mike did today. So lovely to have his deep appreciation and experience in yoga beaming into the Shed. He did some thoughtful backbends, and I did my arm and shoulder weights routine, followed by an abbreviated yoga practice. Mike exited and Heather entered.
All of us Shedders ended up at the Waterbird Cafe for our regular Saturday morning breakfast, with the SMH quiz to tease our brains.
The beach walk is a daily ritual, you must know by now. […]
What makes for heaven on earth for you? Reading the SMH at your favourite cafe early in the morning before the brunch crowd arrives? Sleeping in on Sunday morning – I mean all morning – with your darling? Seeing a five star movie that really deserves all of its rating? Maybe your kid gets his first paid work doing something he/she really likes? […]
What a treat! I was able to practice with the Simply Yoga teachers this morning. Sigh. I miss having that routine in my life.
Speaking of routine, I waived my regular yoga practice while staying at the Fallows. Good thing it was only a week long. No walks either, but plenty of drinking and dining at Sydney eating establishments. As a result I feel trendified and rather overfull. […]
Incense and oriental bells are time-honoured instruments to nudge us back into the present if our minds have gone elsewhere. Meditators know that if they don’t have a strong focus they will drift, probably often.
An even more powerful device for making us aware in the moment is our breath. In the practice of pranayama, we can listen to our breath, identify such nuances as tone, pace, and depth, and even locate it in various areas of our bodies. […]
Attending classes are a tremendous way to be introduced to yoga and to enjoy the comraderie of others. I was completely hooked on classes when I learned Iyengar yoga in the early 80’s. I can’t believe it now, but I used to do more than one class a day. I think the cost of a class was $8 then, and the price went down to $5 if you were enrolled in the six-month teachers’ training course. Come to think of it, all the classes were two hours long! I don’t know if I was passionate or just obsessed. […]
One of the most attractive communities I’ve been privileged to be part of is the Yoga Sangha.
I had no idea when I started on my yoga path that this community is a human worldwide web. Not long after I completed my 10 week beginners’ course in Spring City, Pennsylvania, I moved to California and looked for my next class. […]
A little while back, I wrote about two of my communities, my two women’s groups.
Community has been a continuous and important theme in my life. There’s an old movie called “Witness” that is set in an Amish community in America. I saw that movie 4 times and probably could see it again – no, not just for the youngish Harrison Ford – but because of the way the people portrayed worked together so well. There’s a scene of a barn-raising in the movie that made me cry every time I saw it. […]
As a newcomer to country living, I thought I should join in some community activities.
Last week I went along to “Windsong” a community choir that meets weekly in Wingham, a little town about 30 minutes from us.
Can I sing? Sort of. If my life depended on it.
I didn’t have an entirely happy experience last week. I had to concentrate so hard on looking at the sheet music for following the alto harmony that I’m not sure what I sounded like. […]
A blog is a discipline. I read somewhere that there are 184,000,000 blogs in the world. I would have thought there were even more. Most blogs die an early death, after just one month.
I’m pleased to say, I’ve been a blogger (please someone think of a better word) for four years. If success is rated in terms of readership, I’m probably still just muddling along, unlike Julie of “Julia and Julie”. […]