This is my last post with Beginner's Mind.

Change has always both scared the hell out of me and thrilled me right down to the mula bandha, to put it politely.

But with age, with experience, and I swear with yoga practice, I'm beginning to love the feeling that comes with letting go and walking through the next door.

My guess is that saying thank you is one of the keys to good transitions.

So.

Thanks, first, to Yogajournal.com and all of the lovely editors who offered me a chance to have this 18-month conversation with you. As readers, we have no idea how much work goes into such a massive and excellent website. To create and nurture such a thing, and to do it with good hearts, humor, and professionalism is off-the-mat yoga at its best.

Thanks, next, to yoga for being such a fabulous topic of conversation, not to mention a superb window through which to explore ourselves and our place in this mysterious world.

Thanks, most importantly, to you. Many, many of you have become friends. Many of you might as well have written these posts, given all the compelling and thoughtful notes you sent this way. On occasion, some of you objected to what I wrote. Thanks for caring enough to do so. All of you have been excellent teachers.

It's been a pleasure.

(And it's not like I'm dead. You can still reach me at kristin@kristinshepherd.ca or at Dr.Kristin Shepherd on Facebook. Hope you do.)

Thanks again for the conversation. 

Lots of love and joy,

kristin

Dr. Kristin Shepherd is a chiropractor, actor, and speaker (About All Things Wonderful) in North Bay, Ontario.  Join her on the web, on Facebook, on Twitter, and on iTunes.

Posted by Kristin Shepherd at 8:53 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Funny, the more yoga I do, the less I have to say about it. More accurately, what comes out of my mouth and my head/heart gets simpler as my practice matures.

I am less concerned than ever about where I place my mat in class, what I'm wearing, whether or not I'll ever do a handstand without a wall (OK, I still dream about this one), and whether home practice is better than class. I have cared deeply about every one of these, but they're receding in the rear view mirror, if you know what I mean.

What I do contemplate now, on and off the mat, are things like this:

Open is better than closed. Open body, open mind, open heart. Not always easier, but always preferable.

Discomfort goes away when I don't meet it with resistance. (Tight hips are one thing. "Oh my god, these hips are killing me, why won't they let go, I'll never be able to do a stinking King Pigeon" is resistance.)

My body knows what it wants. This is more important than any outside advice.

Pushing doesn't work. Google Sisyphus.

Accepting what is grants me immediate freedom. All of a sudden my head is 90 percent quieter.

Judging me or anyone else is a colossal misuse of energy and erodes everything I love about myself and my life.

Courage and trust are the best companions ever. Feed them well.

Joy makes me healthy.

And as always, love wins.

Is it getting simpler for you? Or more complex? I'd love to hear.

Thanks to yoga for keeping it simple. Thanks very much to you for the conversation,

kristin

Dr. Kristin Shepherd is a chiropractor, actor, and speaker (About All Things Wonderful) in North Bay, Ontario.  Join her on the web, on Facebook, on Twitter, and on iTunes.

Posted by Kristin Shepherd at 9:46 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Earlier this week a friend called and mentioned she'd convinced a group of coworkers to do an introductory yoga series. She offered to attend the classes with them, only to discover that, "there's no other way to say this, the teacher is really b*&^%y! I have to help them recover after each class!"

Another friend goes to a studio where the teachers tell you where you can and cannot place your mat according to your skill level. No kidding.

This morning I arrived early for a teaching gig and walked in on 80 women, mostly seniors, doing yoga. Sun Salutations adapted for seniors, using chairs. The entire room was laughing. I heard fart jokes. The overwhelming impression was one of relaxed happiness and no shortage of love.

It makes me realize how short life is and how important culture is to me.

I admire the teachers who amaze us with technique, strength, and flexibility. No question, I'm inspired by that.

I appreciate charisma, organizational skills, the occasional push, humor, and broad knowledge.

But I don't go back if it doesn't feel warm. I want enough love and openness in the room that I can feel good in there whether or not I feel great about myself, my body, or my day. I want so much warmth in the room that it reminds me that I have a heart and that my heart is being taken care of. (Not asking for much!)

The warm fuzzy thing isn't for everyone, though.

What do you need in the room? Intelligence? Quiet? Edge? Progress? Community? I'd love to hear. What quality is most important to you in a class?

Thanks to yoga for being so varied that we can all find our place. Thanks to the beautiful women doing Sun Salutations today.

Thanks to you for the conversation,

kristin

Dr. Kristin Shepherd is a chiropractor, actor, and speaker (About All Things Wonderful) in North Bay, Ontario.  Join her on the web, on Facebook, on Twitter, and on iTunes.

Posted by Kristin Shepherd at 8:55 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

We can talk for days about what the central point of meditation is. It's possible that it's different for each of us.

For me, there's no question. It's a lifelong discovery process of looking more and more deeply into who I am, what is truth, and what remains when I let go of everything. It's the digging of that well, and the absolute, flat-out joy that results from the digging.

The rest are just happy side effects.

During a daily practice, we train our focus. If we didn't, I'd spend my 30-60  minutes thinking of better ways to stop my dog from eating disgusting, rotten food off the street, or wondering what I'm going to do with the rest of my life, or being frustrated that I still can't do a headstand in the middle of the room. You know, really important stuff.

Training my focus is like using my camera.

My camera comes almost everywhere with me. It just feels better than cursing myself for not bringing it, which is what happens every time I leave it at home.

Why do I take it everywhere? Because beautiful, surprising things show up every place I go.

Here's the thing, though. I point the camera to the left, and all I see is morning traffic. I point it to the right and zoom in, and I see a gorgeous pairing of chairs, one for a kid, one for an adult, which makes my eyes well up, thinking of love and parenting and the wise words that come from kids' mouths.

Untrained focus is like a camera that just swings all over the place. No sense of purpose, no sense of direction, at the whim of whatever honks loudest in your life. Lousy pictures. Trained focus is a camera that looks where you choose to look.

Beyond photography, trained focus means that I can either see the 3,000 random realities in front of my face: dog woofing cigarette butts for all I know, my head hurting a bit, my inadequate headstand, loud traffic. Or I can decide to focus on the truths I find beautiful: dog is alive and well, I am extraordinarily healthy overall, I can do headstands and handstands against a wall and I learn more every day, and traffic means that people are going places, the world is humming, all is well.

Focus means that I fill my head and my energy with the thoughts that do me good.

Again, this is a side effect of meditation for me, but with side effects this good, isn't it worth a few minutes of your morning?

Thanks to yoga for training more than our bodies.

Thanks to you for the conversation,

kristin

Dr. Kristin Shepherd is a chiropractor, actor, and speaker (About All Things Wonderful) in North Bay, Ontario.  Join her on the web, on Facebook, on Twitter, and on iTunes.  

Posted by Kristin Shepherd at 9:14 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

We talked last time about meditation being like digging a well, except that the digging is more like successive letting go, and with each letting go, we sink a little deeper until we reach the wholeness of who we are, that joy place, that place where there are no problems, there are no questions to answer. If you've been there, you know what I mean. It's who we are.

It is not, however, where most of us spend our days. Instead, we spend some part of the day with deadlines (what a horrifying word!), timelines, family-lines, walk-the-dog-lines, not to mention all the bogus insecurities and the bogus insecurity camouflages (clothes, hair, makeup, cars, houses, titles ...) that are also not who we are. 

So the benefit of spending morning time with the greater part of me, the most whole and most holy place, is this:

I know myself to be huge and loving and safe no matter what, so open and huge that the world and its vicissitudes float right through me. When I open my eyes after a dose of this, the life stuff that used to affect me--the money worries, the body worries, the driving part of achievement, the heaps of time I spend in the future and past--all of that is stripped naked and looks a bit more ridiculous than it did before I closed my eyes. 

This change of perspective from surface to roots, to core truth, makes me less reactive, more patient, braver, and more useful in the world.

That's gold for me.

Is this your experience? Does it sound worth sitting for a few minutes each morning? (My not-so-secret goal is to talk about how delicious this is until you fall in love with it too.)

Thanks to yoga for not taking my surface definition of reality too seriously.

Thanks to you for the conversation,

kristin

Dr. Kristin Shepherd is a chiropractor, actor, and speaker (About All Things Wonderful) in North Bay, Ontario.  Join her on the web, on Facebook, on Twitter, and on iTunes.

Posted by Kristin Shepherd at 8:44 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

It's like digging a well every morning. I breathe my way down through layers of restlessness, distracted focus, speedy thinking and 50 other kinds of discomfort. Sometimes this takes two minutes. Sometimes the entire practice is the digging, although the digging is more like continued letting go.

On the other end of this letting go is a huge opening which I sort of fall into (this may be different for each of us) as though I have traveled through a wormhole to some other place.

The great joke is that by the time I arrive there, I understand--no, I know--that I am actually here, that I have arrived back home. That, in fact, I never left, but was a bit distracted by my mind waving its frantic hands in front of my eyes.

The beauty of this is that every morning, or most mornings, I spend time in the hugeness of what I really am, or Love, Truth, Heaven, Joy, Grace, Silence, Infinite, Whole. Impossible to put in words, but I keep trying for fear that leaving a blank page for you won't do the trick. Perhaps it's enough to say that these words point to what we are underneath without wrapping it up too tightly.

Again this sounds woo-woo, but it isn't. It is the palpable reality of meditation.

And what if this isn't your experience? If you haven't experienced the huge bliss place?

Then you're digging. Have a little faith, just for the short while it takes to meet your resistance on the way home. Meeting our resistance and being willing to sit with it rather than run from it is the trip of self-discovery, and we might as well enjoy the trip.

Has this been your experience? Are you digging?

Thanks to yoga for bringing us home over and over and over. Thanks to you for the conversation,

kristin

Dr. Kristin Shepherd is a chiropractor, actor, and speaker (About All Things Wonderful) in North Bay, Ontario.  Join her on the web, on Facebook, on Twitter, and on iTunes.

Posted by Kristin Shepherd at 8:35 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

"You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."

This is Steve Jobs, of course, in his now-famous 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University.

During meditation, if we're fortunate, we experience a kind of life-altering nakedness that permanently affects our perspective about what we are and what we are not.

What it feels like to me is the dissolving of my body. By the end of morning practice, my understanding is that I'm a body of energy that happens to be passing through this less significant physical body.

It's a feeling that stays through the day. On a good day, I see everyone around me as the same kind of energy, and we feel like family. 

One of the best consequences of this shift in perspective is that it makes me brave. When I know myself to be light passing through this day, I lose my fear of failure (light can't fail), of humiliation, and of rejection. I lose my small-minded need for security.

I follow my heart more easily.

I don't know whether Steve Jobs meditated. This is important, because meditation itself is not the point, any more than my physical practice of yoga is the point.

Freedom is the point. Waking up and discovering who we are is the point. Recognizing that we're part of all that is, is the point. Living bravely from that perspective is the point.

It just happens that meditation and practice on the mat are excellent signposts saying, "Hey! You beautiful smacking whack of radiant light, you! Look this way! Here you are!"

I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Thanks to Steve Jobs for the reminder that we are light passing through. Thanks to yoga for exactly the same thing.

Thanks to you, always, for the conversation,

kristin

Dr. Kristin Shepherd is a chiropractor, actor, and speaker (About All Things Wonderful) in North Bay, Ontario.  Join her on the web, on Facebook, on Twitter, and on iTunes.

Posted by Kristin Shepherd at 9:06 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

"If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other."

This quote is from Mother Teresa, apparently. I'm wary when I read things attributed to her. I often wonder whether it's really Bob at the liquor store, who, in an inspired but insecure moment, came up with something really beautiful that he wanted to share. Bob doesn't trust himself, at the deepest level, to be unique or worthy, to have quote-spreading clout, so he puts MT's name on the idea, hoping others will now enjoy it.

Bob might love meditating.

Why? Because with every sitting (or standing or lolling, whatever your method is), we sink through layers and layers of our "not enough"s: I'm not smart enough, adventurous enough, wealthy enough, young or old enough, creative enough, altruistic enough, quote-worthy enough, and on and on.

It's not as though we look these things in the face as we meditate, it's more that they soften and eventually slough off with practice. Over time we learn who we are not, and let that go.

At the same time, we sink gradually into what we are: compassion, love, peace, hugeness, trust in what is, connectedness with everything.

These sound like woo-woo lightweight absurdities. They aren't. They are the palpable realities that show up when I sit still long enough to get beneath the chatter-brain.

And when I get down there, one of the things that becomes evident is that capital-L-Love is what I'm made of, what every cell is packed to bursting with, and when I open my eyes, everyone and everything I see is made of the same stuff. The world, including the parts of it I was not thrilled with before, becomes almost unbearably beautiful. At that point I understand myself to be enormously worthy and "belonging to each other" in the most intimate way imaginable. 

In this context of Love (or whatever you call it when you get inside), two seemingly opposite things show up. The need to be unique or special disappears. The simplicity of who I am is enough. At the same time, Love moving through me, or me meeting the world with Love, matters more than ever.

That's what I want to tell Bob at the liquor store, or the grocery clerk who won't meet my eyes, or my friend who feels awkward about teaching yoga for the first time. We're gems, all of us.

Is this your experience with meditation?

Thanks to Mother Theresa or to Bob, both of whom are worthy and indispensable. Thanks to yoga for being all about union of body, mind, and spirit.

Thanks, always, to you for the conversation,

kristin

Dr. Kristin Shepherd is a chiropractor, actor, and speaker (About All Things Wonderful) in North Bay, Ontario.  Join her on the web, on Facebook, on Twitter, and on iTunes.

Posted by Kristin Shepherd at 7:01 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)