Confessions (the bad news and the good)
JPW Design Team
Forgive me, computer, for I have sinned. It has been 5 (4? 6?) days since my last blog. My goodness, where did the week go? Is it really already Saturday afternoon? What happened to Wednesday and Thursday? With the kids home on spring break, they simply slipped through my fingers.
Well, do you want the bad news or the good news first? Seeing that I consider myself an optimist, someone who tries to see the positive blessings in everything, I'll start with the less than positive.
The bad news is that I totally dropped the ball with yoga this week. I have been hard pressed to create the time to do yoga the last few days, and when I do, I don't get very far before that inner voice starts begging me to meditate. My energy has been lagging as I flow with the moon (no pun intended, lol), and it seemed like a good idea to meditate.
The problem with me, though, is that meditation does not equal meditation as it does for some people. At this point in the game of life, "meditation" is a big fat excuse to sit my lazy ass on the floor and let my thoughts and feelings drive me absolutely crazy.
Not exactly the point of meditating, right? Haha.
And in my inability to carve out my yoga time, my spirit has suffered. I didn't have a bad week, per se, but I could feel my inner strength waning. I have not liked how it feels at all. It just feels yucky. Gray. It makes me mopey.
The good news is, there is lots of good news. The heat finally arrived this week, so Mark-Daniel and I took the kids to the beach yesterday and now have the sunburns to match, haha. (I still cannot fathom the surreality of discussing the cons of match.com with two of my best girlfriends as well as my soon-to-be former spouse; it would definitely make a fascinating blog topic all on its own!) Then last night I saw Lisa Loeb perform at Yoshi's in Oakland. I really liked her a lot. She was 7 months pregnant, and it brought me right back to when I performed a concert of arias with Mark-Daniel in Wellsboro when I was 7-1/2 months pregnant with Nadia. Lisa is really personable and funny, and she makes me miss performing, so now I am manifesting a keyboard or piano so that I can let that part of my soul out on a more regular basis.
Today, I went to a local conference for the American Holistic Nurses Association at the Osher Center at UCSF. Can I tell you how great it was to go to a conference of nurses and do yoga not once, but twice?!?! We started off the conference doing laughing yoga (which, as you would expect, was really funny, especially thanks to the facilitator), then heard the keynote presentation (which I'll touch on in a sec), then had an organic lunch, and then got to participate in another yoga class taught by another nurse. Awesomeness. And then two more presentations, one on aromatherapy, and one on healing touch. It felt good to be with my tribe of nurses. I even got a new mentor in the process.
The keynote presentation was the best part of the conference. They discussed some of ways stress can affect aging at the cellular level, and how we can also prevent some of that aging. (And guess what can play a huge roll in this? Yoga, of course, from both a meditative standpoint as well as a movement perspective.) I felt so inspired! It got my brain going about all of the different ways we can show "scientifically" that complementary and alternative therapies really work, since that is usually the brick wall that we face. So much of this research is happening right in my backyard, and I am hungry to be part of it. I have always fantasized about working at UCSF and the Osher Center, even part-time. Are you listening, Universe?
What I most enjoyed about the conference was that it empowered me and took away what was left of that gray and mopey feeling I've been dealing with this week. I know all the pranayama we did in the yoga class helped with that, but there is also something powerful about being in a room of 40+ nurses who believe with all their passion that holistic, integrative care is the way of the future, and we are just the tip of the iceberg.
I'll confess, I plan on leading the way. :-)