Mean Mommy

Lately, Lucia has been saying, "you're the meanest Mommy in the world." At first it kind of smarted when she said that. Lately though, (like tonight when she chanted it naked from her bathtub while I, like a maidservant searched for the bedtime book she wanted) the words bounced off of me with barely a sting. After Lucia's raging tantrum and full-on tirade declaring me "the meanest Mommy in the world", we talked in bed. "Lucia", I said, "just because you are mad or sad or tired, does not give you permission to be unkind to me. It is my job to make rules for you and sometimes you won't like them. Sometimes it will seem like I am mean but I love you all the time, even when I'm mean." Now, calm and sweet and irresistible with her eau de Johnson & Johnson's baby shampoo, Lucia explained emphatically, "Mommy, I know you're not really mean. Sometimes I just need to cry it out. But I always know you love me." Whatever. Maybe I'll crack the code to parenting and maybe I won't, but in the meantime, I'll still make rules.

Lucia knows that I will always be her mom. She knows that when she pours water in her gym shoes and puts glitter all over her scalp I will still love her. She knows that she can roll her eyes at me and slam the door in my face and I will still love her. She knows that she can hate me and be ragingly frustrated with the rules I impose on her and that I'll still be here. I'll still be her mom. Like all moms, I am her touchstone. She'll go away from me and come back, sometimes staying for a long time, calm and content and then she'll run from me, stifled and needing independence. Just like I did with my mom. Some days it feels thankless. "I birthed you and this is how you treat me?!" I know that, just like me, Lucia is in a process, feeling her feelings, finding her way with Mean Mommy.

For me, Mean Mommy comes in the form of my yoga practice. Anyone who has read my blog knows that I often go to yoga feeling resistant. I make myself go because I know I will always always always feel better after I practice. In the time I have been doing yoga I have gone through great times, good times, mediocre times and don't- want-to-get-out-of-bed-can't-eat-a-thing-don't-want-to-brush-my-teeth bad times. No matter where on the emotional continuum I start my practice for the day, I am invariably better after practice. My better feelings might last for an hour or a week or a month. When I go on vacation and eat crap and don't exercise for a week, I know what will make me feel better. Yoga. When I forget to pay my gas bill for three months and feel like a loser. Yoga. It's like Visa. Yoga is priceless. For me, it can make me feel better about almost anything.

My job as Lucia's mom is to keep her safe, teach her the rules, guide her so she is equipped to navigate through her world. My yoga practice does the same thing for me. When I am a spinning out of control maniac trying to manage a business, parenting, friendships, emotions, Yoga keeps me sane. Just like Lucia knows I will always love her, always be there, I know that about my practice. I might resent it, push away from it, even avoid it, but I know my yoga practice is always there. It will always love me.

It's inside.

Last month I witnessed a group of people practicing yoga every day for thirty days. This means these people spent over 45 hours yogastudio. They committed to doing this challenge for a range of personal reasons. Private reasons. They were not graded nor judged nor paid. The rewards came from within. These 30-Dayers reported feeling happier, more energetic, calmer. They told me they slept better, ate better, smiled more. I received so much joy from teaching the 30-Dayers. They were (and are) strong, radiating energy and strength from within. Amazingly, though very few factors in their lives changed during their challenge (stress at work, relationship challenges, financial woes), they were happier, inside out, bones to the skin.

I've always been an over-achiever. If a teacher told me to do it, I’d do it. No shortcuts. The more tedious the assignment, the better. If I struggled more, I felt more accomplished because there was always the reward at the end of the task in the form of a grade or a compliment. I was forever competing with my twin sister or my classmates. When my partying high school girlfriends opted for a free period junior and senior years, I balked, signing up instead for the non-required Physics and Chemistry. When my swim coach gave us a ball-busting workout, I joined in the moaning and groaning of my teammates, but inside I was thrilled. I could work harder, show my coach that I was stronger. Then he’d pat me on the back and say, “Good work today Culberg.”

But what reward was I getting internally? Was I feeding my own sense of accomplishment or was I just ticking off achievements to tally at the end of each day? It was not until I was years into my yoga practice that I started to move away from being mostly externally motivated in my actions. Yoga is personal. It is a process of seeking the divinity within. In my yoga practice, I began to recognize the satisfaction of approving myself. It was enough to be proud of myself in standing head to knee pose. I stopped worrying (and even noticing) if I needed to take more breaks than the 75 year old woman practicing next to me. I practiced because I wanted to, because it was a gift I could give to myself.

Understanding the power of self-satisfaction has affected almost every part of my life. Of course I still struggle. I find myself in petty emotional predicaments with friends and family. The trouble is almost always rooted in some kind of disconnect I am having internally. I’m trying to be the most popular friend or the number one daughter. The difference is that now I can see when I am playing that old game. I can step back and say to myself, “What do you want? What do you need? And how are you going to get it?” And, like the 30-Dayers, in my process of finding what I need inside, I am exponentially happier, calmer, and more satisfied with the world outside.

It's chronic......

For the past four months I've had a cough or a cold or asthma. I'm not sure what it is. It rotates. Finally, after teaching yoga with the voice of a pack-a-day Parliament smoking granny, I decided to take care of my "condition." Convinced I had allergies, I very resistantly went to the allergist to get myself figured out. They tested me for everything. The good news, I don't have allergies. The bad news, if I don't have allergies, what the hell is wrong with me? The allergist referred me to an Ear-Nose-Throat doctor. While reading my chart, this ENT peeked over the file and said, "I see from your chart that you are medication-resistant." So awesome, I thought, "This doctor gets me." "I am too" he said, "That's why I'm a surgeon." He then proceeded to tell me that, while he had no idea what was wrong with me, he was sure that I had given myself a chronic condition, one that needed to be dealt with seriously. In the short ten-minute appointment, the ENT seemed to forget about my resistance to medications. He prescribed me three different drugs and threw in a referral for a CT scan of my sinuses. I thanked the good doctor, took the prescriptions I would never fill and ran from the building.

A week later I found myself in the office of an acupuncturist. I spent an hour in his dimly lit office talking about all the parts of my life, my respiratory system, my diet, my exercise habits, my love life, my own ideas about what might be wrong with me. After listening to me, he did his treatment and then we talked. "Based on the information I have about your lifestyle", he said, "I think you have created something chronic." Great, I thought to myself, this guy is just like the last doctor. "Because you created it", he continued, "you can un-create it." I agreed to eat a lot more red meat, committed to practicing some exercises, and made another appointment.

Like so many experiences in my life outside of the studio, the acupuncturist's approach made me think about yoga, how nothing is permanent. A physical ailment, a state of mind, feelings of the heart can change. What's more, they are all related and interactive. The heart affects the mind affects the body affects the heart affects the mind affects the body. When I wake up and my congestion seems worse than the day before, I remember the words of the acupuncturist. I can un-create this. Everyday students tell me about things that are wrong, or hard, or bad. Knee injury, break up, allergies. I don't believe that we necessarily create these conditions but I do believe that things can and do change. All feelings pass. The pain in knee. The ache in the heart. Nothing is static.

In dealing with my new "chronic" life condition, I understand this idea of change more clearly. "Chronic"- never-ending, constant, persistent, unremitting- means something else to me now. "Chronic" is a state that may be constant, but it is not without change. I'm still congested, coughing, slightly asthmatic. I'm still seeking a cure, an answer, but my chronic state feels better now. I'm in a persistent process, not stuck in a state. Like in yoga, every day is different. Every posture, every moment, every breath.

Cougar of the month

Last week, my daughter, who is three-weeks into kindergarten, won "Cougar of the Month" at her school. Cougars are her school mascot. Lucia was bestowed the honor, her teacher said, "because 99.999 percent of the time, Lucia is doing what she is supposed to be doing in kindergarten." Was I proud? Extremely!!! The teacher also said other things like, "Lucia is friendly to everyone, she helps without being asked...." But, nestled within my radiant pride, I also carried a smidge of concern that Lucia might be a super-conformer. Is she a kindergarten automaton? Or, is she just good at following directions? I've been thinking a lot about this.

Here's what I figured out. Lucia loves school. She asked on Saturday why she had to have such a long vacation from school. "I wish Sunday was Monday," she whined. Like me, Lucia relaxes in structure. If I know the plan, I'm open to anything. If it is wide and vast and unformulated, I'm not my best self. Maybe this is why I stuck with competitive swimming for fourteen years and yoga for almost twenty. It's comfortable, familiar. Lucia in school. Me in my yoga practice. Sameness, structure, expectations. These things create and hold a form that allows each of us to relax into the experience and find newness, excitement, and ultimately joy.

I've experienced the gamut of physical sensations and emotional hills and valleys in my yoga practice, but I've never been bored. Really. Every practice I experience differently. For example, last night, I was worried about practicing because my class the day before had been really difficult. So last night, I set my intention to focus on that practice and try not to bring the previous practice baggage with me. I stood somewhere new in the room, really close to the teacher (Kristen). Her fabulous turquoise outfit was surely a distraction, but I managed to focus and work hard in spite of it. I followed every single thing she said. I always try to do this, but, like everyone, sometimes I get distracted. Last night was different. Word by word, step by step, I let myself be carried through the 90 minutes. I learned so much! Like Lucia and kindergarten, I could hardly wait to do it again.

Karaoke Heals the Soul

Tonight at dinner, after her twelfth day of kindergarten (but who's counting?), Lucia proudly told me that she knows the definition of "desperate." "Desperate", she said, "is when you really really really want something." Desperate isn't necessarily a negative thing. Sometimes it is exciting, thrilling, intoxicating. That's how I feel about singing Karaoke. Once I decide to do it, I'm desperate to sing my heart out.

About a month ago I found myself in a Karaoke Bar in the International District with my partner Nancy, my 27-year-old brother David and five of his law school buddies. I'm basically old enough to be their mother and have thankfully almost outgrown the self-conscious phase of young adulthood. I went through a phase in my early twenties where I did a lot of Karaoke. At that time I was crazy about any song that involved Dolly Parton. I loved to sing "Islands in the Stream", her fabulously uplifting duet with Kenny "The Gambler" Rogers.

The Karaoke Bar on this night was immediately my favorite place in the whole world. Everyone was so different (age, size, race, style) yet they were all the same. Karaoke does that. In Karaoke land, I've often gravitated to Stevie Nicks (fashion aside). Put a mike in my hand and I sound exactly like her. Almost. Kind of. Well, not really. Anyway, I wanted to sing "Stop Draggin My Heart Around" which as you should all know, is a duet between Tom Petty and Stevie Nicks. My sister Katherine and I almost won a Grammy singing that song at a divey bar in Chicago. I asked all of my brother's friends and my Nancy who boldly accompanied me on this mission to do the duet with me. They all declined. Repeatedly. So I asked the Karaoke host if he'd sing it with me. I mean, come on, the night was early so there wasn't a huge backlog of performers. I could be a great warm up act, a novice like me with the host.... He said no.

I watched a few acts. These crazy people were singing their hearts out and they were good. They were great. I loved each one of them profoundly. I was growing increasingly desperate, agitated. As I scanned the bar for someone who might sing with me, a humongous, crew-cutted man wearing a t-shirt that could fit a baby elephant got up and sang so beautifully I thought it was a joke. He was a regular. "Smoosh" was his name. Completely star struck and embarrassingly uninhibited in my desperation, I watched Smoosh exit the stage on which he barely fit. He lumbered to the back of the dark bar where he was surrounded by his friends (fans?) and sat down like a king holding court. Before losing my nerve, I marched back to him in my Value Village sundress and said, "Smoosh, will you be Tom Petty in 'Stop Draggin' My Heart Around'?" He said yes!!! What a gentleman. What a benevolent, kind man to say yes to this holly hobby looking Karaoke beginner. I was ecstatic.

I returned to my shy table of  attorneys and waited. Desperate. Finally, they called us, "Laura and Smoosh." Two mikes, one screen. His words in blue, mine in pink, our harmonies in yellow. Boom boom boom!!! We were on. My voice cracked in the beginning. I knew the only way to do this was to really be a rock star. Me and Smoosh. Stevie and Tom. One and the same. I actually have no idea how we really sounded or what was happening in the audience, but in my amped up, wanna be a rock star mind, we took down the house. I wanted to hug Smoosh. Kiss Smoosh. He was my partner in this Karaoke ecstasy. I didn't actually make physical contact with Smoosh, but I did make an internal note to self to go back the next Tuesday and sing with him again.

When I left the bar that night, I was joyous in a way that I rarely am. These people! Smoosh, the man in the pristine white suit and Frank Sinatra hat they all called "Uncle Bob", the librarian looking guy in the beret who belted out Nina Simone like a champ. They were fantastic. I felt connected to them. I felt hopeful, alive, part of something bigger (even if it was being a Karaoke singer in a bar in the I.D.). The next day I sent an email to five of my good friends. The subject line, "Karaoke Heals the Soul" and I invited them to come sing the next Tuesday. The response wasn't great. I didn't go sing that next Tuesday nor have I made time to go since then. But, as I write this, the moments on stage I had--giving it all up, channelling Steve Nicks, singing my heart out with Smoosh, being the same in all of the difference-- are clear as if I just finished my encore. Karaoke does heal the soul. And I'm desperate for more.

Break it down....

Ninety-five percent of the time I practice yoga I am deeply resistant at the beginning of class. I feel the weight of my life on my shoulders. I see the long dark hallway of physical exertion and mental focus stretching out in front of me, and I have the strong desire to run from the room. My beginning of class mantra is, "only 90 minutes." I remind myself that that's a blip in time when I consider that I was in labor with my daughter for 42 hours.

Pranayama feels interminable. How am I going to DO this? I feel a little bit more calm for a split second when the instructor say, "last two breaths." Then comes the half-moon series. Arms up. Straight spine. No. No. No. No. NO! I don't want to do this. And it is three parts. Half moon then backward bending then forward bending. And then, come ON, a second set?!

At some point during the half-moon series, I lose some of my resistance. I stop so actively fighting with myself. I still struggle, but it is different. I'm in relationship with the struggle. My body and mind seem to be in it together. Somehow, the fact that they are keeping one another company makes it easier. Like jogging with a friend. The physical and mental are a team, each carrying part of the heavy load.

By the end of the awkward series, I am just about committed to this craziness. I still have to push away my tendency to calculate how many more minutes I'll be in the room, how many more postures there are, but I'm not so actively in resistance. Something has shifted. Eagle pose comes next. I'm madly in love with eagle. It's so efficient. We're doing so much in just one posture and it's sufficiently hard and doable.

By the time the balancing on one leg series comes, I can't really remember why I balked at the idea of practicing. It's not that it's not hard. It is. Really hard. It's that suddenly I am lighter. I am no longer the lone Sherpa of resistance. Posture by posture, I have slowly discarded weight from the over-stuffed backpack I started with.

Once I hit the floor series for my first Savasana, I have actually let go. Any residual heaviness sinks into the floor below me and I feel lighter right away. Like everyone, I have ups and downs during the floor series but the mental heft is almost undetectable. Like a piece of hard clay that's eventually malleable after lots of kneading, I'm finally soft. I'm there, in the room, in my practice. And so it goes practice after practice. I start heavy, encumbered, resistant, questioning my ability and strength. Then I slowly break it all down. I leave lighter, carrying less, looking forward, ready for the next thing.

Hazel and Sienna

This summer I taught a group of kids yoga at a day camp. The class was comprised of nine girls between the ages of 3-5. All girls that age are cute, but there were two that I've thought about repeatedly in the last month since the camp finished. Hazel and Sienna, both 3-years-old. Hazel was one of the littlest at the camp. She watched the bigger girls, observed them, found entries into activities when she could, but was consistently calm, quiet and contained.  I wondered at times if she was actually verbal. Sienna, on the other hand, was hyper and very kinesthetic. Sienna was a major plushy. She loved her stuffed animals and had a running monologue of who her animals were and where they should sit during yoga. At any given moment, Sienna carried between 3 and 7 stuffed kittens, bears, dogs. They overflowed from her short little arms, making yoga postures difficult to perform. Sienna moved constantly in all directions. Her face seemed to be in an ongoing state of manic smiling.

Over the course of the week-long camp I practiced Savasana with the girls at least once per class. I played Deva Premal, dimmed the lights, and read them meditations while they practiced Savasana. I had the girls close their eyes and, once they were still, put a beany baby on each of their bellies so they could feel it rise and fall with their breath. You can imagine how a stuffed toy on Sienna's belly must have tempted the poor little energizer bunny. Sienna needed extra help to find her stillness. I learned to put my hands on her head or her arm or leg, a little weight to help her stay contained. She still wiggled, her eyes shutting for just split seconds, but she was able to find moments of being still. Hazel, on the other hand, was shockingly capable. As soon as the lights dimmed, Hazel was down. Her body still, eyes closed, brow relaxed. She didn't even open her eyes when I put the beany baby on her belly. Savasana was seemingly easy for her.

I hear it all the time in reference to my own child--- kids are born with a personality. They have their own special characteristics that, no matter how we try to chisel them into a certain form, they come out their own way. Being with Hazel and Sienna over the summer, two children with such starkly different natures, reinforced this idea for me. Of course they have different homes, are exposed to different foods, play with different kids, but it was obvious to me watching them that they each came into this world with a way of being.

This idea has helped me in my own role as yoga student and teacher. I think I am somewhere between Hazel and Sienna. Most people are. For me, Savasana is sometimes really really difficult. Other times, not. I remember when I first started practicing yoga in my twenties, Savasana felt as foreign as playing the bagpipes, (I was definitely closer to Sienna's wiggly state in those days). As I've practiced more, I've inched my way closer to Hazel's nature.

So how was I born? I am pretty sure I came out closer to Sienna-style. Over the years, with practice, I've changed. It's possible. A student said to me the other day, "I hate it when the teacher tells me to calm my mind." She hates it because it's hard right now. It will get easier as she practices more. It's not her nature, so she has to work harder than someone like Hazel.

Everyone has to work hard at achieving stillness in Savasana. Even Hazel. And some people have to work even harder. These people, the more active, energetic ones, might excel in an Evelyn Wood speed reading class. It all balances out in the end. We work harder at the things that don't come easy and we get a little break when we do the things we were born to do. Even Steven. No right. No wrong. No better, no worse. We all have to work hard at something.