You work really really hard. And then you rest.

Last week, Sarah, one of our beloved students finally had her baby. Sarah practiced through her whole pregnancy until two days before she went into labor. She had a fast labor that ended with a healthy baby boy. Sarah is an incredibly focused, dedicated student. She works hard and she doesn't take herself too seriously. It was a delight to teach her every week while her belly grew and her practiced evolved with her changing body.

The week before Sarah went into labor (by this point she was already days overdue), we talked about a preparatory conversation she had with her midwife. In getting Sarah ready, her midwife said, "Sarah, you do Bikram right? Giving birth is a lot like Bikram-- you work really really hard and then you rest."

Yes! That's so true. You work really really hard. And then you rest. I remember being in labor. It was a slog, 42 hours, 6 different midwives, nipple stimulation, stair walking, yoga poses. When I heard Sarah retelling her midwife's advice, it all came flooding back to me. Yes, you work hard and then you rest. In the final phase of my labor, right before I was ready to push Lucia out, I literally fell asleep between contractions. I was working so hard and I needed to rest. My body knew what to do.

In yoga, our teachers guide us into postures, encouraging us to work hard, and reminding us to rest when we need to rest. In childbirth, we do this as a means to an end, to get to the baby. In yoga, we are practicing the "work hard-rest rhythm" to rebirth ourselves, so at the end of our practice, while there is no new baby waiting, we get to welcome our new selves, rebirthed in our own way, happily worked out and fully rested.

Consciously place your mind.

Last week I was reading Cyndi Lee's newsletter in which she talked about basic mindfulness meditation and the instructions to "consciously place your mind." As most of my students know by now, Savasana is my favorite posture to teach. There is so much there. To be able to consciously relax offers us a respite for all that ails us.

When I read those words, "consciously place your mind", I was so excited. What perfect words to share with my class! A lot of yoga practice is about putting your body into different physical positions, some people would even say contorting the body. We spend years learning to balance, bend, stretch, open, and twist. Savasana doesn't require that same coordination, but it involves a similar intention. Just as we position our bodies, so too can we position our minds, consciously place them in a state of relaxation.

I've learned in my own practice and observed over the last twelve years as a teacher, that Savasana is the pose that takes the most work to get into and it is the easiest pose to fall out of. My personal balance in Savasana is tenuous: I can lose my focus if I am not fully engaged. Everyone has something that helps them reach a place of conscious relaxation, and for many, that thing changes daily. Focusing on the rhythm of your breath, keeping your eyes fixed on one spot, following the movement of breath in and out of your nose. For me, recognizing the similarity between my physical practice and my mental practice in Savasana has helped profoundly. I work so hard to coordinate all of my limbs in Garurasana, twisting, pulling, bending. I am very consciously positioning my arms and legs and hips and shoulders. Now, when Savasana comes, I tell myself, "consciously place your mind Laura." And just as I tell my body where to go, I am helping my mind to find its place.

I'm Siii-iiick

I am recovering from a two-week bout of coughing. My cough came with extreme fatigue. In other words, I was sick. People who know me well will tell you that I always say, "I never get sick." That's almost true. Getting sick for me is like admitting defeat. I don't like it. For two weeks I was grumpy, cranky, convinced that I was just lazy or depressed, but on Sunday I started coming out of the sick feeling and on Monday I finally got to practice yoga again.

I intentionally went to Frankie's class. I love Frankie. She is my long-time business partner and even longer time yoga teacher and I know what to expect from her class. Mostly she doesn't say much to me. She has a lot of other students to focus on and taking her class felt like a great place to be on my first class back after two weeks of sicky.

Class was hard! In the standing series I did about every other posture, lying down in between, barely able to keep my eyes open. I was struggling physically and mentally I was letting myself fall prey to my own dramatic tendencies. At one point during Triangle pose, Frankie gave me a correction and I immediately got indignant, even a little pissed. "God. She knows I've been sick. She must see how weak I've been all class..... blah blah blah," whined my internal victim. But I made the correction she gave me. And as I stretched my right arm higher, like a flash I realized it--- "Frankie's brain. My body!" Frankie was not teaching with my sick-identified brain. She was teaching with her brain and her brain had a much different message.

I continued to struggle in class, but differently. I had snapped out of my victim state and joined the ranks of just a bunch of other students who are working hard, doing their best. My indignation at Frankie was misdirected. I wasn't responding to her correction, I was responding to her not being in my pity party with me! I thanked Frankie after class. I felt better; I had turned the corner and was among the walking well. I still have a cough. But I'm no longer sick. See, I told you.

Breathe Bertha. Breathe.

Sometimes when I am teaching, I'll look out and see a student's face bright red, grimacing, trying to get into or hold a posture. They look like one of those big Olympic weight lifters (minus the little suspenders and shorty shorts) trying to hoist a 400-pound barbell. When I see a student turning purple like this I tell the whole class, "An important aspect of yoga is that you are breathing. Normal breathing. If you are holding your breath to get into a posture, you've stopped practicing yoga." That weight lifter might get the barbell up, but he drops it just as quickly. In yoga, we are trying to hold the postures, hold our balance.

In Seattle right now, our city is undergoing a major construction project, much like the Big Dig that happened in Boston several years ago. Big Bertha is the world's largest tunneling machine and it is boring right through Seattle's underside (follow her progress here). Big Bertha has a big charge. She's slated to drill two miles through Seattle's downtown area, a project that will hopefully increase the beauty and efficiency of our fair city.

Back to breathing. Often when a student, especially a student new to yoga, is trying to do a very challenging balancing pose, he or she will hold their breath, perhaps thinking that this will make them more steady, give them more strength. When I see students grinding through a posture, even a whole practice holding their breath, it reminds me of Big Bertha getting stuck, pushing and pushing to no avail. I recently read that the obstruction for Big Bertha was an 8-inch diameter steel pipe. Imagine it. Bertha is 57.5 feet high, as tall as a five-story building and she is stuck on a little pipe.

Some yoga postures are easy for our particular body. We each have different strengths, flexibilities, and comfort levels in different poses. The thread through all of the postures, no matter what your personal strength or personal proclivity, is to breathe. When you hold your breath, you create a blockage so your body cannot open, cannot stretch, cannot balance. Try it in some of your more challenging postures. If you are one of those people who bears down, grinds your teethe, holds your breath and gives one good kick or pull to get yourself into a pose (I see this all the time in standing-head-to-knee pose), slow down, stop, take a breath, feel where the obstruction might be, and try again.

Twelve minutes

On January 1st of this year, I committed to meditating three times a week. I've gone in and out of regular meditation practice many times, so I didn't have supremely high expectations that I'd succeed. To my happy surprise, though, I have meditated daily with the exception of three of four times where my days were extremely out of the norm. On January 15th in the New York Times, there was a great article, "Breathing In vs. Spacing Out" (by Dan Hurley) in which psychologist Amishi Jha described her research training United States Marines in mindfulness meditation. Jha found that, "getting as little as 12 minutes of meditation practice a day helped [the] Marines to keep their attention and working memory-- that is, the added ability to pay attention over time-- stable." I don't have any first hand experience with being in the military, much less being a Marine in combat, but I can imagine that having a keen ability to focus and concentrate is of the utmost importance.

In this blog over the years, I've written a lot about busy-ness-- my own, that of other people in my life, of the world at large. For many people, being frantically busy has become so much the norm that they don't even question it. But what if it really did take as little as twelve minutes a day? Would people actually squeeze out this time from their already busy day to improve their overall quality of life?

I have only myself as an example. Since I recommitted to a daily meditation practice, I have added to my already full plate: a major home remodel, a big business opportunity, and an online class in real estate. Here's what I notice: I am a better listener, I am less overwhelmed with the largeness of some of my undertakings, I am happier.

In Hurley's article, he shares other research by Yi-Yuan Tang who, in studying the effects of mindfulness meditation, found, "that it [mindfulness meditation] enhanced the integrity and efficiency of the brain's white matter, the tissue that connects and protects neurons emanating from the anterior cingulate cortex, a region of particular importance for rational decision-making and effortful problem-solving."

My renewed commitment to meditation happened before I read this piece in the New York Times. It was inspiring to read about improving the integrity and efficiency of my brain's white matter. I love knowing that a short daily mindfulness meditation can help soldiers develop better mental resilience in a war zone. But what I knew, even before I read that ground-breaking scientific research, was that my daily meditation was my gift to myself. There are days when it feels like I can't squeeze out my meditation time-- there are lunches to be made, laundry to be folded, flooring samples to choose. These are the days when I feel like I am disappearing into the details of life. Giving myself 10, 12, 15 minutes of mindfulness meditation every morning reminds me that, no matter what else is going on, there is still room for me. Twelve minutes.

Don't think about that stuff, you're meditating.

Most of my life I have been a New Year's curmudgeon. I obnoxiously espoused how silly resolutions were, how absolutely unrealistic and empty they were. Im sorry if I offended anyone. This year, in an effort to help my 9-year-old daughter Lucia (still hopeful and optimistic) understand the concept of resolve, I made a "Goals and Dreams for 2014" chart. It's basically a big piece of butcher paper on our wall with a jar of sharpies next to it. It is an open invitation for anyone to write their goals and dreams for the upcoming year.

For some reason, introducing "Goals and Dreams" instead of "Resolutions" helped me. I found myself happily writing three of them: meditate three times a week; do sit ups; and stop eating sweets for the month of January. I felt different committing to actions that I perceived to be for me as opposed to resolutions that I historically viewed as punishments. All of the things I committed to on our Goals and Dreams chart were things that would help me, so even though they might be hard or restrictive, they were gifts (goals and dreams) that would make my life better. It is January 17th and I can proudly report that I've accomplished my goals and dreams successfully for 17 days straight.

The trick for me with the meditation has been to keep it really short and sweet. A short 5-10 minute meditation (depending on the rush factor associated with any particular morning) is what I'm committed to. About two weeks ago Lucia asked if she could meditate with me in the morning. I've mediated with Lucia a handful of times in the past but nothing regular. Now most mornings Lucia wants to do it. "Mom," she'll ask when she wakes up, "did you wait for me to meditate?!!" To my great surprise, Lucia really loves this morning ritual. We sit in the living room cross-legged, facing each other, set the timer, close our eyes and breathe.

I explained the first time we meditated together to try to just focus on her breath and keep her mind as clear as possible from other thoughts. Last week after the harp-tone of my timer alarm sounded and we slowly opened our eyes to see each other, Lucia said, "Mommy, while I was meditating, I kept thinking about other stuff, but then I'd remind myself, 'don't think about that stuff, you're mediating.'"

"That's meditating," I explained to Lucia. "You're teaching your brain to quiet down."

That morning after I dropped Lucia at school I went to take a yoga class. During Savasana I listened to Frani coaxing us into relaxation. "Inhale let your belly rise...." My mind, as it often does, wandered. I thought about the work ahead of me, scheduling piano lessons, toffee bars, and eventually landed on my morning meditation with Lucia. Wise words from a nine-year old helped me calm my brain down, "Don't think about that stuff, you're meditating."

For my dad.

Last night I finished reading The End of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe. It's a rare occasion for me to persevere through a book that I don't initially LOVE. I've been reading it on and off for a few months. It is a memoir of the author's care-taking and final few years with his mother who has pancreatic cancer. Both avid readers, mother and son spend hours waiting for doctors appointments and sitting through chemotherapy, reading specially chosen books and discussing them. Through it all, the tender, mutually respectful, incredibly loving relationship emerges and we get to know both mother and son through their reading preferences, philosophies and opinions.

My father died over twenty years ago, also of cancer. While he was battling cancer, I lived here (in Seattle) and he was in Chicago. His illness was prolonged and I went back frequently, first just to visit, and towards the end of his life, to care take and say goodbye. A few times I accompanied my father to chemo. He'd be attached to an IV in a big lounge chair with several other people also receiving their chemo rounds. My dad was very funny, very friendly, and wonderfully silly. I remember him making jokes to the other patients, jokes only someone who has cancer can make to someone else who has cancer. A few days before Dad died, he actually called all of his friends around the country to let them know he was "checking out" (his words) and to say goodbye. I remember standing outside his bedroom door hearing him reminisce with old friends about times past, mostly laughing but crying too. Maybe this is why I became progressively more engrossed in The End of Your Life Book Club. The author's mother (Maryanne) shared an open-ness,  a connection to that I always felt my dad had. And both Maryanne and my dad seemed to grow even more connected, more open, through their bouts with cancer, the disease they both succumbed to in the end.

In The End of Your Life Book Club, there are several references to Jon Kabat-Zinn's book Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness. In one section of Schwalbe's book, he writes about Kabat-Zinn's perspective on interrupting. Shwalbe says, "we all know it's wrong to interrupt each other. And yet we constantly interrupt ourselves." We split our energies, sometimes to the point that there is really no value, no quality to any of our interactions. But at the end of life, there is a different kind of knowing; an understanding that each interaction is meaningful, an opportunity to be alive. And, while it is sad and often tragic to accompany someone through their last days, it is also a blessing, an opportunity to be present in the way they are present because they are in their last days.

Since I read that piece about interrupting ourselves, I have been thinking a lot about moments where I can start to form an interruption-free discipline that I can build on and expand. It is, of course, in my yoga practice. During Savasana when I am practicing being physically still, mentally quiet, I still interrupt myself. I think about how I've gained three pounds and my shirt feels tighter. I think about how Lucia really doesn't need all the Christmas gifts I got her and how the abundance sends the wrong message. But what if I was practicing Savasana in my last days? Maybe I would notice how my skin around my hips feels after wind-removing pose. I might feel my heart beating in my finger tips. I get teary thinking about my dad in the big lounge chair receiving his chemo. I miss him. But I also feel joyful, thinking about how he was living, really living in his last days.