We are all so very human and more or less aware of our inherited and self-generated interior cast of characters who show up for those better or worse curtain calls depending on what’s playing out in our lives...a personal population evolving from a very tender age. Recently, someone who knows me all too well named one player in my internal troupe: “the good little soldier”.

Ever feel washed, wrung out, hung to dry? I spent yesterday afternoon couch-curled, sunk in recovery, a bit breathless from two over-the-top weeks. Many extraordinary things came to pass in a brief chunk of time and on this rainy morning stretching empty before me, quiet drapes my shoulders and I recall a Mary Oliver line: “what was that beautiful thing that just happened?”

hursday night 2003, Clunie Clubhouse, 8:30pm...again. After a full year dancing, I know the drill. Time to circle up after practice. Listen to the extraordinary shifts and communal realizations happening inside us on the dance floor. Time to articulate the ineffable. I sit there deeply identifying with each speaker, grateful they are communicating some (but not all) of what has passed for me. I hover trembling, so stirred and shaken, so much transformation and information revealed on multiple levels...and I say nary a word, never contribute, not dare allow fear or doubt to become visible, illumination or joy to spill over, become audible. Never.

Late 80’s, a chapter of intense orthopedic manual therapy training. One moment remains crystal clear: case presentation, standing before my peers, explaining each turning point in treatment, how multiple options narrow into singular choices. The instructor stops me mid-stream, asks why I chose that particular alternative. My reply...“It was intuitive.” He promptly seized that opportunity to call me on the carpet, to derail intuition as a guiding force, to make his own point about what guides a truly worthy clinician. Practical, functional, hands-on, logic. Total reliance on observation and palpation.

This morning I took my 90 year-old stooped papa to the airport so he could fly home. I didn’t want him to go. And I felt the profound shift this simple statement indicates. I grew up watching shows like Leave it to Beaver and Donna Reed and Father Knows Best. I ached to have a normal family like that. Where you can count on Dad to be politely reasonable and Mom wears an apron and pearls and everyone gets along and, most importantly, no one yells. We all have our family of origin stories and quite clearly, mine had been way messier than my T.V. viewing.

At least once a week someone corners me for a variation on the same urgent confession: how much or for how long they have wanted to come to a 5Rhythms class. This revelation is followed by some version of a fear story and, if they talk long enough, the word self-conscious usually emerges. They shrug their shoulders and wonder if they will ever get over it. I don’t say much in reply, just that it is a common story with no magic solution except to show up, be with it, watch it change...or not. Here’s what we know from experience: it almost always shifts after a class or three.

Periodically someone with dubious authority publishes an article about why it is dangerous to engage in yoga. The latest article, published in the New York Times last month, warns flexible women about serious hip injury if they keep doing this perilous practice.

Peppermint steam wafts between us, this friend seated across from me at Pete’s. Her whole being emanates open ground as she poises the $64,000 question: “How do you feel right now?” My body tentatively poises on the edge of detection, I watch my mind try to busy it’s way into territory it knows nothing about. I actually feel belly butterfly queasy, shallow breath...this is dread, this is fear. I am grateful to feel and name it.

Last night I was lifted ever so slowly from a dream sound-tracked by rhythmic flutter. I rose to a large butterfly, burnt toast in color, beating her frustration against the window-pane by the bed. A few tries, then finally, cradled in the gentle glow of a white t-shirt I had danced in all day, I carried her outside. Released her to the night speckled sky, the almost full moon calling her back home. Paused in wonder on the deck and then fell back into dreamland once more

Book Club last night, intrepid women fearlessly tackling sticky issues, personal travails, the obstacles on our common journey to our birthright home, our essential goodness. Last night we dove into Getting Our Bodies Back by Christine Caldwell, a somatic psychotherapist working with the seeds of addiction that lie in the body. Recovery that focuses on cognitive treatment alone will miss a big boat.

What are your thoughts on teaching, being a yoga teacher, or your desire to be a yoga teacher now compared to before you started this program?

The question is: What, most simply, can you surrender to this week? Maybe program related, maybe not.

This week I had to write a bio and did a list of writing prompts to get me started. “Where can we find you when you’re not working? What’s your favorite way to spend a weekend or a Sunday afternoon?”

We spent three hours Friday night with an aruvedic practitioner, not my first exposure to this unique medical slant. Love to consider nutrition an integral step on the optimal health pathway and my personal approach has been moderation, balanced diet, as much local and organic as possible. I have done raw, done vegetarian, done vegan…for spurts of time….always come back to the middle ground.

I was supposed to blog about what was outstanding from the anatomy lesson on Sunday but I had to miss this weekend of training. California Spirit Fest was simply amazing and I missed the camaraderie and stimulating learning that has become part of my life since early in January. So this blog reflects the three qustions I answered about svadhyaya—the niyama that encourages us to take on self-study as a lifelong habit.