“A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” Winston Churchill
I had gotten an unwieldy situation under control. I was feeling good about the progress and the step-wise solution that was in place, and then it all came apart in 48 hours. Like pulling a loose thread in a sweater, every piece unraveled. All the forward movement had been erased and then some. I showed up at Brian’s office a little worn out. Depleted. How and more importantly, why, did this happen?
Brian sensed my frustration the moment I walked into his office. “You’re living on a ledge. What kind of existence is that?” he counseled me. “What the universe, what your yoga, is trying to tell you is that you can be more. You can do more. What you’re doing now is just watching the time pass, and that’s no way to live. I’m a little worried that you’re too adaptable, that you’re too good at coping. Go where you can be well and inspire wellness in others.”
He’s right of course. Sometimes I try to prove him wrong. I discount his counsel, and I waste my time in doing so. So here’s to leaving the ledge, to picking up one foot and then the other, and not looking back. There’s the message I was looking for…
“Patience is the companion of wisdom.” ~ St. Augustine
Lately I’ve been itching to run, just take off on the open road of life so to speak and not look back. I’m not exactly sure where this feeling came from or why it’s persisting, but it is certainly familiar to me. It’s been a while since it’s made an appearance in my life, and I must admit that it feels like greeting an old friend who has been away for too long.
Someone wise once told me many years ago that change is good and I should embrace it, so long as I’m running to something and not away from something. When the running instinct showed up at my door a few weeks ago, I had to take a few steps back and really think about whether or not to let it in. Was I just so frustrated with certain circumstances in my life, compounded by the fact that I have such a clear vision now for Compass Yoga, that I was willing to do anything to feel like I was just moving, if not moving forward? Or were the options for change laid out in front of me truly something I wanted to embrace for their own sake? It comes down to priorities.
By nature, I am an impatient person. I see what needs to be done, what must be done, and I just want to go do it. I don’t want to ask permission. I just want to have the freedom to act by my own conscience. Having such a clear picture of Compass Yoga is both a blessing and a curse. It helps me channel my efforts straight to its purpose and it has become a very centering force in my life. However, it makes it very difficult for me to do anything but further its mission.
As of late, I’ve had some really incredible career opportunities cross my path, opportunities that even a year ago I would have given anything for. I wasn’t sure what to do, and so I sat in meditation, much longer than I usually do, hoping for an answer. And I got one. I turned them all down. All of them, in favor of putting my efforts into Compass Yoga. One of them was a dream business development job. I would have been a senior person in the organization charged with growing the company 20%+. I knew I could rise to a challenge like that, but the trouble is that if I’m going to grow anything 20%, it’s going to be my own organization, not someone else’s, no matter how great I think that other company is.
Patience is hard. We aren’t wired for it, but when we have a big audacious goal, we need patience and perseverance is equal amounts. I’ve been waiting for this moment to do my own thing, it’s almost here, and I was going to cloud it with someone else’s vision? No way. I’ve waited too long to have my turn at channeling all of my resources and experiences in the direction that I see fit. I can’t lose sight of that big picture now! This choice is part of the hero’s journey.
Like Hanuman, I am laying in wait for just a little while longer before springing into action. The opportune time is almost here – I can feel it with every fiber of my being. No sense in getting sidetracked now. My work, by my own definition, is too valuable to too many people. Focus is what’s needed.
“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry I could not travel both, and be one traveler long I stood, and looked down one as far as I could…knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back…Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” ~ Robert Frost
While on vacation I started and finished reading the book Hanuman: The Devotion and Power of the Monkey God. Since beginning a deep study of yoga philosophy about a year and a half ago, I have felt very close to Hanuman. A tiny monkey, he is the most loyal servant of Lord Rama. The child’s version of the story of Hanuman is that he leapt across the world to rescue Sita, Lord Rama’s wife, when she was captured by the enemy during a long and brutal war. The truth is a bit more complicated, as truths tend to be.
In incredible detail, the book elaborates on the story of Hanuman, his dual-characteristics of great devotion and great might, his ability to be a fierce warrior and to lay in wait when that is what’s needed, and his dark and light sides. I had envisioned him as an adorable and adoring little monkey. He is so much more.
I won’t spoil the story for you – you should read the beautiful prose that author Vanamali lays out in exquisite detail. What I do want to share in this post is a role that Hanuman plays that i never knew before reading this book. He is the protector of the crossroads, those places in-between in our lives, the transitions. Ironic (or perhaps just synchronous) that I would learn this now when I feel that I am at such a huge junction in both my personal and professional lives, as I craft a living and a life with Compass Yoga.
In my daily meditations for the past few months, I have felt change arriving slowly, like a light slowly rising, like a clearer vision coming into focus that honors my experience and celebrates my potential offering to humanity. While I am crafting an extraordinary life, I am fully aware that I am also lovingly building a legacy. This is my soul’s work.
In my meditations I have heard a faint and distant voice conveying what I know is very important, though I cannot yet decipher its exact words. I think maybe it has been Hanuman unrolling the map of the decisions I must make, laying out the carpet that takes two directions of which I must choose one.
Joseph Campbell is famous for elucidating the hero’s journey, a choice between two roads that is never easy. Both roads contain trade-offs, good and bad experiences, joy and sorrow, pain and freedom, light and dark. Our goal is not to choose the “right” road, but to choose the “right road for us”. I am at the crossroads, but Hanuman is here with me and so I don’t have to be alone or afraid in my choosing. He will protect and defend while I decide. He will do the same for you, too, and you should take great comfort in that. A bit of help makes the choosing easier, right?
We run from the imperfect. We want everything to be flawless. We praise beauty; we seek it out; we convince ourselves that we can’t live without it. Ruin is something we have come to dread. To feel ruined it to feel busted up, disappointed, and taken advantage of. We desperately cling to the perfect – in ourselves, in others, in a moment of time. We try to rush through ruin as quickly as possible, and with closed eyes. By running from ruin we are missing so many opportunities for growth and personal evolution.
Dancing with our disappointment
I know this dance well. I have been running from ruin and toward perfection for many, many years. Brian calls this my intricate skill of “maximize this, minimize that.” In other words, I make the most of the good things and try very hard to ignore the bad things, hoping that those bad things will just magically go away. For the record, they don’t. They accumulate until their collective voice is so loud that they must be reckoned with in one way or another.
We can learn a lot from sadness if we’re willing to sit with it
I received a lot of positive feedback from my last two posts – the first about how my dad taught me that the only advice we can take is our own and the second about how a chance encounter with an ex taught me about feeling and transcending anger. So much so, that I’ve decided to take my writing in a very personal direction. I’m at a point in my story where some previously disjointed pieces are starting to fit together in a very powerful way. Steve Jobs said that, “We can’t expect to understand our lives living forward, but only by looking back.” That’s why reflection is so important, why writing it all down and sharing it is critical to our own understanding. All burdens can be borne if we can put them into a story.
Some of the pieces of my story are jagged and uncomfortable and some of them are smoothly crafted. Somehow, they’re all finding a way to come together and co-exist side-by-side, not stealing the limelight from one another, but sharing in it equally. It’s quite a surprise, even though I’ve been working on this very hope for such a long time. I never thought I’d realize it, and certainly not so early on in my life. And while this surprise is of tremendous benefit to me, I want it to benefit you, too, because I want you to have the same experience of holding up a mirror to the parts of you, of others, and of your experience to see that the good, the bad, and the ugly are all extraordinary teachers.
For a long time I vilified my dad, and many of those reasons were justifiable. What I shunned for too long were all of the lessons he taught me, albeit in a manner that I would never wish on anyone else. He was a cold, austere, sad man, and my family bore the brunt of that for a long time. What I didn’t know as a teenager, what there was no way for me to know, was that his behaviors and his personal history that caused those behaviors, would give me the tools I need to do the work I was meant to do with Compass Yoga.
This is about honoring our whole self, not about making lemonade
And this is not some pathetic attempt by a hopeful gal to make lemonade out of lemons, to make the most of what she’s got even if that isn’t much at all. It’s about honoring every part of our past; it’s about recognizing that in every moment, in every experience, there is a very deliberate, necessary teaching that sets us up to live our dharma, our path. We need the painful, sad parts of our past just as much as we need the joy and light. And I would argue that we need them in equal measure. The poetic Dolly Parton is famous for saying, “The way I see it, if you want rainbows then you gotta put up with the rain.” Truer words were never spoken.
So here in my promise to you: you will learn about my own personal story, layer by layer, piece by piece, even the ugly parts. Especially the ugly parts. It will be revealed in as thoughtful and sacred a manner as I can muster, and you will eventually see the complete picture. None of it will be gratuitous and all of it is intended so that you can benefit from these two learnings:
1.) where and what we come from has every bit to do with who we eventually become
and even more importantly,
2.) the depth of our roots does not determine the spread of our wings. We can fly as high as we choose to fly regardless of how far down we find ourselves at any point in time. It’s all based on our will to find our way. And I intend to find mine.
After celebrating and bidding a grateful adieu to my classmates and teachers, who were all truly amazing and gifted, I turned my attention to the next item at hand: what do I do now? The Universe interceded some moths ago and showed me that I should take Compass Yoga in a therapeutic direction, that this was the work I was meant to do. I thought about this training with Cheri and Arturo for a long time and had been looking forward to it since the beginning of the year. Now that knowledge lives in my mind and hands, as if it has been there all along.
Over the last few weeks, a number of people have asked me how I plan to use this therapeutic yoga training and rather than answer them individually, I thought it might be more helpful to publicly talk about my thoughts to date. Your comments and ideas along this journey are always, always appreciated.
Starting up a full private practice
While the real estate market in NYC is always on the nutsy side, commercial space for a small office is relatively easy to find and fairly inexpensive. With therapeutic yoga, private sessions and small group classes are very powerful because it gives the instructor time to the use of props to perfectly calibrate each pose for each student so they feel the full benefit of the practice.I’m currently looking into a few different spaces in Manhattan to rent for private sessions.
Joining an integrated medical practice or working closely with a network of doctors and therapists
1 in 30 people who now practice yoga in the U.S. are referred to the practice by their medical doctors. Rather than hoping someone will stumble into my class, I’ve been more proactive about connecting to the medical and therapeutic community for mutual referrals. Eventually I would love to truly connect with a group of doctors and therapists as a part of a joint holistic practice in which therapeutic yoga is just one piece of a system to help treat a whole patient effectively.
Establishing residence within a yoga studio or network of yoga studios
Therapeutic yoga is often used for very specialized populations who are managing a specific illness, injury, or condition that has specific needs. I’ve put together a set of populations whom I’m most interested in working with and started to look for partner studios who are interested in providing the space for me to create these specialized programs.
Continue to provide yoga to underserved populations through nonprofit partners
This work has been some of the most rewarding of my life. To see someone bravely walk into my class who has never tried yoga before, and then to watch them feel the tremendous benefits, is a joy that I have a hard time fully expressing. It’s my hope that Compass Yoga will continue to provide this service to everyone who has the courage to take up a practice, regardless of their financial circumstances.
May the healing continue
I continue to be amazed by how much I learn and how much I heal every time I teach a class. What I give in my classes is nothing compared to all that I receive in return from my students. Their joy gives me joy. Their peace brings me peace. Their encouragement gives me more confidence and courage than I ever imagined I could have. The only way I can think of to truly thank them is to keep teaching as often as I can, to pay it forward as often as I have the great blessing to do so. Here’s to a world filled with more yoga, to a world filled with more healing.
“The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.” ~ Dolly Parton
When I was in Florida, rainbows were popping up everywhere. It had been a long time since I’d seen a rainbow, and in many ways I felt like the ones I saw in Florida were a sign that I’m going in the right direction. This year is my one year anniversary working with Brian. For a year I’ve been working hard on myself, digging deep into what I’ve come from, where I really am, and where I want to go. In one year, I’ve seen a huge transformation in my life: my confidence has grown, my authenticity has come shining through, and I feel positioned to live my very best life going forward.
The road to self-discovery can be difficult. I had dinner with my friend, Michael, this week and we talked about how much effort and energy it takes to find the work we’re truly meant to do. It’s much easier to take what comes our way, but it’s another thing entirely seek out and fulfill a personal mission. It can feel risky to build our own road rather than travel the one laid out before us, though ultimately a truly fulfilling and extraordinary life is one we live by our own self-designed principles.
There will be a lot of rain that falls as we build our own road, one small brick at a time. The pace of progress, particularly in the beginning, can seem slow and frustrating. I encourage you to please keep going, keep seeking. This world needs the very best of each of us, and we owe it to ourselves in this lifetime to find out what it is we are meant to do. Building strength, courage, and skill takes time, but the rewards we can reap once we have them are invaluable. The rainbow is out there.
The photo above is a picture of a double-Rainbow I took at Disney World last month.
“Mistakes are not the “spice” of life. Mistakes are life. Mistakes are not to be tolerated. They are to be encouraged. (And, mostly, the bigger the better.)” ~ Tom Peters
How many adventures have been stopped in their tracks by the question, “What if I make a mistake?” How many dreams have died an untimely death? How many brilliant plans were left behind on the drawing board, never even getting a shot at the light of day? We hear so often that mistakes are our best teachers, that we learn more from failures than successes. So why don’t we celebrate mistakes? Why are we bent on telling people to always do what appears on the surface to be safe? Why does risk, any risk to any degree, have a negative connotation?
Here’s my advice on mistakes: start small with the aspiration to go big. I’d love to chuck caution to the wind, quit my job and do nothing but write and teach yoga. Truly, I’d wake up glowing every day, at least for the first week. And then I’d get nervous about money and I’d probably make some choices that compromise the work I really want to do with my yoga and my writing just to make ends meet. I’d likely save less, inhibiting my financial goals, and I wouldn’t be able to pay down my students loans as aggressively as I’d like to.
So my plan is to rent a small studio space once a week. The cash outlay isn’t much and I can rent week to week. I’m stepping up and out, taking some risk (mostly the potential of a very bruised ego if no one shows up to my class, which I can live with), and trying to strike out on my own in an authentic, meaningful way. I’m learning how to fly before jumping off the cliff. But don’t worry – I’m making my way to that cliff, and the moment I get a bit more confidence in my wings nothing will keep me from taking a running start right toward the edge.
Getting comfortable with risk, mistakes, and failure takes some time. Don’t beat yourself up for needing to take things slow. Inch your way to your edge. It’s a step-wise process. Go slowly, but earnestly. Rather than aiming higher for the sake of bigger successes, I’m going to focus on upping the anty and aiming for bigger mistakes. Thanks to Tom Peters for always encouraging us to jump right into the fray – it’s more fun in the fray than out of the fringe.
“If there is any kindness I can show, or any good thing I can do for any fellow being, let me do it now, and not deter or neglect it, as I shall not pass this way again.” ~ William Penn
“Mantras you shouldn’t say: I don’t know; I’m not ready; I can’t do it.” ~ Yogi Tea
I’ve made excuses for why I can’t do good now. I need more experience, education, money, time. Truthfully, we will never have all of the resources we think we need to get something done, and the other side to that truth is that we don’t need as much as we think we do. I spent a number of years thinking I didn’t have enough experience to offer to be a teacher. In my writing, I kept seeing my age as a limiting factor. “I need to wait until I really know more before I commit my beliefs to writing,” I would tell myself. The actual reason why I put off too many actions for far too long – I was scared I’d get it wrong.
And then I tried and did get it wrong, and the world didn’t end as I had feared. I got opportunities to try again, and again, and again. As long as I’ve been willing to put myself out there, the world has given me opportunities to keep trying. We lull ourselves into thinking we just aren’t ready, that we had better wait to realize our full potential until some magical time in the future when the stars will align right before our eyes.
By waiting, we deny ourselves the power to create and align our own stars. We need to stop focusing on what we need, and recognize all that we have. We need to understand that achievement is based not upon what we have but who we are, and right now, in this moment, we are enough and we are all we truly need to make good happen. Pick up those mantras of “I don’t know; I’m not ready; I can’t do it” and chuck them out the window in favor of the mantras “I’ll figure it out; now’s the time; let’s get going.”
I’m working my way through Cesar Milan’s book as Phin and I get to know each other. So much of the advice is counter-intuitive, though I can already see how helpful it is to see a dog as a dog, not as a person with fur. I’m so guilty of not learning that lesson sooner. I have always seen my dogs as people, and now I know why so many of them had issues of possession and anxiety. By letting dogs be dogs, they have so much to teach us about being human. By making them human, we miss out on their distinct sense of wisdom.
Dogs do not dwell on their pasts. They truly are creatures of the moment. Their existence is in the here and now. Certainly they develop habits and associations, but 99.9% of the time those habits and associations can be undone and replaced with others. Their degree resilience is enviable.
As a I read the section of Cesar Milan’s book about how dogs appreciate the persent, I thought about how much time people spend living in the past, incurring anxiety by situations that are long gone and will never be repeated. We relive disappointments, insecurities, and sadness of our past ad nauseam. We can’t let it go. Dogs let it all go. They care about what’s happening now, in this and every moment.
Imagine if we could do that as a way of life? Get up every day with a renewed sense of hope and happy anticipation. What if we could really leave our past behind us? Would our life experience be richer or poorer if we could set aside our past and our future and just love where we are right now?
I talked to Brian today about the idea of non-negotiables. Now that the summer is drawing to a close, I’m feeling some shifts in a number of areas of my life. It seems like every piece of ground is a little unstable, a little shaky. Not in a bad, or even uncomfortable, way. Just changing, again. Constant movement. Change opens the way for new beginnings, and Brian encouraged me to think about how I really want to shape this change by establishing my non-negotiables and putting them into action.
My friend, Kristen, is a numerologist and at the start of the year she told me 2010 would be an interesting year, one in which I would just have to hang on as the unexpected twists and turns cropped up fast and furious. She told me that just when I thought I had it all figured out, the year would show we that the unexpected was just over the horizon. I hoped that 2010 would be a time of rest and rejuvenation. And despite my best efforts to make it that way, 2010 has been all about growth and very little about rest. It’s what I needed – 8 months in I’m much stronger than I was at the start of the year.
With everything changing, Brian asked me to think about my non-negotiables in every area of my life: work, home, relationships, how I spend my time, and what I want to look back on my year having accomplished. I can easily tick off a list of things I do want in my life, things I don’t want in my life are more difficult to categorize. I recognize their importance; I understand that they help us to make better choices. But the piece I struggle with is that non-negotiables can lead us to close doors, to let go of certain opportunities. And I suppose a piece of me has a hard time letting go of opportunity; there is something nostalgic about possibility, even if that possibility is a long-shot.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be thinking about the idea of non-negotiables. What stays, what goes, and what needs some more evaluation. Have you been through this process of setting firm non-negotiables in any area of your life? I’d love to know how it went for you.
“A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”
Christa Avampato 