A very quiet month

As of today, It has been almost 5 weeks since I stopped teaching yoga in preparation for our coming child. I'm lucky enough to run my own business, which means that I make my own rules and can set whatever schedule I want. When I was pregnant with Isabella, I took a few weeks off before her due date, and I remembered clearly how appropriate that seemed at the time, how hard it was to haul myself around the studio demonstrating poses near the end. The time off seemed especially necessary this time, as I have even less time to rest these days (due to chasing Isabella around much of the time).



Accordingly, I stopped working over a month ago. Since then I have embraced a number of joyous and peaceful activities -

• Sleeping - 8 yrs every night, 1-2 hr nap every day




• Cooking, eating, and entertaining - I have been cooking up a storm, embracing these last few weeks when I can spend 3 hrs a night cooking gourmet (instead of later when I will be trying to shove a casserole in the oven with one hand while holding a nursing infant with the other arm). We recently held 6 dinner parties in 8 days (a record for us!). I've also made eclairs, cookies, banana bread, and several batches of homemade ice cream! It's been fun and delicious.




• Yoga and meditation - I've had extra time to sit in my open and sunny studio, gazing out the windows onto the distant Cascade mountains, meditating on how incredibly lucky I am in life.




• Long walks - to relax, get gentle exercise, and increase the downward flow (to encourage baby to move down)




• Acupuncture - 5 sessions in the last 3 weeks. Sessions were designed to increase downward flow, ripen the cervix, relieve pregnancy fatigue, and in general put me in a very Yin state. I have to say that I have felt absolutely fantastic after these sessions. Who wants to give me $3500 a year to get acupuncture every week on an on-going basis? :)




• Continued Isabella joy - Nothing new here, just the usual wonderful mommie-daughter sweetness. This has included our usual zoo trips, bus rides to Pike Place, long playful baths, excursions to various parks, adventures in cooking together, and shopping at her favorite store (Value Village). I've been soaking up every sweet moment I can, as pretty soon it won't be just she and I.




• Time with my beloved John - John and I have had lots of date nights (thanks, Mary!), and extra time to sit around and leisurely chat in the evenings after Isabella goes to bed. I have been reminded over and over again how much I love spending time with my husband and how much I look forward to spending the rest of my life with him.

So in summary, it has been a very peaceful and indulgent month. At the same time, I have begun to remember why life isn't like this all the time. Surprise, surprise - I miss working. I didn't miss it right away, of course. The first few weeks were such a breath of fresh air - the extra sleep, the time to prepare for the coming baby, the additional frolicking in the sunshine. I even had brief moments of wondering - should I even go back to work after this baby is born? Rest assured, these crazy thoughts went away by week 4. I began to get a little restless and began to feel the need to bite into some sort of project. I found myself browsing MIT's Open Courseware site and downloaded the program for an Economics course. I found myself spending even more time than usual pondering career ideas for the future (I'll always teach yoga, but once the kids are in school I want a 2nd part time job to use different parts of my brain). I spent even more time than usual discussing lesson plans with the teachers that teach in my studio. I even caught up on a million house projects - cleaned out closets, filed a years worth of random bills and papers, reorganized the kitchen, etc. In short - I realized that I like having a lot to do!

By week 4, I said to John "Um, I'm kinda bored. I don't think I was meant to be a full time mom and housewife." He laughed for a LONG time and said "I was wondering how many weeks it would take before you said that!" I have to say, it's nice to be married to someone who really knows me and accepts me the way I am.

Around the same time, I was chatting online with someone who asked me if life was slowing down yet, to which I said something like "Well, I'm not working now so my yoga schedule has slowed down, but I've been throwing a million dinner parties and embracing some house projects, so things aren't slowing down overall. I'm not sure I know how to not be busy!" To which this person said that was where my yoga had something to teach me, that "To experience joy without being busy is a real gift. That is when the joy comes from within."

Wow, so besides the, um, awkwardness of someone who doesn't do yoga telling me what my yoga can teach me (after 10 years of intense practice and many huge changes), this comment inspired me to post about something I think about all the time - joy. Of course, the pursuit of joy and happiness is a topic that one could write volumes on. For now I will just write a few words.

It used to be that I truly didn't know how to not be busy. Not in the way I mention above, but in an anxious and unhealthy way. When I was at MIT and Microsoft I worked ALL the time. If I wasn't working, I was partying hard - drinking and dancing all night. I simply didn't know how to do anything that wasn't intense, had zero ability to smell the roses in life. I remember taking vacations at times and getting very anxious after a few days, as I couldn't handle the time off, as I truly didn't know how to relax. This lifestyle led to many health issues and eventually led me to chuck it all and take a year off to travel around the world by myself. The decision to walk away from all the success, money, praise, and glory was the best decision I ever made, and was the beginning of huge and wonderful changes in my life.

The first place I began to truly relax was Thailand. I spent 6 weeks there, the first 2 of which were on a quiet beach on the island of Kho Pha Ngan. I would wake up in my bamboo hut, have some breakfast, do yoga on the beach, lay in the sun under palm fronds, swing in the hammock on the porch of my hut, swim, and drink fresh pineapple smoothies at a bamboo hut called the Chai Bar. In short, I had found peace. I remember feeling that time had turned from discrete chunks into one continuous thread. On that island I watched, listened, felt, and simply was.

My travels continued on to include time in Northern Thailand taking a 1wk massage course, time in India doing a 1 month yoga course, time in Spain to take some intensive Spanish classes, and many other places in between. Mostly, though, I walked around the world, watched the people, sat in parks, thought a lot of deep thoughts, and learned to smell the roses.

Eventually, I decided I wanted to be grounded in a home again. So I returned to Seattle and bought a small 860 sq foot house in which I lived alone. I then spent a few months just enjoying this rootedness. I spent time with friends, spent hours upon hours learning to cook fabulous Indian and Thai food, spent 2 intense weeks sewing my own light up Halloween costume, did a ton of yoga, and in general just enjoyed doing as I pleased.

After over a year off work, I began to feel a desire to do more, to find more structure in life. I had experienced 2 extremes - working all the time for many years, and then a year of complete leisure. At the end of the day, my system craved some sort of balance. I felt a strong pull to contribute more to society, to interact more with my community, to (gasp!) find a job! For better or worse, some people at Microsoft caught wind of the fact that I was looking and offered me some jobs that were too hard to turn down. So I went back to Microsoft, and then after a few months found that I was laughing at myself for being so foolish. Don't get me wrong, Microsoft is a wonderful place and I couldn't be more grateful for the opportunities I was given there. I realized, however, that Microsoft could only help me to grow in ways that I was already fairly strong, and that I couldn't be at Microsoft if I was to evolve in the ways I truly needed to evolve as a human being. It was like a light bulb going on - a clear message that I needed to continue to focus on becoming more loving, more compassionate, listening better, and in short - becoming more human.

So I decided to become a yoga teacher. I started my own business and enrolled in a bunch of incredible trainings. I was able to support myself modestly fairly quickly and found a sweet balance of working some, practicing some, relaxing a lot. I still had time to go for long walks, meditate, cook, see friends, sleep, and advance my asana practice. I continued this lifestyle through meeting my wonderful husband, John. We eventually married, got pregnant, built a new yoga studio, and had a child, during which time I continued to teach yoga part time. John and I decided that we didn't want to use child care, so I adjusted my business so that I was only working when he wasn't working (so that once of us could always be with Isabella). This meant that I taught on weekends, in the evenings, and the early mornings before he went to work. It was, and is, busy, often leaving me tired, but always happy.

So this brings some questions - If one is busy and sometimes tired, can one truly have a joyous life? What does it mean to enjoy fullness in life? Can one enjoy a full and busy life but still know how to stop and smell the roses?

In short, I believe that there is nothing wrong with craving fullness in life, with having a strong drive to contribute to society, with loving complex projects, with being busy. The catch, however, is that one needs to maintain the ability to pause, to look, to listen, and to feel. I used to completely lack this ability. These days although I am very busy, I still enjoy very very sweet chunks of time meditating in my yoga studio, watching my daughter play in the sunshine, and sitting in the woods all alone. I have especially enjoyed getting into camping and hiking over the last few years. My favorite part of nature is when I go off by myself, sit cross legged between some trees, and listen to the birds for an hour or so. One time I found myself meditating against a very old tree, feeling it's energy and wisdom, communicating with it in a way I cannot explain.

When I emerge from my yoga studio, or the woods, or the backyard and enter the real world again, life is indeed busy and full. I don't always sleep a lot, but damn I'm happy. I have come to accept that part of being Holly is expressing my passion for life, engaging with the community around me, organizing interesting projects, and throwing fabulous dinner parties. Of course, part of being me is also knowing that I absolutely must find quiet time to balance out the business.

So can one be very busy, often tired, and still joyous? I think so. Of course, I still have much evolution to do in life, so who knows, I may change my mind later. But for now, I'm enjoying the journey.