Mic Check One, Two

And now, for something slightly different...

NAMASTE!

Thank You, Captain Obvious.

Image by Hello Turkey Toe, courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons

It takes quite a bit of work inside our cerebral powerhouses to actually produce a single thought. Yes, even those occasional impulsive outbursts, even those moments of vacuous nothingness eat up a lot of energy. In fact, our brains use more energy than any organ in the body, utilizing about 20% of our total (thanks, Scientific American). Most of this energy is devoted to just keeping our brain's cells functioning.

Feeling a bit like a dirty dog lately?

That's a lot of energy to wrangle. Indeed, as B.K.S. Iyengar says, "The brain is the hardest part of the body to adjust." Well, I most certainly could use a brain adjustment. It's been exceedingly difficult to get it going at full steam these days. I guess this thought train departed from Disappointment Station, wherein we turned our heads for just a second, and somebody stole our "Perfect Schedule/Routine/Organization/Motivation" luggage. You see, for some time we had a great routine established where we managed to get in yoga, surfing, swimming, running, hiking, gardening, waking early, working, cleaning, and general life organization on a regular basis. Then we went on a longish vacation and obliterated any trace of that routine (see here). We recovered from that fairly well while we were moving to a new house. Then we had some visitors for a week, and adopted a puppy, and somehow we reverted back to our caveman brains. We let our diet go to crap, we don't get up early anymore, we haven't been to the beach very much, our work:play ratio is completely out of balance, organization has become a four-letter word, getting up early is horrifically hard, and I don't even want to say how long it's been since we surfed. Sheesh.

The picture of our yoga practice: sleepy and strewn about. ;)

I started to succumb to dismay at how easily we're sidetracked from our "yoga-fied life" ideals. Like Mr. Iyengar says, "Change leads to disappointment if it is not sustained. Transformation is sustained change, and it is achieved through practice." So I guess this means we're still in that process of transforming our lives into the elevated ideals which we seek, lagging behind due to sluggish practice. Thank you, Captain Obvious. I'm cognizant of the fact that we will always be working to improve our quality of life. I already know what we want to be doing, and where we're headed. The disappointment comes when I feel we've backtracked, or when I start to become fixated on reaching some mythical finish line. In this particular instance, I'd say we're definitely in backtrack territory.

First family hike... baby steps.

So, when this happens we regroup and take baby steps to start moving forward on the path again. Take, for example, this past weekend. Despite feeling pretty low on the energy scale, we managed to get in some beach time, some hiking, some cooking and eating at home, some garden time, some budget work, and of course some yoga. Now, that's a pretty darn good weekend! So I was flying high, patting myself on the back. But wait, then I got a massive headache. What the...? I was totally taken down by one of those headaches that lasted all through the night and into the next morning. Hmmm. That doesn't seem right, we had a great weekend. I should be feeling great, right? After a few moments wallowing in my confusion, Scott made a sideways mention of going into the yoga room. Of course! Why didn't I think of that? Why do I practice all this yoga if I'm not going to use it to help me when I feel like crap? Again, thank you, Captain Obvious. This is what I meant when I said my brain hasn't exactly been running on all cylinders lately.

I don't guess it'll spoil the ending for you if I tell you I felt quite a bit better after some yoga. It's a shame that it took a headache to get me moving forward again, but I guess it could've been a lot worse. It's so easy at times to become dismayed at not being perfect, not having the perfect pose, not eating the perfect foods, not having perfect finances, or not living our lives as perfectly as we'd like. I've been so anxious to be where I want to be now, rather than being where I am now. Mr. Iyengar again (it's an Iyengar-kind-of-day, I guess), puts it so well, "Let the goal be to reach Perfection, but be content with a little progress toward perfection every day." Actually, I'd like to amend that a bit. Perhaps I can delight that a little progress toward perfection every day is quite perfect in and of itself. Just keep practicing, yogis & yoginis!

NAMASTE!

People Should Get Paid To Do That.

Yoda & the ragtag crew on tour.

I'm referring to playing Tour Guide, of course. We just had a lovely, adventure-packed week with some family from the mainland. While we had a great time, we are also happy to settle down again, put our house back together, and get back to whatever "normal" life we have. So, while we take a moment to regain our composure, I'd like to share some fun yoga news with you. Perhaps we'll see you at one of these upcoming special events!

First, I'll be teaching a 5 week series of Gentle and Restorative yoga classes at Island Spirit Yoga in Lahaina, beginning April 27th and ending May 27th. We'll have Weally Welaxing Wednesdays ;) with Restorative Yoga 6-7:30pm. Thursday mornings we'll move through a Gentle Flow from 10:30-noon. Then we close out the work week with an Aloha Friday Gentle Yoga class 9-10:30am. The entire schedule is laid out in the sidebar under "Yoga with Jean Marie." Some of our teachers will be on retreat in Italy, and these classes have been trusted to my care. All of the classes are appropriate for all levels, and are likely to leave you feeling very warm and fuzzy. Come check it out!

Speaking of retreats in Italy, my dear teacher, Dominique Pandolfi, is leading 3 retreats this summer: one in Mallorca, Spain and two in Italy. She, along with Jen Weller & Chelsea Hill , will take you on a transformative journey, weaving yoga, meditation, language, & culture together in the retreat of your dreams! Visit their website for more information: www.livingdreamretreats.com, or call Chelsea at 808-357-9591. Tell them Jean Marie sent you! More information from the lovely ladies themselves:

That's about all for now, yogis & yoginis. Stay tuned for more updates, including happenings around the garden... I feel a breaking of the ground coming! I'll leave you this week with a gratuitous puppy shot, and a passage from Jack Kornfield that I've been sharing with my classes. I hope it has as much resonance with you as it does with me:

"In this way, meditation is very much like training a puppy. You put the puppy down and say, 'Stay.' Does the puppy listen? It gets up and it runs away. You sit the puppy back down again. 'Stay.' And the puppy runs away over and over again. Sometimes the puppy jumps up, runs over, and pees in the corner or makes some other mess. Our minds are much the same as the puppy, only they create even bigger messes. In training the mind, or the puppy, we have to start over and over again." (from A Path With Heart, p. 59)

NAMASTE!

Small, Furry Coup d'Etat

Introducing: Yoda Nalu!

I've been sitting here for some time now trying to come up with a blog post for this week, and coming up blank. Well, not necessarily blank so much as distracted. Surprisingly, I've found it challenging to focus on anything for the last 5 days besides PUPPY. This small, furry, funny-looking 8-week-old dog-creature has managed to invade our home, take whatever semblance of an organized life we had, and turn it completely upside down. It is quite possibly the swiftest coup d'etat ever carried out by a being bearing baby teeth. 

So, I thought, if I can't think of anything besides what this little guy is doing, I might as well give the newest member of the Infinity Crossing team a proper introduction. His name is Yoda Nalu, he's the product of a heeler/pointer mother & a maltese/shih-tzu father (the logistics of which must have been impressive), and he's pretty awesome. Though we've been around him and his litter mates since they were just 1 week old, we still have a lot of acquainting to do. We have no idea how he'll wind up looking, but we're guessing he might grow to 20 lbs. Aside from being the cutest fur-ball ever, his most dominating trait at the moment is unfathomable energy.

Representing Maui Runners Club, in all it's glory...

It's all smiles and wiggles: what a great teacher!

Yoda has much training to do to develop the Master that lies within, and he's eagerly started on the path. Today, for instance, we brought him along with us for our 5k fun run on the beach in Kihei, as part of the Valley to the Sea race. We thought we'd carry him for much of the race, letting him run as he wanted, and walk as he wanted. This was to be his first introduction to the beach and first time around a lot of people. So, we planned to play it safe. Well, we were floored when our mild-mannered little puppy took off at a nice trot on the beach, staying right beside us as we baby-trotted along for nearly the entire 5k! We stopped to rest and drink water at the half-way mark, and tried to carry him or walk him, but he just rocked his puppy trot all the way through the finish line. I think we even managed to finish before some of the 10k runners! I do realize this was an awful lot of activity for a little puppy, and we won't be running any distances like that again soon. This was an exception for an event planned long ago, and it was a marvel to see how he literally took it in stride. In case you're wondering how all this activity affected him: a brief morning nap was all it took to fully power back up, and this puppy was even more rambunctious the rest of the day than he's been yet! Makes me feel old.

Does any of this relate to yoga? Of course, it does! Firstly, I'd like to point out that the couple of times I've been able to get him in the yoga room with me for long enough to start "aums" he's settled down relatively quickly into a nice mellow nap while I whip out as many asanas as I can before he wakes up. Aums definitely get his attention! Perhaps Yoda will be a great yoga dog, after all... Secondly, I'm getting a crash course in highly improvisational yoga. With a puppy constantly swinging between 0-100mph, I'm forced to grab yoga wherever and whenever I can sneak it in. Temporarily gone are the sweet days of getting up early and diving straight into hours of yoga. Now, we get up and "go potty," followed by a puppy playtime of indefinite duration. Yoga must now form strands that interweave themselves into the day, forming a beautiful tapestry out of chaotic threads. This is a blatant reminder of our essential mission: to yoga-fy everything we do by sprinkling yoga (be it physical, mental, spiritual, or metaphorical) onto all the fibers of our existence. Thanks for the lesson, Yoda! This is shaping up to be a beautiful partnership...

NAMASTE!

New Brain Food!

I'm very excited because a new book arrived at my doorstep today: Iyengar Yoga for Motherhood. I've been heavily anticipating this book's arrival for a couple of weeks now. As a 200 hour certified yoga teacher, I've had some training in the basics of pre & postnatal yoga. Yet, this really only covered some general rules of thumb about what to teach (and avoid teaching) when a pregnant woman shows up in a regular asana class. For example, standing poses are good while backbends and twists are not necessarily best. Or, it's not a good idea to teach kapalabhati but an emphasis on ujjayi breathing is great. These are pretty basic concepts, and have certainly proven valuable to me in my relatively short time as a yoga teacher. However, I've had enough encounters with pregnant women either in my classes or asking me about yoga to become painfully aware of just how infantile my knowledge in this area remains. There is a distinct lack of prenatal yoga on the island for my study purposes, and my personal experience with pregnancy is only through second-hand stories of its trials and triumphs. So, when all else fails, I turn to the internet!

Researching great books for yoga and pregnancy turned up Geeta Iyengar's book. Seeing as how I cherish her father's books as indispensable to my daily practice, I figured her book would be a pretty good starting point in this quest. So far, it looks like I scored a winner with this selection. First, it's huge! It's a very large hardcover book, numbering 443 pages from cover to cover. Topics include: yoga & Ayurvedic philosophy, preparation for pregnancy, asana descriptions & sequences for all levels and stages of pregnancy, pranayama, post-delivery practices, anatomy, & Ayurvedic health tips, including menus & massage. The photographic illustrations are abundant & clear. The size of the book and illustrations make it easy to practice alongside. In short, the mountain of information in this manual constitutes a full-length course in and of itself. It's going to take me some time to absorb it all. As a teacher, I'm incredibly pleased with this book as a reference guide to assist me in learning more about yoga for those beautiful pregnant women in my life and who come to my classes. On first glance alone, I can highly recommend this book for anyone with a curiosity or need for more in-depth information about yoga & pregnancy. Until next time...

NAMASTE!

Energy Flows Where Attention Goes

Image from NOAA, courtesy of Hawaii News Daily

Things are settling down here on Maui after our long, and thankfully uneventful, tsunami watch Thursday night into Friday morning. Our prayers for protection and comfort go out to the people in Japan, struggling with the aftermath, and ongoing dangers, of the earthquakes and tsunami.

Lower Waiehu, on Maui. Image from Haley @ Green Plate Dinners

Among the Hawaiian islands, it seems that Maui and Big Island met the largest of the tsunami surge: 7 ft at Kahului Harbor and 11 ft at Kealakekua Bay on the Big Island. There was noticeable flooding along the coasts here on Maui, with ponding along coast highways, widespread debris, and some damage to coastal homes. We're told the water came in several city blocks in Kahului. Boat and harbor damage seems to be the most costly from what we've heard. All in all, we really dodged a bullet, considering what reasonably could have come our way.

MFD rescues a stranded honu. Image from Haley @ Green Plate Dinners

As we watched the outside world from the comfort of our new home, which happens to be well outside the evacuation zone, we reflected with great gratitude upon where our attention and energy had led us. This time last year, with a tsunami warning from the Chilean earthquake, we had to pack our worldly belongings and haul up the mountain, then anxiously wait to see if our home and the rest of the coastline would be spared mother nature's wrath. We love our new home, but we discovered even more love for it Thursday night!

Photo by Jen Fry

All of this further solidifies my resolve for the work we do. The essence of working to yoga-fy our lives lies in focusing our attention on manifesting a peaceful, loving energy within and around us. This means that everything we do strives to be aligned with positivity, peace, and love. Of course, things don't always line up the way we intend, for whatever reason, be it of internal origin or from larger forces. It seems that what ultimately matters through these fluctuations is the energy we continue to generate in our own beings. Whether we're responding to the forces of mother nature, or actively creating in the world around us, fueling our thoughts and actions with compassion and love automatically unites us with yoga. This world and everything in it is made of energy. Just look at the image of the tsunami spreading through the ocean to see energy at work before your very eyes. If we think about it, we can all find examples of how we've used our focused attention to guide the energy around us towards good things, even great things. As someone once said, "energy flows where our attention goes." So, what are we waiting for?

NAMASTE

"There" Is Now "Here"

Hello, new house.

I'm just going to come out and say it: I'm so very ashamed that it's been a whole month since I last posted on the blog. While I accept responsibility for diving into a time warp, I also blame it on that house! You see, we've been in the process of a long, slow, tortoise-like move from Paia to Haiku, HI. While it has, at times, been arduous, this move is ultimately an integral part of our yoga-fied lifestyle path. It also just so happens to be driving us nicely along towards our goal for this year of improving the quality of our surroundings.

Finally, a real kitchen for that fancy vegan cooking we want to do!

And things are indeed improving! This lovely house is very cute, full of good energy, and provides us with exactly the balance of privacy, nature, and convenience to society that we need for this year of business-building and lifestyle-upgrading. Along the same lines, we've invested quite a bit of time (and money) into upgrading our household stock. While this has made the move very drawn out (we're still not fully settled), it has taken us huge leaps forward in the quality of our surroundings, keeping those all-important goals in mind. For all that we've done well, I will say that the next time I move, I'd like to hire movers so we don't wind up digging out of a haphazardly moved mountain of personal belongings! That's just another improvement we can work on, though I'd rather not have reason to work on it for another few years...

Want Yoga? Super Yogis Jean Marie & Scott will fly in to save the day!

So what does all this mean for ICY? Well, we no longer have our ICY Paia Studio, and our new home, while fabulous, is ill-suited for the business of teaching yoga. This just means that if you'd like to schedule a private lesson with me or Scott, we'll be meeting in a mutually accessible yoga space on the island instead of our private studio space. This actually opens us up to come to you! So if you want to inquire about scheduling private yoga instruction with us, please call 808-463-9413 or email jeanmarie@infinitycrossing.com. We'll work with you to decide on a location, time, and rate that's most harmonious!

This also means that big changes will need to happen at infinitycrossing.com. Beyond the basic changes involving our move from the ICY Paia studio, we are almost ready to release some new product lines, which I can't tell you about just yet. They'll have to speak for themselves! We also have that brand new set of photos ready! I've posted some here on the blog, but you can preview the full collection on our Facebook page, and soon we'll release them on the website as well.

Pots, pots, and more pots!

And of course, there's the garden! I carted a full truckload of plants from the old house to the new. I was hopeful they wouldn't experience too much shock because of the change in climate. At the new house we have slightly cooler temperatures accompanied by much more moisture. My plants have absolutely loved it here from the moment they arrived! Of course, it probably helped that I fortified their move by feeding them all some worm castings and compost tea.
I'm going to keep several large planters by the lanai for my easy-access edible herbs. I'll also keep lots of ornamentals potted on the lanai. The new garden space is just around the trees, and needs loads of work! A new post on The Garden page is forthcoming, where I'll go into greater detail, for all you green (or brown) thumbs out there...

So, I think that's all for now. I have a rumbling volcano of work to soothe in the coming days, so keep your eyes on the blog. Even in all the chaos that was February, we kept our twitter account @InfinityXing up to date every single day. So if you want the latest "Yoga-fy Your Life Tip of the Day" or just want to know what we're up to, twitter is where we're at! Again, for those of you who can't stomach the "tweeting thing," our daily tweets go straight to our Facebook page, so "Like" us there and you won't miss a beat. Many mahalos for tuning in to Infinity Crossing, in whatever manifestation you choose. As always, yogis and yoginis, keep smiling, laughing, and spreading the NAMASTE!