enlightment

We recently got a lower price on cable (which is still grossly overpriced if you ask me, but I can't fully convince myself that we don't need it... yet) and as part of the deal they threw in 3 free years of Starz.  I was kind of annoyed, as I'd rather not pay so much and I'd gladly give them back their movie channels, but I've found myself pleasantly surprised by the ability to watch bits and pieces of movies that I liked.

The other night we caught the end of Eat, Pray, Love.  The book is one of my favorites and I'm currently re-reading it for a second time.  The movie was a little "eh" because they left out so many great parts and concentrated way too much on her failed marriage but it was Saturday night and we were both exhausted at  9:30 or so and figured it would be a good way to wind down (WILD AND CRAZY TIMES HERE AT THE NARD HOUSE! staying up til 10 on a Saturday! WHOA, SLOW DOWN!).  And at the end she was with her Brazilian dude in a market in Bali and in his heavily accented English they were talking about what he referred to as the enlightment and she made fun of him for missing a syllable.

Sorry, all of that was really neither here nor there but I found it funny because I'm having so many of my own "enlightment" moments right now, both mentally and in my physical body.  Turns out I've been doing crunches wrong my whole life and it explains why my belly tends to puff outward (it does not explain the layers of chub that sit above my abs but that's just something to work on).  Crunches are WAY HARDER when you actually do them right.

I went to a workshop on Sunday morning for teacher training that was amazing.  I hate to be all clique and call it life-changing but it did change the way I see my yoga practice in relation to the things going on in my life.  I have kind of come to a point where everything is coming full circle for me.  The hours I spend in personal practice, all the hard work that is changing my body and mind, the cadaver lab, the anatomy classes, the workshops, the lectures, my personal experiences in therapy:  it's all coming together now and making sense.  I hope I'm able to share this with others when I'm done with training as well as others have shared their talents and gifts with me.  I'm not sure if I can adequately explain how I felt during and after the workshop in particular but I will say that I have always had trouble with the meditation aspect of yoga and some of the spiritual sides of practice.  After spending two and a half hours in intense self-study like that, I have a new found confidence that I can get better at meditation and yoga spirituality as I go and with steady practice (this is exactly why yoga is called practice, because it will always be imperfect, there is always another edge to find, pose to work on or level of consciousness to reach).  There was a part where we were instructed to journal about our relationship to grief and sadness (and I know I sound like a total new age hippie now but I promise, I'm still 100% the same) and it touched me that we would be talking about something that I have been dealing with and working through for the last seven months.  It brought a tear to my eyes, just one, mostly because it was powerful in the way that writing down my feelings in the journal felt.  I think I'll probably look at that Sunday morning in a room with 10 or so other people, chanting, meditating, singing, practicing and writing about our feelings as a turning point in my grieving.  I know that time has helped to heal the wound but all of the self-reflection that I'm doing every day has been speeding things along quite nicely.  And now I need to wipe the one tear that's reached my eyes in writing this post.  I promise the tear is only because I'm starting to feel like I'm healing from the inside out, and I think that is my biggest enlightment.