All This For Downward Facing Dog with Christie at 808 Wellness: Kihei, Maui, HI: January 28, 2019

Einstein was a rock star. “Chance favors the prepared” he says.

I've been practicing with Christy every Monday this winter. Her sweet yoga helped prepare me for the class I taught, directly after hers. Now I'm finished with my winter teaching, I began to ask myself, what is the yoga preparing me for now?

Today Christy took almost the entire first half of her class to prepare us for Downward Facing Dog, a pose I know well, I've practiced a gazillion times. With deep preparation the pose felt fresh, new, more expansive. I began to notice deeper subtle nuances of yoga, while one part is stretching in one direction, another stretches in its opposite. Paying attention to the dual direction was helpful in deepening the pose. In the same way I'm hoping my time on Maui will help propel me to deeper expansion in my tour life. I feel Maui more my spiritual home, but my life on tour my material home. It affords me the ability to rest on Maui months at a time.

Given I want to spend more time on Maui necessarily points to increasing my material juice on tour. I've been preparing for my book proposal, I'm lining up a launch of a podcast, but more importantly I've done my best to clear myself energetically of things holding me back at a deeper level, you know, the same ol' chesnuts that hold us small, like fear, unworthiness, worry, doubt, sadness, laziness. There are others of course but these are the particular demons that haunt me, even in the middle of the peaceful Maui night when I wake up in the dark. I listen to the flutter of the palm trees and the distant sound of the ocean waves to lull me back to sleep, sweeping with it the particular flavor of discomfort. I've spent some time with these dark energies this winter, getting to know them, not by pushing them away, but snuggling up closer. When you welcome things in, like take a sit down with them and a great cup a green tea, they don’t seem so scary. They don’t seem so true.

I wish Maui was my permanent home, but its not possible at the moment. I wish I had a bigger bank account, I wish I had the body of a thirtysomething. A shift has occured this winter, though. Instead of being angry and unempowered, I feel energized and purposeful. I can't make this happen over night, but I can begin to prepare the way. Einstein said, "chance favors the prepared", and the spiritual texts would agree. The yamas and niyamas, for example, prepare us for yoga like little hamstring stretch prepares us for downdog.

Underneath it all, what I really want is peace and love. So it seems to be at peace in the leaving and love my life away from Maui is the best preparation of all for my return to her. Its more difficult than it sounds so in the meantime, I'll spend some time in downward facing dog.

Health, Love, and Rock N Roll