When I drive home from the Denver studio, I take the same path. Every time. Every day.
Next-to-furthest-left lane until I take the first necessary right turn… third lane over which turns into a turn-lane-only that takes me directly to where I need to go.
Every time, I dodge, swerve, barely miss and sometimes hit the same dozen potholes.
I always curse and hold my breath, wishing away the rough BUMP. I should have seen those coming, I think to myself. I know those are going to be there.
Each drive home, I maneuver – sometimes with less grace than other times. Keeping an eye out for impending opportunities for flat-tire-disasters.
It finally hit me last week.
There are a zillion different ways to get home. And of the streets that I DO take home, it’s only the specific lane that I’m in that have all the stinkin’ potholes.
protect your wheels. (Ha!!)
Sure, I could keep going the exact same path because it’s familiar, it’s habit, it’s comfortable and requires less inclination to adventure outside of my comfort zone – or I could change it up.
Maybe it’s me who is driving myself into these rough spots. Maybe it’s time to try a different path. Maybe I don’t have to face the same demons over and over again by subjecting myself to cross paths with them.
Inevitably, there will be a pothole or two your journey. But if you could literally choose whether to take the disastrously bumpy road that you’ve been down a million times or the road that has been freshly paved and still serves your ultimate journey… doesn’t it seem obvious that you are the one who can make a change here?
It was Ash Wednesday in Dublin, Ireland where I was attending school for a semester in college and two of my Catholic friends had invited me to Mass. I’ve always been mystified by Catholic practices and was secretly jealous of all the folks who had already had ash smudged on their foreheads that morning, so I decided to go as a means to seek out adventure (it was a slow day). After all, I was attending a Catholic College (in Ireland… big surprise, I know…)
I filed into the red velvet covered pew between my two friends, Ania from Poland and Cecile, a fellow Coloradoan. I stood up when they did, sat down when they did, knelt and tried to mimic every hand gesture and obediently murmur every reply the congregation did. I’d be damned if I was going to let anyone in that church know I didn’t know what the heck what going on. And all in all, I thought I was doing a great job.
When time came for communion, I was swept away by the river of participants, stiffly filed after Ania and before Cecile. The nun blessed me as she dipped her finger in ash and schmeared a cross in the center of my forehead. I kept firm eye contact the whole time, determined to not give away my cluelessness. I crossed to the old Father, who gave me the body of Christ himself.
“Bless you, my child,” he croaked to me.
“Thank you,” I replied, as if I had sneezed.
I wrapped my fingers around the little wafer and began to make the crowded walk back to my seat. Cecile rushed down the aisle after me and grabbed my arm.
“Have you taken your First Sacrament?” she whisper-hissed. My oblivious blank stare was enough of an answer. “Oh my god. You should not have even gone up there.”
I opened my mouth, desperately searching for a response and realizing I was totally in trouble. “Do not put that in your mouth, Elle. Do NOT.”
I could feel all the blood drain from my face. I sat through the rest of the sermon with my fingers delicately wrapped around the holy cracker, trying to softly balance it in a way that wouldn’t make it obvious that I was still harboring the body of sweet Jesus. I prayed to stop sweating, doing everything I could to try and keep the piece of peace from getting all soggy in my palm.
When the service finished with its ultimate Amen, I rushed out of the chapel as quickly as I could for fear of Cecile’s scolding. What was I supposed to do? I in no way had meant any disrespect to the ancient tradition – I had found the sacred ritual fascinating and really wanted to participate.
I could imagine walking back up to the priest; “Excuse me, Father. Um, hi. Hey, look, thank you so much for sharing the body of God’s only son with me but I can’t really accept this. See, I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to take it… long story short, it’s really soggy and I wouldn’t recommend putting it back in the dish for the next mass, but I just wanted you to know I was completely clueless and shouldn’t have taken this. Oh hey, so do you need to wipe off the ash on my forehead now, too? Can we use holy water for that, or should I just go wash my face at home…?”
So I did what any good, God-fearing woman would do – avoided eye contact with everyone I passed on my way back to the dorm and locked myself in my bedroom, waiting to see if I would be smote down.
Until I remembered that I don’t fear God. I sat at my desk and placed the divine loaf in front of me. What was I supposed to do with this now? I certainly wasn’t going to eat it even in the privacy of my own room because now I feared showing some level of disrespect. And throwing it in the trash was absolutely out of the question – Maria, the surely Catholic housekeeper would surely recognize it when she came to clear the rubbish in the morning. It’d be the friggen Spanish inquisition.
I looked down at Jesus sitting on my desk. He looked up with me, curious to see my next move. Who could I call on in this, my time of need?
Then I remembered that my cousin had been on a wide-ranged spiritual search in her life. She was reading a number of religious texts, studying a number of spiritual practices… sure she’d know what to do about this whole ordeal.
So I packed Jesus up in the day before’s Irish Post and shipped him Par Avon across the Atlantic to Kansas City for my cousin to deal with.
Ultimately, life is not about the specific religious practices you subscribe to – but rather about those who support you completely in the search for your own heart… and the way you do the same for those you love.
Below is an excerpt from my first post on elephantjournal.com! They posed the question, “What does the Divine mean to you?” …and never one to just NOT answer a question… I did…
“Religion is for people afraid of going to hell. Spirituality is for people who have been there.” -A bumper sticker, as tweeted by a friend of a friend.
In a place like Boulder, there is undoubtedly no shortage of opportunities to experience the most way-out-there of spiritual practices with a bunch of tie-dyed nut-jobs.
Was that too harsh?
…follow here to read the rest of my post on Elephantjournal.com!
my visit to Kyle in Oahu in 2005
I walked into the studio after teaching my 8:30 am class at om time Boulder this morning to this text message waiting for me on my Blackberry from my dear buddy Kyle.
“So I had this dream last night, you were in it. You asked me to get some hand sanitizer, so I got up out of bed. Then I realized it was just a dream and cursed… then I went back to bed and when I started to dream again, you were laughing hysterically at me.”
I like to think of myself as the kind of friend who endlessly laughs and lovingly teases those I care most about. But I had no idea that my friendship could transcend the boundaries of sleep!
One of my students is a sweet man whose early onset Parkinson’s symptoms are increasing. Instead of waiting quietly for the symptoms to take over his life, he has taken a very inspiring approach of radical participation in his own life. He remains very active as a means of keeping his mind connected to the space of his own skin. He practices yoga, plays squash and is always mentioning in passing a number of other activities he completed since the last time I’ve seen him in class.
The other night he said that after his most recent visit to the neurologist, he has been practicing smiling.
“Most of the time, I don’t realize that I’m not smiling,” he said to me, then paused to think. He looked up at me and flashed me a beautiful, full-on smile.
It looked good on him, that whole-hearted smile. It was completely contagious, too.
That smile has got me thinking – how hard is it to smile a lot of the time? I like to play a game of “smile at passers-by” while walking down the sidewalk. And it’s quite possibly one of the most difficult things for me to do. Sharing a smile with a stranger is very intimate and uncomfortable, especially if you are not necessarily feeling particularly jolly that day.
Smiling in front of a camera is nearly impossible for millions of folks. Last Friday at öm time Denver, Peggy Dyer of One Million Faces photographed 139 different faces that came through the studio. Peggy has a way of putting even unwilling participants completely at ease on the other side of the camera lense – but even with so many faces, there were so many more who flat-out refused to have their picture taken. Some people were even a little snippy when I tried to charm them into participating. There was absolutely no way they would get in front of a camera and share their smile with the world.
Smile. Do it – right now. What does it feel like to smile at your computer? Anyone who watches me reply to emails knows that I smile silently to the person I am emailing. It is my way of making sure my response is genuine.
Why is smiling so hard? What are you afraid you’ll say with your smile that you wouldn’t want a stranger to know? Feel joy on the outside by connecting from the inside and make yourself vulnerable enough to give others permission to smile back.
The greatest feeling in the world is when I pass someone on the street and they smile so genuinely at me that it catches me off guard – and I blush and giggle the whole rest of my walk.
Dear Muse,
Hi, how are you?
…boy, this is awkward…
Look, I really want to apologize for not recognizing you. That must have made you really feel like shit. But I want you to know how much it means to me to know you just played along that whole time. You didn’t try to prove me wrong and you didn’t screw with my head like you could have and I appreciate you not taking advantage of me.
All along, I was afraid you’d leave me, and I didn’t realize you ARE me; my breath, my passion and my spark.
I feared your voice was tainted and your opinions were set to misguide me, and I’m sorry I told you to put a sock in it. I didn’t realize it really was YOU being genuine – I thought you were the whispers of someone else trying to trick me.
I haven’t been able to look you in the face for ages. In fact, it’s been so long that I fear I wouldn’t even be able to pick out your face in a crowd. And I’m embarrassed to admit I wasn’t even actually looking in your direction because I was star-crosseyed trying to keep focused on another lover.
Look – I realize now how legit you are. You’re not just shouting arbitrary hogwash to me because you want to see how high I’ll jump. You’ve been asking me to jump because you know I can fly. Before I realized who you were, you couldn’t have paid me to have faith in what I was jumping into. And now? Now I’m purposely waiting on the cliff for the most perfect burst of air to rush up and meet me from all the breathtaking beauty below and toss me into a freefall extravaganza of faith.
I’ve been dense and stubborn, convinced I was running the show and acting like I knew what I was doing. You’ve been patiently raising your hand, waiting for me to take notice and ask you to stand up and share your thoughts with the rest of the group. What I’ve only just realized is how in love I’ve fallen with you.
I’ve fallen in love with you by falling into myself.
You are my inspiration, my passion, my intuition, my heart – you are ME.
Like, literally – I’ve been falling in love with myself this whole time. No more middle man. No one else gets the credit for this one – this was all me.
I can’t wait to keep falling in love with myself over and over again.
Muse, keep it real. Remember I love you. I’ll see you soon.
Thank you for loving me.
LYLAS,
elle.
I had a very active little muse when I was young. Together, my muse and I built houses in Gramma’s backyard out of sticks, fashioned balance beams out of old fence posts and sat in the tops of trees while talking back and forth to one another. I sang, I wrote, I dreamt big dreams and I had big plans. My muse had a million things in line for me to accomplish, and at times I was hugely intimidated by the endless sea of suggestions.
As is common, the older I got, the quieter my muse became. In college, I had to flat out ask my muse to put a sock in it so I could focus solely on graduating. Obligingly, my muse sat patiently in the corner of my heart.
After graduation, I had nearly forgotten about my muse. I took it upon myself to play the muse for many others in my life, desperately trying to inspire friends, family and boyfriends to follow their heart. I helped them apply for colleges and jobs, planned their fantasy vacations and cross-country moves, and tried to place their dreams in their hands even though their fists were shoved obstinately into their pockets. It was the blind leading the blind; no one was listening to their own actual authentic muse.
i think this is where my muse lives.
I remember the first time I heard my muse speak again. It began speaking at the same time I was cultivating a new relationship with someone I very much cared for. The kind of person who tells you you’re beautiful, you’re talented, you’re amazing and you genuinely believe every word of it. This new friendship was maintained over hundreds of miles of distance and in the beginning, through handwritten, heart-felt old-school snail-mail letters. As this was the only means of our communication (and because I was living alone at the time), I began to have long talks in my head with the person I was writing on paper to. The response back came in the voice of that friend, offering empowering words of support and encouragement straight to my soul, echoing the language of real-life letters that were written back to me.
He inspired me, he let me grow, he made suggestions and he had big dreams with me. I began to write again. Sing again. I began teaching yoga. Hoping to make him proud, I had obligingly took his inspiration to heart and became overwhelmingly proud of the woman we had created, him and I. But as he became less accessible in real-life, I continued to have these conversations with him in my heart. It was like having an imaginary friend – the comfort of memories of a real person, fashioned from real-life conversations, and still telling me all the things I needed to hear.
When it came down to it, I fell in love with my heart, which I mistook for someone else. The person I had always thought I was having these conversations with through my heart was living a life separate of mine. I got everything on the inside confused with the real-life person on the outside – and when that real-life person was not in love with me, I felt misled.
And then, because I had listened to that guidance from in my heart that I thought had come directly from him, I felt betrayed.
On top of all that, I had been having internal conversations that I was taking seriously for over two years – I felt like a nutjob. A complete lunatic. Basketcase. Crazy.
Let me be clear about these voices; I’m not talking about the kind of voices that say, “Light the bedskirt on fire, Lizzy.” Or, “Redrum. Redrum…”
I’m talking about the kind of voices that say;
“You know, you’re the most incredibly beautiful woman I’ve ever known.”
“You should make a change in your life if it’s what your heart really wants.”
“Have I ever told you how much you mean to me? How much you inspire me?”
Those ones. The good ones.
I started telling those voices to go eff themselves. Any of those thoughts that came through my head were the enemy. They were being said with the voice of someone I didn’t trust, I didn’t respect and I was extremely, incredibly hurt by. And so I shut them out.
My self-love diminished. My love of others diminished. I didn’t trust any thoughts, whether shared by someone else or thought of myself. My creativity diminished. My self-worth diminished. I crawled into a shell and wondered what was even occupying it.
If I was having so many of these freaking love-filled heart-to-hearts without HIS heart, then who was I talking to? Who was responding?
Enter: Breakthrough, Stage Right. The kind of self-realization and –actualization that hit me so hard that my face went numb out of shock and my eyes welled up with tears.
I had been talking to Love.
It was Love that had inspired me to become the woman I am even still becoming. Love reached out from the inside of my heart and embraced me when I was sad. I had found support, strength and empowerment because Love had guided me to it.
All this time, I thought love had left me because he had – but he was never really there to begin with. Love was. All along.
Love had led me to accomplish so much because Love is my muse.
My muse isn’t him. My muse isn’t anyone. My muse isn’t even necessarily me – it’s much more than that. My muse is the relationship I cultivate with anyone around me. My muse is the passion that burns me into a flame of creativity. My muse is Grace herself, Creation herself and Destruction herself.
When you cut through all the muck, all the muddle, all the bells and whistles and smoke and mirrors – what is truly speaking to you? What is truly driving you? And will you take the time to really listen to what it’s saying, not how it’s saying it? Even when you are dreaming, your muse is begging you to listen.
Acknowledge the person who inspired your strength. The person who made you first feel beautiful. The person who showed you the greatest love. The echoes of their words become the language of your muse. Carry those memories in your heart – but know that that strength, that beauty, that inspiration and that LOVE is already a part of you. They cannot take it back and do not ever try to convince yourself it’s not yours.
One summer, my cousin and I decided to have a contest to see who could find the most four-leaf clovers in our grandmother’s yard. There seemed to be an overabundance of lucky finds, particularly on the south side of her house, and even five- and six-leaf variations were not uncommon.
I was probably about eleven years old, making my cousin somewhere around seven at the time, but digging deep for signs of luck was no foreign concept to us. We each had the little patches of clover that we declared OURS, dragging the garden hose across the yard to water our crops. Gramma’s kitchen counters became holding grounds of dozens upon dozens of freshly picked four-leaf clovers every day, each needing to be expertly pressed between sheets of waxed paper, set under the toaster, the sugar canister, the cookie jar and endless cookbooks. It was imperative that each wax paper pressing kit was labeled with the date and the finder’s name on a bit of masking tape to ensure there were no discrepancies.
I wish I had a way to prove to you how many we found that summer, because you’d never believe me (and yet, maybe they do all still exist in some forgotten cabinet at Gramma’s house….) but between my cousin and I both, we found over 1200 four-leaf, five-leaf, and six-leaf clovers in a matter of months. And being one to take hard-work to heart, my cousin was the winner – only beating me a couple dozen more.
A few summers later, I lazily picked up a four-leaf clover I saw in the corner of my eye while walking up the sidewalk to Gramma’s house. I put it in a tiny bottle, filled it with water, and sealed the top of it shut. It’s been one of my favorite trinkets for over a decade now. There have been times I’ve dabbed a little bit of the water on my wrists and neck, like a perfume for success, praying that the luck o’ the clover may be with me. But because of the exorbitant amount of lucky finds I found in the damp grass as a child, I don’t really believe there’s anything particularly other-worldly about a four-leaf clover.
It’s probably for the better, seeing as how the four-leaf clover has long since dissolved into the water of the little bottle. But I know it’s still in there. I know that my luck hasn’t changed just because I don’t have tangible proof of it anymore. Most importantly, I know that the things you find most brilliant in life, most fascinating and most unexpected are always there if you take the time to look. I believed they existed – and thus I saw the good. And I still do.
Today is my cousin’s birthday. Maybe the only reason we even found as many clovers as we did was because he was born on St. Patrick’s Day. I know he’s a grown-up now and everything, but I hope he never forgets how he spent that summer making his own luck good.
Happy Birthday Joshie.
I opened up my computer to start playing music before my class Sunday morning (the 8:30am in Boulder – aka, “church”). Usually, Inigo (my iBook) boots right up. This time, he screamed like a two-year-old throwing a tantrum.
It was haunting, like when you hear peacocks crying or ostriches in mating season (I had some strange neighbors out in the country growing up). The kind of sound you’re not sure is indicative of impending doom or just your imagination running rampant. But one thing was for sure – my computer was definitively NOT working.
So I did what any normal person would do; kept trying to turn it on again and again, holding my breath and hoping that the wailing would stop.
“Well, when was the last time you backed-up all your files?” Shannon asked me.
“Erm… when did I get this? May? Hm…” I paused. “Yeah, I haven’t ever backed anything up.” I began taking a mental inventory of everything: all the documents, all the programs, all the pictures and all the music that I may lose. Surprisingly, I found myself not too terribly worried. There was nothing I couldn’t live without, when it came down to it. But I was still crossing my fingers. Life would be so much easier if I didn’t have to start from scratch…
I received my computer back this afternoon with good news – all of my documents were still in tact!! I counted my blessings, my files, and my iTunes music library, thankful to have it all.
Until I realized there was an entire file of half-written blogs I could have potentially lost. Barely started ideas, abandoned for lack of inspiration, lack of interest, or lack of time. Those were all stories I may never even remember I started to share if they had ended up being wiped off of the hard drive. To lose all those before I even had an opportunity to complete would have been frustrating, disheartening and discouraging. I would have blamed myself for never having taken the time to sit down and finish a thought.
Why not take advantage of the time you have? With your thoughts, your words, your body, your art… In a yoga class, you can move through haphazardly, spending not enough time experiencing the sensations underneath your own skin. But what happens when one day you wake up and you’re injured? You’re sick? Or you’re 95 years old? Don’t take what you have for granted – experience it fully or else one day, you may regret having never fully appreciated what you had.
That’s not to say you should push yourself through a yoga practice, forcing yourself into poses for the sake of experiencing them. You honor your body, and on the days when you are tired and can’t make it full throttle through an entire yoga class, it’s like backing up your files – you make a conscious decision to save your energy, protect all your hard work, and promise to step back into it when you’re ready.
Sometimes the best of ideas have to be set aside for the sake of career, family and other such responsibilities. But don’t miss out on your creativity because you don’t think it’s worth it to spend a little time humoring your muse. Tell someone you care about exactly how much you love them BEFORE you miss out on the opportunity. Take a deep breath to smell the blooming tree blossoms before it’s suddenly winter again.
Don’t miss out.
Lucky for you, I never run short of stories to tell.
I gave my little sister a Ganesh sticker from Third Eye Threads that I found when cleaning out a bag from Yoga Journal (yes, that was months ago and I’m JUST now unpacking). She smiled, anxious to have her very own Ganesh to put up in her room.
“He’s the one who removes obstacles in your life, right?” she asked, assessing her room for optimal placement. I nodded.
She froze, mid-movement. Eyeing the sticker, she said, “He also PUTS the obstacles there sometimes, too, right?” I smiled and nodded again.
I left her to her room for a little while, listening to her mumble about how she wasn’t going to put him on her laptop for fear that she had enough obstacles granted to her in school this semester.
An hour later, I wandered back to her domain to see if she had made a decision. Just to the right of her bedroom door she has hanging a hand carved Samoan mask that a friend of hers gave her from Samoa – a scary looking creature with big teeth and gaping holes for eyes. The frightening mask has its mouth open, and whether it’s about to bite off your head or just yawning is indeterminable. Samoan mythology suggests that hanging one of these masks in the home will protect you from demons and other such bad spirits.
And my sister had put Ganesh on the wall behind the opening of the terrifying mask’s mouth.
I pointed and looked inquisitively over my shoulder to my sister, sitting at her desk doing homework. She stretched her arms up high over her head.
“I figured if I put him there, then Ganesh can’t be too much of an obnoxious little shit with the obstacles he’s throwing at me.”
