Stillness Is the Move

I made a really profound discovery this morning... I think.

I love to run.

I have been running regularly since september and it has been wonderful. It's such a great way to keep myself grounded and de-stress - I have high anxiety and running really helps me to keep it to a minimum. However, due to a recent foot injury, I have had to take a break from running.

I have not run for about a month.

At first not running was incredibly difficult. In the past few months, running has been the answer to nearly every problem that has come up in my life and now that solution had been eliminated, forcing me to find a new one. What was I suppose to do when I started feeling anxious? What was I suppose to do when I got into a fight with my mom? What was I suppose to do when I felt... trapped?

I'm a stubborn person and I really tried to ignore the emotions that running helped to temporarily tame for as long as possible. However, eventually all emotions become revealed in some way or another, and despite my initial reluctance, I was eventually forced to do surrender to my own worst enemy: myself, and face the thing that I was most afraid of:

sitting, with my feelings.

Well, I wasn't actually sitting. I was doing yoga.

Let me back track a bit:

Fortunately for me, and not so fortunately for my family and my boyfriend J., my vacation from running happened to come at the same time as a family vacation to Florida. My mom, dad, J., and I were stuck in a car for two days together. For someone with high anxiety this was no picnic.

There were plenty of thoughtless actions, emotional triggers, and tears... plenty of them.

However, although we weren't all hugging and singing songs together (although we did do some sweet car dancing on the way home!), everyone was supportive of my difficulties and I am endlessly lucky and grateful in that regard.

Once, we got to Florida I was unsure of what to do. I couldn't really walk let alone run (yes, my foot was that bad) and I needed to do something to release in a physical way.

I had brought with me a yoga dvd that I used on occasion but never really on a regular basis.

One day, while experiencing a mild panic attack, J. suggested that we do the yoga dvd together. Although at first I was skeptical: I didn't think that it was going to give me the amount of physical exertion that I require in order to experience relief from my anxiety. However, I had to face the fact that I really had no other option.

So together we did yoga. We started by focusing on our breathing and then we gently moved our bodies into postures that required strength, proper breathing, and forced us to focus not only on how we performed the exercises, but how our bodies felt. This emphasis on listening to your body was something that I had purposely avoided for a very long time. Maybe I didn't want to listen to my body. Maybe I felt like my body and I were not only strangers, but rather enemies who did not want to hear what one another had to say. In the past I had use running as a tool to silence my inner voice and frankly the idea of listening to it now scared me to no end. However, while I moved through the postures, which did satisfy my need to move in a refreshing and nurturing way, I thought... a lot.

I realized that running had been a way to solve my problems temporarily by distracting myself with movement. But with yoga, I was able to start seeing things in a different light.

Instead of stressing over unknowns such as: 'What am I going to do when I feel anxious?' or 'What am I going to do when I get into a fight with my mom?' I began to ask myself: 'Why am I anxious?' 'Why am I fighting with my mom in the first place?'. Yoga was able to help me change my thinking in a way that actually helped me to problem solve by getting myself to the deepest root of the issue. At the same time it also helped me o trecognize a lot of my own fears about life, love, and myself.

Now, I am not going to sit here and say that yoga solved all of my problems. It most certainly did not. I still have high anxiety, I still fight with my mom, and I still feel trapped... sometimes.

What yoga did do was help me develop an overall awareness of myself. It helped me to realize that I am powerful and capable enough to tackle anything that life throws my way, and it gave me the tools to always be able to look deep inside of myself and understand what my heart is really saying.

Yoga teaches you about strength. It forces you to connect with and embrace your own strength physically, mentally, and emotionally. It challenges your body physically while encouraging you to maintain an awareness of your thoughts and your breath. The most liberating part of the strength that yoga allows you to cultivate is that it is entirely your own.

I am now a proud yoga lover and frequent practicer but this does not mean that I don't believe running and I can not repair our broken relationship. This time around I want to run in the safest way possible which means not pushing myself through something but feeling what my body needs a the time(a technique emphasized in yoga). I also need to get new shoes and make sure that I stretch and give my body adequate time to recover each time I run.

Anyway, this morning I woke up with the desire to run. I can't run right now unfortunately, less because of my foot injury (it has healed a significant amount), but more because of location - I am not at home but at J.'s house for a visit.

I immediately felt stressed, and that old fire, the fire that I now recognize as a way of avoiding my own feelings, emerged. However, instead of giving into this feeling as I would have in the past, I recognized it. With that awareness I was able to reflect back upon the recent discoveries that I made with the help of yoga and channel it through another form of therapy: writing!

So friendly readers, if you are out there (and I hope you are!) my hope is that my transformation can help you to also grow in a positive way.

I think that the most important lesson that I learned is that you must constantly remind yourself to never fear, impose harm upon, or most importantly underestimate yourself.

Quote(s) of the day:

"Yoga teaches us to cure what need not be endured and endure what cannot be cured."

- B.K.S. Iyengar

&

Through the practices of yoga, we discover that concern for the happiness and well being of others, including animals, must be an essential part of our own quest for happiness and well being. The fork can be a powerful weapon of mass destruction or a tool to create peace on

- Sharon Gannon

Question(s) of the day:

Do you ever suppress your own feelings? If so, does the idea of sitting with those feelings scare you? Why do you think this is?

Have a great day everyone!

Musical Frustration: Part II... & Breakfast!

Good morning!

I can not believe that I am writing this at 7:00... A.M. I woke up this morning a little bit before 6 feeling really hungry. I was really craving almonds so I made my self a yummy breakfast of 2 packets of plain instant oatmeal, 1 banana, 1/4 cup of a raw almond and raisin mix, garnished with cinnamon and sweetened with stevia. It was incredible!

When my family, my boyfriend and I took a trip to Florida to visit with family for the holidays, we spent a few days with my grandparents in Georgia. My grandmother Carole and my mom went out to the store to pick up some vegan eats for me and my boyfriend and while they were unable to find some of my fav staple foods - ezekiel tortillas for example - they were able to find organic, plain instant oats! I love the convenience of instant oatmeal when your on the road and I have never been able to find oats of the instant, packaged variety that weren't sweetened, or packed with weird additives and/or artificial ingredients. So finding these was such a surprising treat. Upon receiving the oats I thanked my mom and grandma and told them, in the words of Tim and Eric, Great Job! Unfortunately they didn't get the reference.

Anyway back to musical endeavors of the frustrated variety:

So, we left off talking about me writing my first song, which was a cappella. When I got a little bit older I became more and more fixated with my fathers acoustic guitar. He sensed my interest, and showed me my first chord - a D. I struggled at first to configure my fingers into the tiny triangular shape that the chord required, all while putting enough pressure on the strings so that they would resonate the way they were suppose to. After that I was hooked.

I took guitar lessons for a bit learning basic chords, covering songs by other artists that were assigned by my teacher (my first was "Let It Be"), and overviewing a bit of picking and finger technique, until my teacher moved to New York. From there, I basically took what I had learned through lessons and used that knowledge to develop my own songwriting skills on the guitar. I enjoyed playing other people's music but I always found myself straying while practicing, in a similar way to when I wrote my first song... I wanted to create something of my own that meant something to me. At a young age I discovered the rush of playing a song that you yourself write personally. There is nothing else like it.

In eighth grade I transfered out of public school middle school and into a performing arts middle school near by. I had heard of the school from a very dear friend and been really interested because I never enjoyed or felt good going to public school. I always felt a bit anxious in such competitive environments and I found it difficult to make friends. So naturally when another option was presented to me I eagerly jumped on board the charter school train.

PVPA (Pioneer Valley Performing Arts High School) was small and the kids were friendly, everyone bonding together in a haze of middle school/ new school awkwardness. The teachers who were all very welcoming, seemed to be fueled with a kind of 'we're-very-enthusiastic-about-this-school-but-we're-still-getting-used-to-this-whole-teaching-thing' kind of vibe.

And to be fair it was the first year that the middle school was open. That year, PVPA, which originally was a high school only, had branched out to create a middle school - and for this I am eternally grateful ('Toy Story' anyone?). Because the middle school was brand new there was a whole new crop of students that the school was just waiting to let in. The high school, which had been around longer, had a lottery system for accepting students and so if the middle school had not opened up at that time I may have never gotten in. I auditioned for the school with my song "Fall".

In middle and high school I slowly transformed from out of my shy closet singer songwriter persona into a open-mic playing regular (we had one almost every friday) who belted out songs in the school staircase. PVPA completely brought me to life and helped me to realize that music, for me at that time, was the most healing and enriching way to nourish my creative being.

I took lessons with various teachers throughout high school but I never really stayed with them too long. Sometimes it was the teachers who didn't feel right and sometimes it was the lessons themselves - somehow practicing the 12 bar blues just didn't make my heart sing the way writing my own songs did.

I ended up writing a lot of songs throughout my adolescence and teens, over 30 of them. I dabbled in a bit of recording but always felt intimidated by the permanence of it. I didn't like the idea of not being able to change a lyric if I wanted to. In addition to playing at school, I played a lot out on my own too: at open mics, some local shows with other young artists, and sometimes I collaborated with friends.

After graduating from high school, I deferred from Smith College for a year to work on music - ideally I wanted to record. My recording plans feel through but my school year (August 2009 - August 2010) year was still jam packed full of great things including music: I worked at a children's summer camp where I made some wonderful connections with people, I picked up the ukulele and the piano, I worked at a coffee shop, I met my current boyfriend J., I took 3 amazing classes at a wonderful community college that I absolutely adored, J. and I started a band together (and recorded an album!), I spent the summer in Maine with J. & his family, I worked at an Inn in Maine, I saved a bird in the road, made some big and really difficult decisions about school, and wrote a whole slew of new songs.

And now on the the frustration part. Since returning home from my summer in Maine and them some time away at school, I have been having a really difficult time writing music. This difficulty may be due to a few things: I am distracted easily and I have been putting music on the back-burner lately (which brings up that age-old question: why do we put off doing the things that we feel that we wanting to do?), I may be in a musical rut, and I may be in part due to the fact that it is winter time and this has caused a musical decline to my musical creativity and productivity in the past. Usually I am flooded with ideas come spring.

Whatever the reason for the break, I have decided, to ride out this musical fork in the road with stride.

I think that is all I have time for, for now. I am off to choose my new classes at Holyoke Community College (the one I mentioned earlier) and then I have a long list of errands. Sounds fun right?

Quote of the day:

"A human being... experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desired and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison... " - Einstein

Question of the day (feel free to leave a comment below):

Is there anything that you love to do and yet you put off doing it on a regular basis?

Have a great day guys!

Musical Frustration: Part I

Hello. Good evening. Thanks for stopping by. Hi. Hey. Howdy! Gad you've made it. Welcome back!

In case you were wondering I couldn't figure out how to begin tonight and I figured that if I wrote down every introduction I could think of then later I couldn't say: "crap I wish I wrote this one instead..."

And yes, I do think about really unimportant things such as introductions. I guess unimportant isn't the word that I am looking for... petty maybe? Anyway I guess sometimes I get distracted by petty worries... or worries about petty things... like which word I am looking for.

I am also guilty of using a certain word in a sentence, then disliking it for whatever reason, then looking up synonyms for that word and debating over which synonym is appropriate for the given sentence for an embarrassing amount of time. Sometimes I will try to choose a synonym that I have never heard if before so I can learn a new word. And then I debate about whether I have a firm enough grasp of the meaning of said word to use it yet for an embarrassing amount of time. Sometimes I feel like using a word that you don't fully understand (how can you really understand it after just hearing it and reading the definition one time? Will you actually remember that word the next time that you see it? Will you?) is a a bit like cheating. Long-story short: I'm a bit crazy but well intentioned. Or just crazy.

If you are still with me I applaud your bravery and your tolerance for tangents. I expect they will become a regular occurrence for me here in this free-range writing haven... of sorts.

Anyway,

I spent the past two days hanging out with my good friend whom I will refer to as Madz. This is the first time I have spent time with her (excluding a super brief meet up at a concert this summer) for the first time in over half a year! This past May I left to go to Maine where I lived with my boyfriend J. for the summer and just before I returned home in August, Madz set off on her own adventure... to another country! Madz spent four months in Costa Rica doing volunteer work and absorbing, exploring, and experiencing another culture. I have never been outside of the United States, other than a weekend trip to Montreal, and I can not imagine how liberating, eye-opening, and enriching this experience must be and have been for Madz. I am so looking forward to traveling in the future and I can not wait to experience something outside the realm of what I know.

The picture up above is from my recent visit with Madz. It is me with her adorable dog Murphy. I hate to admit it, because I know that J. is amongst those reading this... J. is probably the only one reading this... but Murphy and I have a bit of a love affair going on. Fortunately for your discretion this picture was snapped during one of our less provocative moments.

But lets get back to business. What I wanted to write about tonight was my recent songwriting frustration and difficulty. It feels as if this may turn into more of a diary entry than an information resource (but I guess that a blog is kind of like a public diary of sorts right?) so please bear with me. I think that you may be able to relate to what I am feeling on some level, music-related or otherwise.

I guess I will start with a brief background of my musical history:

I have always enjoyed listening to music, there is some musical component attached to every memory of my childhood that I can conjure up. One of these memories is of jumping on my trampoline to bad pop bands of the 90's. When I say bad music I mean bad music, which, is not limited to: Spice Girls, Bewitched, N'Sync, and a collection of tasteful and beloved classics such as the score to 'Titanic' and the 'Rugrat Gone Wild' cassette tape. As silly as these musical memories may be, I still look back upon them fondly. I especially miss that trampoline which we eventually got ride of due to the fact that it had become a safety hazard. After years of enduring the harsh New England Winters, frequent sprinkler involved jumping sessions, and much loving usage, rust began to eat away at the legs and they began caving inward... kind of like Tommy's Pickles feet. I loved that trampoline and I dedicate many years of fun and entertainment to it. Rest in peace dear friend.

I also liked to listen to music in the back of my dad's big blue van which I sat in the back of, on the floor, without a seatbelt, in the company of one of my dearest childhood companions Sylvana. I know that this is very much illegal and probably not the safest thing for two little girls to be doing (riding in the van seatbelt-less, not listening to bad pop) but we had such a blast and it was always a treat when my dad would let us listen to the music we wanted. Looking back, my dad was a brave soul to tolerate that music and us singing along to it. And I always sang along. To be fair I think that getting to experience a little joy like such as that means way more to a kid than being a little bit secretly irritated by your child's crap music does to an adult. If that makes any sense.

I could go on but I will not bore you with the little details - basically I enjoyed music as a little kid.

When I was around eight I went through a brief stint of playing the violin. I guess as a kid I assumed because violins were so exciting and wondrous looking that I would thoroughly enjoy playing one.

This was not the case.

I dreaded practicing and lessons and recitals. These were the days before I began comparing myself to others so I didn't fear recitals for that reason, but simply because I was nervous that I would mess up. Which somehow, to my memory, I never did.

Anyway, eventually I quit playing violin and stopped thinking about playing music myself, all while still enjoying listening to music.

Oh , also, my mom loved to go contra dancing when I was a kid. Sometimes I would dance with her but most of my contra dance memories are of sitting and watching the band. I would find a comfy spot behind the stage with a a coloring book, or lay down and cuddle with a band-member's, dog watching the musicians. They had such an energy to them. It was mesmerizing, comforting, and so soothing that I often fell asleep right there.

When I was ten years old I wrote my first song. It was an A Cappella song and it was written out of a need... desperation really that I had at the time to sing something. I remember getting home one day from school and wanting to sing but not knowing what to sing exactly. At the time my mom had just bought a Macy Gray album and I really liked the song 'Try'. I tried (haha get it? J. I know you hate me right now) singing the song (without the music) using the little lyric book that came with the cd (at this was the point in my life my family had advanced from the cassette to cd. I remember the first cd that I ever bought was the soundtrack to the Blue Brothers movie - one of my all time favorite movies ever. Oh and that reminds me! I didn't even bother to go back in time to inform you of my obsession with my parents record and forty five collection when I was a toddler. Now you know. Sorry that these parenthesis have gone on entirely too long and have lost relevance. It's late and I am very tired. I hope that you can remember where we left off. I feel kind of like a friend interrupting a teacher who has been talking for a long time and is about to call on you to answer a question... can you remember where I left off without going back to the top?) but for some reason, in that moment, singing that song felt a bit unnatural, so I decided, without much thought or stress, to write my own song. It was a bit corny but I still have to give my ten year old self credit, "Fall", in all it's cheesy glory, was well done. And just like that, my need to sing was satisfied by my own pen.

I'm sorry guys but I am going to have to break here and sign off for the evening because I am getting wayyyy too tired. I hope that wasn't too boring of a read and I apologize that I haven't even gotten too the relatable-and-at-the-same-time-possibly-helpful-and/or-useful-in-some-way information yet. Tomorrow is another day and I will do my best to finish tomorrow.

Thanks for listening... reading!

Oh and to end here's well-known but beloved quote:

"Be the change that you want to see in the world." - Mahatma Gandhi

Goodnight!

A New Year

It is 11:00 on New Years Eve and I am plopped on my bed interacting with one of my favorite distractions: my laptop. My resentful suitcase is starring at me alongside a sea of mismatched garments which I carelessly tossed onto the floor after returning home from a recent trip to Florida.

I should probably be unpacking.

Yet, as it always should, writing takes precedence.

In addition to not unpacking, I also tried - and failed - to nap this evening (I seem to always feel sleepy lately despite how many hours of sleep I manage to get). It seems that lately I am unable to follow through and finish things. It is my one accomplishment.

On the trip that I mentioned earlier, my boyfriend, lets call him J., was a bit stupefied when I declared that I was ready to hit the hay at 10:00 one night, and 9:00 the next. I wasn't too surprised when he drew the line at 8:30.

I have never really been one to handle staying up too late - I tend to be an early riser for the most part. However, despite my early bird tendencies, I am not one to deny the simple relaxing pleasure of sleeping in. If anything, sometimes I sleep too much.

I have been thinking about starting a blog for some times now but, like so many other things in my life, I am have putting it off. Why? I'm not entirely sure. Maybe the idea scared me, or maybe I have simply been lazy. Whatever the reason for my hesitation up until now has been, I am here now, writing, and it feels really good.

When I first toyed with the idea of starting a blog I thought that I might focus my writing on a specific interest or passion of mine such as: mindfulness, animals rights, yoga, veganism, music, raw foodism etc. However, choosing one of these outlets posed as a greater difficulty that I originally thought. How could I possibly write about just one thing?

Tonight it occurred to me that I don't have to choose just one. Maybe the real purpose of starting a blog was not to channel my love for writing through one particular area of interest, but to instead learn about what interests me through daily writing.

I guess I figured that tonight, given the fact that it is the very beginning of the year, would be the best time to start something new - even if I'm not entirely sure what it is that I am starting.

So...

Because it is New Years and also because I think that it is inspiring I am going to end this post with a quote that resonates with me in a very special way:

"Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared." - Buddha

Happy 2011 everyone!