First, let me thank everyone who has encouraged me so vociferously to return to blogging.  There's is no motivation like the encouragement of friends!

And second, let me tell you what has been filling my time over these several months.  Just as a long exhale must be followed by deeply breathing in, teaching for any length of time must be balanced by seasons of learning, and I have been entranced by a few sources in particular of sweet, rich nectar. 

The first was the inimitable Sienna Kathryn, a yoga teacher who has traveled the world for her learning, and who has long graced our Midwestern town with the fruits of her wisdom between pilgrimages.  She is the kind of teacher who lets the practice take her like a trance, lets yoga be the teacher while she just gets out of the way and sits in the same awe of the ancient as her students.  She is all human, all raw and soaking in the reality of what it's actually like for spiritual creatures to have a human experience.  It's liberating teaching in the example of a woman like that, and it's a quality Kandi at Moon Belly shares: where the great majority of the standard American dance teachers under whom I've studied  have prided themselves on their conformity to a standard, these women have defined their greatness with their unshackled individuality.  Their students love them because they are unabashedly their own, and they love being in their own skin.  May we all be so unabashed, and free those around us to embrace the same liberation.

The second has been a book Sienna actually recommended, by Erich Schiffmann, called "Yoga: The Spirit and Practice of Moving into Stillness".  He's another one-of-a-kind, a red-headed surfer with long, curly hair, and a body much bigger than most expect a yogi's to be, but he is as peaceful and Zen a voice as I've ever read.  His major thrust is reminding his reader that the reason we come to the mat is to quiet our bodies enough that their stillness can reveal the eternal, unchanging center that keeps on humming.  The thing we share with the divine, and that makes us human, the thing that watches us think, and dream, and live, and is itself unchanged by the constancy of our changability, is the thing we seek to learn to hear.  He crystalizes books and books on Hindu meditation and Zen Buddhism in his first few pages, and then lingers over practices for getting there.  His whole practice is about getting our bodies out of the way, and it has been quenching to a thirst I didn't even know I had.

And most recently, there has been a Meisner method acting class taught by Kirsten Olsen at the Moon Belly studio.  The thrust of the Meisner technique is, instead of acting, or going to all the work of manifesting something and rehearsing it, just to let go enough that you are genuinely reacting as the scene unfolds around you.  To let the scene play you.  The drills are all about reacting to the unexpected, maintaining the genuineness and spontenaety of your reaction amidst varying stimuli, and they are alarmingly revealing!  But I have loved their relevance to everyday living. 

I've embraced the practice of shedding a character I might be tempted to play, and just letting the scene play me.  I've embraced the practice of pushing beyond the familiar as I approach my yoga practice, and letting the breath breathe me.  And, I've devoted myself to the practice of being unabashed in each of these things, so that I may revel in the juice and freedom of being freely who and what I am.  I am loving the experience of, in the words of Erich Schiffmann, the divine expressing itself as me!  Namaste!