Mindfulness Techniques for Beginners

There are two important pieces of advice I would offer to people beginning their journey into mindfulness and meditation practice.

The first is to start each day on a positive note. That means that first thing in the morning, before checking emails or news or social media or your to-do list, you take a couple of minutes to sit in stillness and offer gratitude for what is already good in your life and to contemplate what other positive things you want to attract and cultivate. These few moments will frame your experience of the whole day ahead. We spend too much time focusing on what could go wrong and not enough time focusing on what could go right. When we begin our day on a negative note, that stress carries through and colors the rest of our experiences for the day. Focus on what you want, not on what you don’t want.

The second thing is to let go of the concept that there is one right way to meditate or be mindful. Start simple. Do a 5-minute meditation and gratitude practice first thing in the morning and then find a couple of other times throughout the day just to pause and be still for 2 minutes, noticing the feeling of your body and the sounds happening around you. A big issue for beginners is that they get discouraged because they try to bite off more than they can chew. You don’t have to commit to a 30-minute meditation right away! Just sit for 2 minutes and feel the benefits it brings. This will naturally encourage you to want to do it more.

Check out this full article and insights from other mindfulness experts in Mystic Mag

What I learned in my third trimester as a pregnant yogi

The yoga practice of making peace with the moment I’m in and rolling with unexpected circumstances as they arise in pregnancy has been way harder than any asana ever could be!

Every day, being pregnant is teaching me the true meaning of releasing control and finding acceptance with what is. Having a body that is no longer solely my own has been a true lesson in humility and releasing ego. Years of dedicated, consistent physical activity have trained me to have a mind with a high tolerance for physical discomfort and a body willing to push through intensity. Being pregnant has taught me a much different, softer strength: the strength it takes to do less when I want to do more; the strength it takes to NOT push through intensity even though I want to; the strength it takes to be still and make peace with my “new” body as it is. For someone like me who relies heavily on physical activity to calm my neurotic mind, this is a true challenge!

This pregnancy has also taught me how to hold my plans loosely. As a detail-oriented planner, being given an “estimated due date” but knowing full well that it’s really a big window including 2 weeks before and 2 weeks after that date (and possibly more!) makes creating a life plan a little crazy. It’s difficult to figure out when my last day of work should be, how soon I need to start organizing all my baby stuff, when I need to take down-time just to relax and sleep more in preparation for what’s coming, etc.

Most importantly, being pregnant has really taught me about letting go of control. I have spent so many hours (and dollars!) reading, studying, visualizing, and taking natural birth classes in preparation for the calm, smooth, unmedicated, natural birth experience that I want. I thought labor and delivery would be the hard part and I have been looking forward to that ultimate challenge and intense experience. Instead what I’m finding is that the hardest part of this whole process might be letting go of the plans I have and being okay with something completely different happening. See, Baby Boy is still in breech position at 35 weeks. He might still flip and I hope he does, but maybe there’s a reason that he’s staying as he is and I need to honor that. This isn’t all about me, after all. And just like my incredible wedding day that was filled with so much love and power that it created a hurricane, this birth is going to happen the way that it’s meant to, even if it’s not the way I visualized it or thought it should be. My beautiful boy is already teaching his mama so many important lessons. He is his own free, independent spirit, and I can’t control him or his birthing.

And so I take a deep breath in, I let it go, and I leave it up to the universe to decide. I remind myself how hard it was to get pregnant and how worried I was that it wouldn’t happen for me and I remember just to be grateful that I’m here at 35 weeks with a healthy little guy growing strong inside me. I remember how fortunate I am to have a life-partner who wants this as much as I do, who loves as fiercely as I do, and who will undoubtedly be the best dad this world has ever seen. I look at our beautiful life and know that everything is already okay and is unfolding at its own time, exactly as it’s meant to.

What I Learned in my First Trimester as a Pregnant Yogi

When I first found out that I was pregnant, I was overjoyed! My husband and I had been trying for almost a year and it was such a relief to finally see a plus sign on the pregnancy test.

That first week was pretty interesting though... I was less than 5 weeks pregnant, my stomach was still flat, and the morning sickness hadn’t kicked in yet, so I really felt completely normal; completely normal except that all of a sudden I wasn’t allowed to drink my coffee in the morning or have a couple glasses of wine in the evening or eat sushi on a dinner date with my husband. Suddenly I am Google searching everything to find out what products and foods are safe to use during pregnancy and which aren’t. I’m taking things that seem very healthy (like sprouts and green juice) out of my diet because they aren’t recommended in pregnancy and overnight, I am going from eating my pescatarian diet which consisted of quite a bit of seafood to a mostly vegetarian diet because it’s not recommended to have more than 2 servings of seafood a week when pregnant either. It was honestly a lot to process all at once! You know things are going to change once you’re pregnant but then it happens and everything needs to change INSTANTLY. There is no break in period.

As soon as I started to figure it all out around week 6, the morning sickness set in. No one tells you that for some people morning sickness is actually ALL DAY sickness. It’s just like an ongoing nausea that gets worse at certain parts of the day but never actually goes away. Add to that my constant dizziness and you basically have how I felt for the entire first trimester of pregnancy. But life doesn’t stop happening just because you don’t feel good. I still had daily classes, private lessons, workshops, and teacher trainings to teach. Showing up to work was difficult but demonstrating yoga poses was nearly impossible. Any time I would fold forward or twist my body in any sort of way, the nausea and dizziness got worse and so I had to train myself to teach without demonstrating anything. It was a very good exercise in creativity and communication! J Probably the hardest part of all was just wanting to be able to share the news with my students but having to keep it to myself as it was still too early.

Another really interesting aspect of feeling sick all the time was that I didn’t have the energy to do the things I used to do. I didn’t have the energy (or stomach!) to exercise so I basically stopped exercising for eight weeks... Yes, 8 weeks! Physical activity is a central aspect of my life, and I generally get a pretty intense work out in 5+ times per week. To go from that type of lifestyle to suddenly sleeping in (often 10-12 hours of sleep per night!), napping during the day, and sitting around reading whenever I didn’t need to be at work was a pretty weird transition.

While the first trimester was pretty rough for me, there were also a lot of life lessons blended in there and some truly positive things that came out of these past few months, other than the most obvious benefit, a beautiful human life growing inside me!! So far my son has taught me:

        ⁃       It’s okay for things to be a little messy and imperfect.

I didn’t have the energy to neurotically prepare as much as I normally do before leading a class or workshop or training and, incredibly, I still did a great job. This helped me to realize that I waste a lot of energy going over things again and again and again, trying to make them perfect, when they are already excellent.

        ⁃       I learned how to relax.

I think this was my very favorite part about the first trimester because I am a terrible relaxer. I think people assume that I’m a very zen person because I am a yoga teacher but actually I practice yoga BECAUSE I am the opposite of relaxed. I am always multitasking. Even when I am watching TV, I’m also folding my laundry, entering data into Quickbooks, fielding emails, preparing my dinner, and thinking about the next project I’m going to do. I normally have a really hard time just sitting still. During the first trimester of this pregnancy though, I was so sick and so tired all the time that I literally didn’t have the energy to do anything so I really would just sit for hours. Just sit and read. Or just sit and do nothing. No agenda. Just being. It was like a super long meditation!

        ⁃       I stopped stressing.

All of the little details of things that I normally would worry about, I just stopped worrying about it. Worrying actually takes a lot of energy and when you’re exhausted, you just don’t have the ability to do it. So I gave up worrying. (Thanks son!)

I am just over the hump now into my second trimester and already and nausea and dizziness are subsiding and my energy is returning. I am looking forward to seeing what this next phase of my pregnancy has to teach me.

My First True Love

Thinking back to being a kid who hated PE class and dreaded playing any sort of sport because of my social anxiety and fear of failure, it’s funny how my life now centers so much around physical activity. I love hiking, swimming, surfing, running, tennis, cycling, Pilates, barre... but always, ALWAYS, I come back to my first and truest love: Yoga.

Yoga was the first physical activity I ever did that didn’t make me fear failure. When I practiced asana, I felt free, unbound, unjudged, able to be content with myself exactly as I was.

I still feel that way. As a teenager, my yoga practice helped me feel more confident and more comfortable in my own skin. I learned to trust my intuition and my natural wisdom. It helped me overcome years of insomnia caused by incessant worrying. It reduced my anxiety and gave me strength to get through many bouts of depression.

In many ways, I am still that girl: an impatient perfectionist who worries too much, a little neurotic, often anxious, and struggling through bouts of depression. But through it all, yoga has given me a safe home to return to again and again. It hasn’t taken away my troubles but it has given me a constant and unwavering feeling of hope, Love, and connection that stays with me in always no matter what challenge I might be facing. Yoga is my ally when life gets chaotic. It’s where I return to rehab when my body becomes sore or injured from the other activities I do. It’s also where I feel most connected to my Source. Yoga practice for me is like a moving prayer, an offering, a chance to open up to the deepest and truest part of who I am.

I am forever grateful for my practice. It is the greatest possible gift now to be able to pay it forward by teaching yoga to others and helping them to rediscover the beautiful light within themselves.  I am forever grateful also to the many teachers throughout the years who have touched my soul and influenced my practice. Namaste.