Bully for you!

At the end of our yoga practice, sitting quietly on the mat with our hands in prayer position, we often lift our thumbs to touch our lips, a reminder that "our words matter."  I love this because yes, sometimes we do need a reminder.

As a writer, I have always been aware of the power of words.  As an educator, I am hopeful that the textual world we live in will make us all more cognizant of language and intention.  Yet, I know this will take time.  Living in a culture that prizes high-speed communication over slower, meditative response is arguably more conducive to spreading hurtful words with ill-conceived regard.

Intentions matter. Just as we say things we don't mean, the thoughts we convey in our emails, our text messages, our blogs, matter. Intentions can create heroes worthy of worship or bring nearly irreparable damage to otherwise steadfast relationships.

Words matter.  Language is our vehicle to communicate love, hate, joy, rage, envy and gratitude. There are so many opportunities for misinterpretation. Certainly we can throw in an emoticon or an "LOL" to define our intentions but the truth is, there is no guarantee of how our words will be received.

These things, harmful intentions and quick words, are the culprits of mindless communication.  They are what fuels bullying, not just in the schools with our children but in the work place with our colleagues and on the Internet with our contacts.  Yet the ever-so-bright side is that we have the power to re-set our intentions and to re-think our words.

Our words matter.  I love being reminded of that.  :)

Beauty and the Best

For a long time I was reluctant to tell people that I had been accepted into a yoga teacher training program. That's just me and my fear of failure (we do a number of things together...or we don't, it depends on which one of us happens to be calling the shots.).  You see, I tend to harbor good news as if it were a dangerous fugitive.  I worry that I may not succeed so in order to keep from disappointing people, I just don't tell them.  

I did tell a few people right away because I was pretty excited.  As I started attending more yoga classes and got to know the "regulars," I felt compelled to share my news with them as well.  But then I didn't want to be that annoying girl in class who is all like, "Look at me! I'm going to yoga teacher training!"  So I kept the news to myself.

Flowers and well-wishes from one of my lovely
yoga instructors :)

Eventually, I decided that sharing the news might be a good thing.  I started by telling some of my instructors then some of the wonderful people in my yoga classes.  The response has been overwhelming.  Everyone -- especially my instructors at Estudio -- has been so amazingly supportive and excited and just plain wonderful about my training.  Of course my friends have been top-notch; they always are.  And my family and Aaron have all been fantastic.  I feel so grateful and so very blessed.  Namaste, my friends, namaste.

Where I have come from, where I am going...

I was born in Seoul, South Korea.  When I was six-months-old, I was adopted and spent the rest of my childhood and teenage years in a small town in rural central Missouri.  I think I was the only Asian child within a 100-mile radius of my home.  From as far back as I can remember I fielded questions such as “Where are you from?” or “Do you speak Chinese?” or even “Why didn’t your real parents want you?”  I knew that I was different but in my struggle to fit in and “be like everyone else,” I rarely acknowledged that difference.

Small-town dynamics are interesting.  To some, small towns offer a close-knit, everyone-knows-everyone community; to others, that same closeness operates as a judgmental eye continually cast upon individuals within that community; and still to others, it is both.  So growing up, I had endless ambitions but limited confidence.

Self-criticism is a difficult thing to escape and pure self-acceptance is even harder to achieve.  Or at least sometimes it feels that way.  But eventually we learn that the self-criticism – the self- judgment we feel – is simply a barrier to self-acceptance.  It took me many years to learn that.  I had to learn to believe in myself and to trust myself.  I had to find things about myself that I, alone, genuinely liked; and I had to be okay with genuinely liking something about myself.   I had to learn to not be jealous of what others had but to be grateful for the things that I already possessed, none of which were worldly.  So I did learn each of these lessons at various stages in my life.  It took nearly thirty years but, with the help of some unlikely coaches and good friends, I had finally achieved self-acceptance.   While I underwent a tremendous amount of personal growth during graduate school, I honestly believe that because I experienced subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) prejudices growing up in a small town, it became second nature for me to look beyond other people’s appearances and try to truly connect with the person inside.

I was living in Columbia, Missouri when I signed up for my Beginner's Yoga class.  I walked into Alley Cat Yoga Studio in September of 2005 and immediately experienced a peace that, to this day, is difficult to describe.  The owner, Ken McRae, introduced himself to me, talked a little bit about yoga, and signed me up for the class.  While the entire process could not have taken more than twenty-minutes, it seemed as though a radiant spark had ignited within me.  I felt joy.

Although I didn’t have a consistent practice during graduate school, I was always able to experience that same inner peace and radiant joy whenever I returned to the mat.  It seems like such a natural state and yet, for years, I was hardly even aware it existed.  But once I realized it was there?  Not only did I want to harness it for myself, I wanted to share it with others.  It is that powerful.

When I moved to New York in June 2009, I returned to yoga after three years of graduate school.  This time I wanted yoga to have a larger presence in my life.  I found a hot yoga studio that I love (EStudio in Latham) and began to practice there as often as I could.  Now, as I begin the journey to (and through) my 200-hour Yoga Teacher Training program at Kripalu, I invite you to join me.

namaste,

angel