Why be alive at all if not to relish the ecstasy of noticing, that crowning glory of our consciousness? — Maria Popova, Brain Pickings
Hello loves!
First of all, I am still flabbergasted by all of the orders for Alias All, most of them from members of this very community. I am so, so grateful. Thank you loves, not only for your support but for all the kind words about this work, telling me your favorite poems and how they’re landing with you. It is THE COOLEST THING. Publishing a first book is terrifying, and this experience is giving me confidence to begin the next one!
(PS there are still a few copies left that I will personally send you (love note & shipping included!). Simply reply to this email if you’d like to purchase one for $15.)
There’s a reason I published Alias All at the beginning of spring - a season of light, growth, fertility, and celebration.
A season that begins in March with hope.
A season that continues through the weird in-between that is April. A season that asks for patience. For managing expectations.
The spring equinox has occurred, and we’re all ready for the warmer weather. But as the saying goes, “April showers bring May flowers.”
I notice gray days and grayer mornings, light rain peppering my face through the open window. I notice the scape of trees I can see from my desk, a view of the forest beyond Georgetown, previously a dense slate of muted black skeletons that is now trying on a dusting of soft greens and pale yellows. The trees just below my window have already bloomed into clouds of white flowers. As I put the finishing touches on this letter, it’s a drizzly day with cool, thick fog - but I can hear the birds singing and the trees are looking their brightest yet. A gentle arrival into a new season. As always with the trees and thus with nature itself - a slow becoming.
After almost a year of attempting to copy the trees, to align my own rhythms with what is so clearly channeling the way of being around us, I’m noticing the wisdom. Noticing how change is happening even, and especially, when it’s not visible. Deconstructing my former expectation that change happens all at once - nothing good and real does.
The tree is waiting… It will not burst into life in the spring. It will just put on a new coat and face the world again. — Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest & Retreat in Difficult Times
Know that during the rainy days, the slow or cold ones, the ones that bring back memories of winter, that you are still alive. Still growing. Use the rain to nourish yourself towards your very becoming.
On Love & Patience
Being patient is perhaps my deepest struggle. It’s always been that way. When faced with the invitation to be patient, when forced to acknowledge when things take the time they take, my immediate reaction is frustration. This undoubtedly leads to anger and the toxic kind of invented self-loathing that perpetuates a false, suffocating loop.
I’m starting to understand how my lack of patience intersects with issues of perfectionism and control. And ultimately, the fear of running out of time towards our promised vanishing.
I’m beginning to notice that the perceived requirement to do it all now, and do it once, and do it fast, and do it right, is a deep-seated (capitalist?) myth that has permeated through every aspect of my being. A habit so entrenched that it takes months, sometimes years, for me to even notice its crippling effects.
I think now of my lack of patience towards my partner, so easily forgetting the big picture. I remember my lack of patience towards my yoga teachers last year who, in the midst of losing it all and upending their entire lives, kept our teacher training group in tact and supported and connected. I see a clear image of me spending last spring not simply offering a meditation class or two to friends, but spending anxiety-soaked hours forcing a flashy website, a DBA license, a second Instagram account, more classes than I could handle. I think of the profound cruelty, a cruelty nearing violence, of rushing to heal my illness, my ankle surgery, my current knee injury.
I thought mostly about how far behind I was from where I wanted to be. How ugly it is to begin. How long things take to mature. How bad of a job I was doing.
Through my old lens, that is once again frustrating - to run out of patience with running out of patience!
Rushing means you also rush past your reality. Instead of recognizing all our very real and understandable struggles and limitations of the moment, of considering what other people were going through, I held impossible expectations for both myself and others that leave one feeling permanently inadequate, less than. It’s a subtle but nevertheless powerful harming.
And it’s entirely unfair.
Painful as these realizations are, and even more painful still knowing that one cannot change what’s passed, it’s in realizing how pervasive this sense of rushing is that I can make a different choice. It’s in noticing how my lack of patience deeply hurts myself and the people I love that provides the motivation and endurance to do the necessary work of noticing.
I think of all of you and the ways you’ve been forced to be patient - being forced to slow down, change, and cancel plans to move, celebrate, travel, commit. Perhaps you’ve been confronting the sort of patience that the processes of death and grief necessitate. This past year has been like a dreadful waiting game for the entire planet, at once uniting us with a reckoning of our expectations.
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For years now, one of the intentions on my list has been: “Go slow, grow slow.”
It’s something I forget often, and remember again. And boy, did 2020 make me remember it.
As the wise Rumi says, “patience with small details makes perfect a large work, like the universe.”
Through this lens, I can understand patience as another ever-evolving, lifelong endeavor of growth. The same infinite, beautiful process that always surrounds us in nature. The holding of the paradox that we are always changing and we are whole as we are right now. Over and over again.
Circles. Cycles.
I recently, belatedly I guess, read Maria Popova’s essay on Katherine May’s book Wintering: The Power of Rest & Retreat in Difficult Times. While it is still (high) on my reading list, this paragraph Maria pulled out struck me intensely as a way to think about patience.
“We are in the habit of imagining our lives to be linear, a long march from birth to death in which we mass our powers, only to surrender them again, all the while slowly losing our youthful beauty. This is a brutal untruth. Life meanders like a path through the woods. We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again.”
We have just been through, and in many ways are still enduring, a season of losing, of stripping, of baring.
With a vaccine available and herd immunity on the horizon, we see the potential of flourishing, of reuniting, of commitments and celebrations.
But we’re not there yet.
And even once herd immunity is achieved, we will require time, likely an unknown, uncomfortable amount of it, to understand and process the depth and breadth of this historic pandemic’s effects on all levels - physiologically, mentally, emotionally, socially, economically, politically.
It’s scary but important to recognize so we can feel more compassion for ourselves and for others. So we can not just accept things are going slower than we wanted, are less complete that in our dreams, but expecting that to be the case.
We are being asked to practice our patience on a level I know I’ve never experienced, and accepting and honoring the true hardship of our current collective moment helps me access it. As I’m more patient with myself, I can extend that patience towards my partner, my family, my colleagues, strangers. These are acts of love.
And as we go slow, grow slow, perhaps we create the time and space to make some real changes in our lives. To take to heart the lessons we’ve learned from this disaster. To create a more inclusive, compassionate human experience. To design a new future, and take the first small steps.
Given time, we will grow again.
And as we move forward, may we think of our lives in cycles. May we know that there is no linear path forward towards a better existence. That we will experience disaster again. If we practice being present now, and in turn practice the skills demanded by the present moment, we can be perhaps be better prepared to handle what comes our way. This is, it appears, all we can ask of ourselves and each other.
As Tolstoy writes in Anna Karenina, “Spring was a long time unfolding.”
So, as I repeat to myself in my own morning meditation:
May we be patient with our lives unfolding.
Practice
The genesis of this love letter is live teaching. It was a highlight of my days last spring - connecting while apart and supporting one another as we can right now.
After a teaching break, several of you came to the restorative class I did for my 300 hour YTT capstone last month. It was such a pleasure to offer, I’m doing it again!
Why? Because good rest is good medicine. Because our bodies and our souls need all the love they can get right now. Because I love to teach. Because I love you.
Please join me for a Savasana Sunday this coming Sunday, April 4th at 4:00 PM ET.
We’ll set up in a supported savasana so you can let yourself melt down into the floor beneath you. I’ll guide you through a long, juicy meditative body scan that will automatically calm your nervous system, like a deep, salving nap. In fact, naps are welcome :)
Let us take care of our precious bodies.
Want in?
Simply Venmo me (@Colby-Sheffer) what you can ($15-$25 recommended) with “ILOVEME” and your email in the description, and I’ll send you the Zoom link the morning of our session. You’ll get access to the recording too.
Know someone who could use good rest? Please forward this invitation along.
NOTE: If you are a frontline healthcare professional, or this pay scale doesn’t work for your current budget for whatever reason, I got you. You’re in. Simply email me you’re interested, and I’ll send you the link.
For free resources, check out our yoga & meditation library.
Loving Lately
Listening to:
This On Being with Krista Tippet podcast episode with poet, novelist and MFA professor Ocean Vuong, recorded live in NYC in March 2020 just before lockdown. I’m honestly just entering the podcast scene so am no pro, but this is my favorite episode of all time (Samar, I owe you one for sending!). I was stunned. I hit play again as soon as it ended. It’s so, so sweet. The tenderness and emotion in Ocean’s voice, his eloquence on topics as difficult as the Vietnam war and his uncle’s suicide, his hope for language, wisdom on how it’s failed us, and how we can recreate it again. A pristine example of strength in vulnerability.
After the conversation with Ocean ended, Spotify queued up one of On Being’s most recent podcast from March 2021 with clinical psychologist and mindfulness teacher Dr. Christine Runyan, who works directly supporting our essential health care workers with their mental health during this traumatic time and studies the physiological consequences of the pandemic on our precious nervous systems. Super interesting and super important. Her and Krista discuss the normalizing of our collective and individual stress responses, how they impact us, why creating space for recovery is so crucial, and small ways we can get there. Dr. Runyan’s main message: “There is nothing wrong with you.”
Judith & Lizzie Lasater, mother and daughter restorative yoga duo, talking about Pranayama on their Office Hours series. I brushed up on the ancient yogic breath work technique before teaching a workshop called “Mindful Breathing for Stress Reduction” for over 50 colleagues! (PS would anyone be interested in a pranayama workshop/class?? Let me know!)
Andddddd our new Spotify spring medicine playlist! I stretch, cook, lay, and generally groove to this mix. Hope you enjoy!
Reading
I binged The Queen of the South over the equinox weekend, a fast-paced, addicting tale of a Mexican woman’s bold and tenuous ascent in the international drug trade. There’s a surprisingly different series of the same name on Netflix that I only recommend after reading the book!
I ordered Anna Karenina before realizing it was 800 pages long. Cleverly though, Tolstoy breaks it up into 8 parts of 100 or so pages, and still further into chapters only a few pages long. I’m into the second part and my god - Tolstoy’s ability to cut to the truth of the idiosyncrasies of our human connections, summarize the complexities of our relationships in a mere sentence or two, and reveal how we can be both inseparable and lightyears apart, is astounding:
“And suddenly they both felt that, though they were friends, though they had dined together and drunk wine that should have brought them still closer, each was thinking only of his own things, and they had nothing to do with each other.” — Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Watching
Mesmerizing videos on the human ability to transmute our souls’ deepest messages into movement, like this dancing long boarder in Paris and theater artist & yoga teacher Andrew Dawson’s visual poem, “Proximity” (above). The work was inspired by a short lyrical essay titled “Close” from poet and philosopher David Whyte, and it is so sublime I included it below in its entirety:
CLOSE
is what we almost always are: close to happiness, close to another, close to leaving, close to tears, close to God, close to losing faith, close to being done, close to saying something, or close to success, and even, with the greatest sense of satisfaction, close to giving the whole thing up.
Our human essence lies not in arrival, but in being almost there, we are creatures who are on the way, our journey a series of impending anticipated arrivals. We live by unconsciously measuring the inverse distances of our proximity: an intimacy calibrated by the vulnerability we feel in giving up our sense of separation.
To go beyond our normal identities and become closer than close is to lose our sense of self in temporary joy, a form of arrival that only opens us to deeper forms of intimacy that blur our fixed, controlling, surface identity.
To consciously become close is a courageous form of unilateral disarmament, a chancing of our arm and our love, a willingness to hazard our affections and an unconscious declaration that we might be equal to the inevitable loss that the vulnerability of being close will bring.
Human beings do not find their essence through fulfillment or eventual arrival but by staying close to the way they like to travel, to the way they hold the conversation between the ground on which they stand and the horizon to which they go. What makes the rainbow beautiful, is not the pot of gold at its end, but the arc of its journey between here and there, between now and then, between where we are now and where we want to go, illustrated above our unconscious heads in primary colour.
We are in effect, always, close; always close to the ultimate secret: that we are more real in our simple wish to find a way than any destination we could reach: the step between not understanding that and understanding that, is as close as we get to happiness.
If you’re on Instagram, I read Close for our Poetry Pause last Monday evening. You can see the series recordings anytime; here’s Spring by Mary Oliver, Phenomenal Woman by Maya Angelou, and #19 from Alias All.
I’m trying to watch less mindless television and choosing shows I can learn from, starting with crime-y true life Netflix series like Murder Among Mormons and Wild Wild Country, the docuseries exploring meditation guru Osho’s culty base in Oregon. For pure funsies, try Bad Trip.
Phew, that was a long one. Thank you so much for your precious time, energy and attention. I hope you paused where you needed to, and come back to it again. I hope you learned something useful or saw a glimmer of insight, and will share it in the comments below. I hope to “see” you on Sunday if you can make it.
Sending you and yours lots of love; we are all in this together.
In loving patience,
Colby