Grateful sitting fireside last night, my girlfriend cooking dinner. Friendship “can be sustained over the years only with someone who has repeatedly forgiven us for our trespasses.” ***  Thankful for her immutable presence in my life, I sat quiet, peaceful, heart and soul awash with considerations, invitations, conversations garnered over a three day retreat with poet David Whyte.

A sense of twilit pause permeates this chunk of time prior to the new year…it’s so tangible. Uncharacteristic surround sound stillness, that final rhythm that seems to get lost in the buzz. In a working culture known for comparatively stingy vacation allowance, un-busy feels welcome healthy. I know this is not true for everyone. God bless the service industry. But you can picture me fireside in pajamas, sipping hot mug of java, looking out at another clear cold day, wondering what this 24 hour episode holds.

Cold early morning, snug toasty looking out at coated mountains that have hugged me all through the week. As soon as I landed here in Washington, an early snow cascaded out of the sky, carpeting grounded orange leaves with giddy surprise. I’m a rare and awe-filled visitor to snow. It’s fleecy sheen turns the mundane to marvel and, when I’m out in it, the bite in the air and potential slip of each step forces me into constant wakefulness.

The October 8 Sunday Sweat was all about letting go and then honoring the empty space created with that surrender, that space between what was done and what was yet to come. By Sunday evening hundreds of people in Northern California were force fed that teaching by a random act of god. The fire finger of fate burned into so many lives and extorted a full on let go, indiscriminately took everything away.

The rectangular glass table held sun’s gleam, kindling open faces around me, many deeply absorbed in conversations stimulated by the Esalen workshop morning. I turned to a mid-West pediatrician and asked about her experience with scoliosis, which is often detected in teen growth-spurt years. Over 17 years she tracked outcome in response to simple instructed exercise given each spinal curve-y youngster.

It’s those five, ten year milestones that get me reflecting. Realize I’ve been showing up on dance floors for fifteen years now. Always a student, sometimes a guide. I find myself listening for what keeps me coming back with such regularity and devotion. At the heart of showing up is something I believe we all share. I sometimes find myself frustratingly distracted by the speed and demand of the way I choose to live. Maybe you do, too. Awareness of this fact does not seem to mitigate its acceleration.

If it weren’t for geography’s random play, I wouldn’t be teaching 5Rhythms. Somehow I landed in the perfect storm, surrounded in northern California by movers and shakers.   Classes were here, workshops were abundant, I was completely swept up. Even after I began teaching, yearly support was generous: a Marin intensive in August, a January teacher refresh in Manhattan.  

Have you experienced musical transport?   Heart-cracking melody, bliss-delivering lead guitar, bone deep vibration. Human beings have been making music forever. It nourishes us with life-giving properties that food and water and air just cannot provide. Still riding the energy of Guitarfish where day after day filled with the physicality of dance re-affirmed my love and commitment to the healing power of this modality.

If you’re of Native American descent and privileged enough to live on your ancestral ground, you might be deeply root-connected. For the rest of us in North America, not so much. Last week I saw the poignant, hilarious and crafty Bad Jews, a play at Capital Stage. At one point the protagonist, trying to get to the heart of this root-connected reality, asks goody two-shoes girlfriend “Where are you from?” Girlfriend answers “Delaware” which launched protagonist into a hysterical tirade with roots in this Sy Safransky quote from The Sun July 2010:

My family moved to California in 1958 and I’ve spent major chunks of time in the Sierras ever since. Back in the day, my crazy adventurous parents took us backpacking all around the eastern slope. This was low tech camping---no tent, no stove, no water filter. This childhood experience created a robust imprint. I’ve travelled many mountains since, but this one…I’m just connected to this range. My heart thrives in the Sierras.

A simple turn of the English language can travel right to heart or gut, rattle us for days. I was listening to Thich Nhat Hanh clarify why he uses the word “understand” instead of “know” when it comes to matters of the spirit. To know is a fixed perspective. You know your address. You know that two plus two equals four. To understand is an awareness fluid in nature, shifting moment by moment. To understand is to release, to let go. Of what? Preconceived notions, precious opinions, cherished attachments. Oh those.

Journey Day 10, huddled fireside at, of all places, the Ritz Carlton, grateful for a bit of warmth and food prepared by someone other than me. Time out in the elements is challenging with persistent blustery cold. So we take a morning of privileged respite, knowing that we can, before we head out once again. The Pacific is mighty in its moods.

A week simmering in loss and love, feeling how they are inextricably woven, two sides of the same coin…if we are willing. Last Monday I was sitting with a friend, choosing music for her looming memorial service. Today she is not here. She died the same day I flew to San Antonio to be with my old papa, who is leaving quite slowly, his mental faculties quietly washing away. So much has changed in my relationship with him and I owe that healthy evolution to Gabrielle. For that I am extremely grateful. In full vulnerability, I want to write about that this morning. If you are curious about what Gabrielle Roth has to do with my dad, read on.

I was held all day Saturday at a yoga retreat dedicated to sutra 1.33, the four brahmavihara. This sutra takes the practice of yoga off the cushion (where it might be relatively easy to become enlightened) into present time reality. Very specific instruction on using social relationships as a call to awaken. And unless you live in a cave, this would be a never-ending practice. Want peace of mind?

Sacramento residents cherish spring-surprise February days. Especially this wet year. In a small backyard nook, even in winter depth, I can count on basking on those special days. Yesterday I moved my cherry red Adirondack out of maple-shade and wedged it in that nook. I lounged in bliss-flooded memory precisely where I reclined in the 80’s, leaning against the same fence, watching my babies crawl through the grass. I could almost taste the lingering sweetness, lost as I was in reminiscence. Now they are grown and gone with babies of their own. Time is strangely swift and plodding all at once.

Soft-hearted, change of heart, hard-hearted, heart’s desire, half-hearted, be still my heart, cold-hearted, eat your heart out, broken-hearted, faint of heart…feel my point? We reference the heart in myriad ways in our efforts to describe our interior emotional landscape. This is rich territory indeed. Close your eyes a moment and check into the state of your own heart right now.

I have books on my shelf with titles like Pelvic Power that have been there since the nineties. Because the eighties core stability craze focused on creating a corset around the lower body and neglected to include the pelvic bowl floor. Woops. So my interest in this multi-faceted topic goes back aways.   Teaching patients to coordinate deep abs with pelvic floor was a clinical treatment goal back then.

The year was 1970. I was stretched out in the dark, atop a floor mattress in a funky duplex in Sherman Oaks. A commanding voice boomed out of the FM radio, spoke to a part of me I knew existed, just had never articulated. Baba Ram Dass might have been the first person to speak directly to my soul, describing the ineffable in a way I understood. There in the pitch black, vast worlds became visible, territory I’d yet to journey, landscapes terrifyingly immense but seductively essential.

I’ve been doing a lot of hanging out lately. Meaning I’ve been upside down, letting gravity have its way with me, allowing elongation. Slowing down and breathing fully. A gravity assist into revised perspective. Traction-ing open hunks of vertebrae, sanctioning disc expansion, yawning ribs free.   In suspended shapes off my couch, treatment table, strap sling, I experience much. What it feels like to breathe into my back body, especially upper right and lower left, the air entering and emancipating what yearns to be free. The exhale calling in the opposite diagonal, inviting it to draw to, align to center.

I saw Moonlight last night, an incredible film that placed me squarely in the life of a gay black young man growing up in a drug drenched neighborhood. In her review, Carla Meyer commented on the movie’s conclusion: “Because an insistence on hope is as much a part of the American psyche as the demand for uninterrupted liberty.”