Weekly Letter: Creating Friction for Transformation

 *Weekly Letter is the letter I include in my weekly yoga studio newsletter.*

Tapas is not only delicious food, but a concept in yoga. Often explained as friction, tapas explains the work.

You’ve likely experienced tapas in different ways during your practice if you’ve ever started to sweat or feel warmth develop in the body.

Friction can emerge in movement, but also moments of stillness. If I asked you to close your eyes for a moment right now and be in stillness, you would likely be safe. I doubt very much you’re reading this as you’re driving or doing something dangerous. You’re likely in a safe place and my asking you to close your eyes and be still for a couple minutes wouldn’t generate a lot of heat for you.

But what if I asked you to go into plank pose and close your eyes? How quickly would a different experience begin to generate? You might not even be able to hold plank very long before that shake of effort begins to make the body quake. And what would your internal dialogue be? Calm? Charged? Would you be mad? Mad at me for telling you to do something hard?

Its within moments like those that we begin to experience tapas, friction. The process that will either shy you away or move you deeper into the practice. Plank is not the only option for transformation, but transformation doesn’t occur without some friction.

In the fall, my family burns the brush along the pastures and ditches at the farm. To burn off the dying overgrowth prevents the winter weather from weighing it down against the ground and smothering the new growth in the Spring.

The effort of the practice is burning off of the things preventing us from evolving. But instead of burning off prairie grass, we’re removing old stories or burdens of who we are to explore and discover who we are yet to be.

Your partner in tapas,

~Carmen

Weekly Letter: Someone to follow: Octavia Raheem

 *Weekly Letter is the letter I include in my weekly yoga studio newsletter.*

Author, Octavia Raheem posted this on her Instagram last week, “A blessing for this week: May you embody a love that is boundless, yet shows reverence for boundaries. A love that is fierce, yet gentle. A love that is wild and always comes home.”

This quote has pleasantly haunted my thoughts all week. Raheem implies that love is fluid, moving and changing. I picture this love as wisps moving through the air in the darkness when they are most visible, being lit from the light of your heart. As though love can only be seen in the dark voids of our soul so we can recognize it as special.

Raheem also characterizes love as being on a few spectrums making it a dynamic entity, a matrix of moving pieces always shifting. This observation feels closer to the truth-as though we will ever fully understand it. But like a sticky dough the love reaches out and weighs toward center more than not. Contentment within love.

So much of love is described with soft edges; pillows our energies bump into until a boundary is enforced or a condition is placed on our love. And when that happens, it’s as though we can hear the emergency brakes skidding to a stop. The mind jerks to attention and some clarification needs to be established.

Boundless, yet shows reverence for boundaries.

And when our boundaries are found, love moves again. The entire system suddenly has a rigid exterior protecting it for a time until it feels available to be fluid and moving again. When this exterior is flexed too many times, bigger changes happen. Love is then redefined.

Love has a baseline, a home. It has a consistent safe place to land and rest. Love rests. Does this rest lead to recharging? Maybe resting is love within a safe context of what it needs to be available for new facets of itself. If it’s ever changing, the rest is less of a sleep and more of a chrysalis for what is to come.

with boundless love,

~Carmen

Weekly Letter: Witnessing Bravery

*Weekly Letter is the letter I include in my weekly yoga studio newsletter.*

I’ve been witnessing a lot of bravery lately. I’m not speaking about within myself, but observing it in others. I don’t mean the bravery publicized with muscles and bravado, but the more subtle bravery-the bravery of trying something new, alone.

Wouldn’t it be interesting to be a fly on the wall of the individual’s internal dialogue that led them to try something new all by themselves? Like a rom-com where the happy ending is falling in love with the self. Can you imagine sitting on the sofa cheering for the hero of the story, feeling their anxiousness and weeping when they do? Deeply understanding their burden of ‘what if’ going on inside and understanding that in some situations the only thing more scary than trying, is not to try at all. And then observing them discovering a community of people who are better because they decided to go.

If only we had more opportunities to be there for people like that. Would we be overwhelmed at how many people could be out there with the capacity to be supportive of us?

Our society is bombarded with negative messaging and that makes stepping out all the more daunting. I think people who are looking to make a move are more careful about the places they chose to be vulnerably new in. They’ve thought it out to some degree. In the studio its all of our responsibility to hold space for those people. You likely won’t know who they are, maybe you will later, but in the meantime, when you walk into class, you get a new opportunity to be the quiet cheerleader of everyone in the room, just like someone else did for you.

Hold each other carefully,

~Carmen

Weekly Letter: Nourishing our small studio

*Weekly Letter is the letter I include in my weekly yoga studio newsletter.*

Eight years ago, I sat down with my attorney to discuss the purchase of MSY. He was asking me a series of questions to best set up the business for the future and make sure we don’t have to redo things later. A lot of his questions seemed pretty routine, but then he asked me if I ever wanted to franchise the studio.

I remember being surprised by the question. I didn’t even own it yet and now we’re talking about more locations? I said no and we moved on.

In the moment I went with my gut. I didn’t have any plans to franchise and it hadn’t even occurred to me.

I always like the smallness of the studio and the cozy feel of small personal classes. Smaller classes lend themselves for more personalized attention, assists and deeper conversations. Having worked for a franchise in the past, I know how easy it is to get derailed if one location isn’t doing well and how it steals time and attention from others. I never wanted to do that here.

Not to mention a pandemic 5 years down the road that would significantly change the landscape in many ways.

Today, I think about that question often. Not because I don’t want to grow. I just don’t feel more locations are the right way to grow for MSY. I’d rather grow in substance than size. I’d rather strengthen our relationships with clients. I’d rather have time to nourish myself, so I have more to give.

So do I want to grow? Yes. But do I want to franchise? Still, no.

And I look forward to growing with you too.

~Carmen