I have been noticing the ways in my life I have become more reliable since starting yoga.  I notice emotionally I am more available and vulnerable.  I notice I am better able to keep a steady pace with the rhythm of my life, instead of rushing around all the time as I did for years.  And I notice that I find it easier to be creative.

I spend a little bit of time every day writing or taking pictures or making something.  Mostly for me it is writing.  Sometimes it is just cooking and nothing else.

I have been told I am a very practical person.  It is true.  I usually ask myself if something could work and how.  This is one reason I love yoga.  It is so practical.  Just  a study of how the body moves and how to make it move more easily.  That has practical applications for everything from sports to breathing. 

Since I am so practical, I like making things solid.  I have been in the habit of making New Year's Resolutions each year for a few years and putting them up on the wall to see them and read them and keep them in my mind.

This weekend I went for a weekend of study of yoga for pregnancy.  This was one of the required courses that I must take toward my advanced certification in yoga teaching.  

We had 28 women in the class and all wore pillows and specially designed pregnant bellies and practiced yoga together, learning modifications and precautions for pregnant women doing yoga.

Our teacher had just had a baby 6 months ago and was still very much processing that experience.  She shared how she had problems with feeling badly during pregnancy, with the birth itself, with healing, emotionally from imbalanced hormones, and with pain during breastfeeding.

One thing I love about yoga and meditation is how wonderful their traditions are around learning to be intentional in life.  I have learned so much in these past four and a half years since I started making yoga and meditation big parts of my life.

I think it is good to have a mission statement.  It makes the journey easier to navigate.  It is so easy to lose our way on earth.  We all make missteps.  We all take wrong turns.  But when there is a mission statement, it is easy to refer to it and ask, "Is this furthering my mission?

The second weekend of study for the advanced yoga teacher certification I am pursuing is coming up.  I am excited about it, as I was about the first weekend.  I found that I was really disappointed after the weekend last time.  But as I have digested the experience and I have done the assigned homework, I have benefited a great deal from having attended.

I wonder about prolonged study.  When I went through university at UGA and got my degree in English Literature, I remember thinking it was a formal system to study something over a long period of time and get a piece of paper that says that I did.

One of my favorite things about teaching yoga is getting to know such a great community of other yoga teachers.  Today's guest post is from a wonderful, magical yoga teacher and Reiki (energy work) healer.  Thiery is wise and kind and teaches a gentle yoga class that has some transformative powers! She also teaches Reiki and she would be a great person to learn it from. Aside from all that, she is funny.  Read on.  You'll see.

(Contact Thiery Goodman at <thierybgood@gmail.

This day had some nice parts to it.  I talked before about my chart with the Y for yoga and the M for meditation.  I have been working diligently to get those letters most days.  I spend fifteen minutes sometime in the day in meditation and I attend a yoga class most days of the week.  One unintended benefit of this more rigorous yoga practice is that I got an invitation from a cool yogi friend out to brunch today. 

One of the reasons I try to put myself into healthy situations and do healthy things is that I meet others who are doing the same thing.

It has been a long time since my last post to this blog.  Sorry.  Life gets wild from time to time.  It is 2014 and time for a new post

I wrote my resolutions last year on a piece of card stock and labeled them "2013" and drew a heart on the list and put them up on the wall.  I looked at that list every day when I woke up and when I went to bed.  It helped a lot.  I spent the year sober and I felt things much more intensely than before, so having that list looking at me every day helped me remember where I was going.