Reflections

Fruitful Patience

~ teganb ~ 2 Comments

Sitting down to reflect on the past week, thoughts and images parade through my mind at a languid pace, out of order, drifting here and there. The day is hot and my fingers feel lazy now that I have put them to work at the keyboard. What can be said about this past week?

Well, we have at last moved into our own flat. IMG1976I have unpacked everything, found places for things,  hung our Sunshine Coast calendar on the wall, and begun to settle in and stretch out like a cat in its favourite box. There is a desk to write at, space to practice yoga, and two balconies with wrought iron railings to lean out over and watch the scurrying day unravel below. We can reach the Spanish school in a five minute walk, the river flows wide and deep a block or so away, and this old apartment—with high ceilings, a quirky mix of furniture, sloping floors—is large enough to give private lessons or small group classes in English and yoga. The plan for finding work is developing. We have ventured deeper into the country, seen the coast, explored another city. We have made a few friends, both Spanish and foreign. The days grow longer and the sun shines hot in the afternoons and the breeze rocks the open windows gently back and forth. Things are coming together.

Sound echoes around the Casco Antiguo—the central area of Sevilla, all old buildings—as though conversations could take place in midair, right outside a balcony two storeys up. If this balcony leads to your bedroom, and you are sound asleep, you might curse the narrow lanes and their excellent acoustics. But when some flutist in the opposite building is practicing with an open window on a sunny afternoon, or the night is warm and laughter drifts up from below, it feels like a privilege.

Finding myself here alone for a few days, I have found the sounds a friendly companion. Robin is in Madrid meeting his parents, who have come to visit all the way from Australia; the three of them are spending several nights in the capital before they make their way to Sevilla. I am looking forward to their arrival, and in the meantime I have been enjoying the time to myself—the first I have had in many months. Living in this old apartment, I like to imagine myself as Amelie from the lovely French movie, making dinner for one, enjoying the simple pleasures of watching people from my creaky old window in an old European city, IMG-20150411-WA0011cracking the tops of crème brulée and things like that—not that I have had any crème brulée, but I have enjoyed other sensual food moments like slicing up strawberries and bananas and eating them with honey, or cooking myself a mushroom risotto with a glass of a wine and music. Moments like those make me feel independent and chic, but also a bit like a kid who has finally been deemed old enough to be left home alone. Either way, a bit of solo dancing round the kitchen lends itself to making the most of a night by yourself.

Late at night, the silence settles in. Sometimes it settles softly and serenely, while at other times with a lonely hue, like a cool night through a thin sweater. But these ebbs and flows are part of the natural order of things—our very breath moves in and out with the same organic cycle, and I am doing my best to embrace such movement in my daily life as well. Certainly one half of that equation is easier than the other but with a bit of patience we generally do come out on the other side—just as my fingers have thankfully managed to rouse themselves after all.

The Storm

~ teganb ~ 4 Comments

Life is wild. Sometimes the chaos spins up around us and howls so loud we cannot help but shake and wail, or leap with excitement, or buckle in a heap of tears. Sometimes life seems to ask us to jump, sometimes to hide, sometimes to dream, sometimes to act. At other times it seems to ask nothing of us. We may wander aimlessly, wondering what the meaning of it all is, where we came from, where we are going, why we are here. During these quiet moments, the wildness of life occurs within the space of our own chest, in the tension and release of our limbs, in the leaps and crashes of emotion and the babbling of our mind. This can be as challenging as the worldly ups and downs that take place without. At least external chaos offers some distraction from the unruliness of the mind, the overpowering emotions of the heart. Stillness around us reveals the noise within, and we do not always like what we hear.

Leaving the strict, busy schedule of yoga teacher training has revealed the intense play of my inner peaks and valleys. My days lie open before me, waiting for me to make of them what I will, and faced with the pressure of an open canvas my mind spins too many plans and I cannot keep up. A mixture of emotions begins to whirr. I feel excitement at all the possibilities before me, but also doubt and fear in wondering how to take advantage of them. I feel the smart of past failures (both real and imagined), and worry if self change is truly possible. Sometimes a wave of depression takes hold, which feels like a warning shot; I could slide down a slope that would end in a grey soup of the mind, chemically deprived of joy, where dark stories take hold and motivation is a foreign word with no meaning. An invisible lead apron descends upon the chest, and under its weight comes the terrible sensation of not enough breath.

We all feel depressed at times. However, there is a line where feeling depressed becomes more than an emotion. Many people in our society have suffered—or still suffer—from depression to varying degrees, and it can be debilitating. The times I have been depressed were often not apparent to me until after I began to emerge from the fog, and I could see more clearly how low the baseline from which I was experiencing life had dropped. I am grateful for the people, the life changes, the activities that helped me move through and up and out again. I know some people suffer more severely and require other treatments to regain light inside the brain. Whatever the degree, I will always have deep compassion for all those dealing with depression, and for their friends and family too. The feelings of isolation that accompany the state make it hard to connect with others, and the ensuing hurt affects everyone.

It is no wonder that the fear of depression underlies my other feelings of trepidation. Things are changing, new possibilities really do exist in all directions, but not if my inner landscape darkens beyond my reach. Incidentally, my struggles of this past week have matched the sky, which has been sealed over with grey clouds, like a steel dome. On occasion the sun does burst through with blinding brightness. More often the droplets gather dark and close above and let loose all at once. Depending on the climate of my mind, the rain can feel either calm and comforting or like a cold heavy curtain blocking out the sun’s warmth.

When I find myself teetering on the edge of a downward slope, I know I must do whatever I can to catch a glimpse of hope. A song, a conversation, a walk can make all the difference—anything to shake up the settling shadows and allow even the tiniest ray of light through. Circumstances may remain as they were, the mountain to climb still stands, but something physically releases. The invisible weight on the body starts to evaporate, and the breath comes more easily. The return of the breathe carries us through the storm.

“The basic thing,” says the Dalai Lama, “is that everyone wants happiness, no one wants suffering… we are all the same.” The Buddha said, “you can search the ten-fold universe and not find a single being more worthy of loving kindness than yourself.” Rumi said, “close your eyes, fall in love, stay there.” The wise words of these sages help me to remember: we are not alone, we deserve to be happy, and it is worth doing whatever it takes to remind ourselves of this any time we forget.

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Stamina

~ teganb ~ 3 Comments

The end of this week draws nearer. Tomorrow morning at 7:30 I will be teaching my first official class. I have written out a sequence on some flash cards, with a number of optional sequences penciled in, given the very good chance I will speed through my planned poses in an anxious whirl, and be left wondering what to say next in order to fill the 75 allotted minutes. Of course, it all has to flow nicely as well, and include all the necessary elements (warm-up, standing postures, backbends, etc) in the right quantities. It feels a bit like baking a cake at this point, and I am worried that if I stir too much or too little the whole thing will flop. Hopefully it is more like making pasta or stir-fry or something, and a little extra dash of this or that will not ruin the overall taste.

The weather has been beautiful for most of this week. Warm enough, in fact, to entice me and one of my new friends to hop in the outdoor pool—a short but very (very!) refreshing dip. A couple of days ago, on the day we passed the halfway mark of this course, the sun beamed down like a midsummer’s day on the BC coast. It was also the only day off from classes we get during this course, and I had a fantastic time; Robin rode the bus to a neighbouring village, where I met him on foot. We spent the day eating and wandering, walking over the hill back to the yoga compound, passing through some lovely old ruins on the way, and enjoying the beginnings of a beautiful sunset spilling out over the hills before he had to leave and catch the last bus home. I sat a while after he left, holding the warmth of the day close to my heart as the air quickly cooled, before settling into the knowledge that there are no more days off and we students are beginning the last and steepest incline before getting through this course.

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I woke several times that night, thinking it must be time to get up. Otherwise I slept lightly, lost in restless dreams that I was teaching my class—or trying to—as the head teacher constantly interrupted me to give me feedback. The next morning the hills were covered in mist. The air was quiet and thick, and added to the feeling of being very much back-to-the-grind. Today, however, the mist has been blown away by a rambunctious wind that whips all the laundry drying on the line into a big clump at one end, and makes the doors and windows bang. I hear the temperature will drop this evening. And tomorrow morning, just after the chilly dawn, I will be one of the first students to teach. I am happy enough to get straight to it (and get it over with). We have reached that stage where no more lectures, reading, note-taking or demo watching can make us become better teachers; we will just have to start out as the shaky, fledgling instructors we are, with the aim to just get through as gracefully as we can, because it is the only way. I think we have a painful habit in the west of wanting to be perfect at everything before we do it, which is madness. We often feel embarrassed at not doing something well, even when we have only just started. Why should there be shame in learning something new? If only we could embrace being beginners; there is a kind of magic in that space I think, if only we would allow ourselves to see it—we are creating, we are leaping, we are living.

Hopefully such thoughts will stay with me as I begin my class tomorrow morning… and at the end of it too, when everyone will go round and critique my performance (including the teachers). At this point I feel so tired that I am more worried about my intensely aching shoulders picking tomorrow morning to give out on me. We are certainly building stamina here, of different kinds.

Goodnight and sweet dreams all,
whenever your night may fall.
And good luck with any and all
beginner’s wobbles and falls.

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Spanish in the Streets

~ teganb ~ 4 Comments

It’s 9:30pm, on the eve before leaving for yoga training. Rob and I have just finished eating an early dinner by Spanish standards, and I feel like I could fall into bed this instant. The week has been full and festive, thanks to a lovely visit from a dear old friend. After many tapas and plenty a glass of wine, I think we are all ready for a rest. But it is sad to say goodbye. On top of that, I will soon be saying goodbye to Rob and to this city, and even a few new friends here, and that feels a bit sad too. I know it is not for long, but I feel like I am constantly leaving places these days.

At the same time, I am of course looking forward to this new experience—to learning, to movement, to seeing the Spanish countryside, to eating healthy vegetarian food. I am even hopeful that the weather might permit a few swims in the lovely pool pictured on the retreat website. The temperature has been increasing over the past week or so, to an almost summery warmth during the day (Vancouver summer that is—not by local standards). The evenings are still cool. But judging by the change so far, I have a beautiful spring to look forward to when I finish my course.

I also look forward to settling in a bit upon my return, to finding work, to getting into a routine, to unpacking my stuff and leaving it that way for a while. We have not yet found an apartment that is to our liking. We have decided that it is worthwhile to be both patient and picky, seeing as I already have a place to stay the next three weeks and Rob can stay in a single room rented by the week. Tomorrow we we will get up early to finish packing and move our things to his room, and later in the afternoon I will catch the bus to the small village of Villamartín. There someone will pick me up and drive me to the olive farm acreage on which the yoga retreat was built, where I will begin this new experience, and perhaps a new chapter.

Meanwhile, the rest of the city is celebrating Friday night. A group of young señores y señoritas is laughing and drinking outside our window. Someone had a guitar earlier, playing songs like Stairway to Heaven and Smells Like Teen Spirit while his friends listened with the attentiveness he was surely hoping for. Flamenco seems to appeal to an older crowd than that which has gathered outside our window. We were lucky enough to witness a spontaneous flamenco practice session the other day, performed by leather-jacketed thirty-somethings—long dreads hanging down their backs—in the hip and hipster café area of La Alameda. The really lovely thing was that nearly the whole café got involved, keeping time with loud and rhythmic clapping, some of them even singing, or just smiling and tapping their feet as they smoked their cigarettes and drank beer in the sun. What the Spaniards seem to share is a love of spending time together, of sharing drink and food in the open air, of soaking up the afternoon and evening with a presence that might suggest there is nothing else to do—but not because there actually is nothing, but because this social interaction is just as worthy as anything else on the list, so they give it their all.

My own social interactions this past wDSCF2145eek were thoroughly infused with the Spanish spirit. Strolling and wandering, enjoying afternoon sweets before dinner, reading in the sun, and hours of drinking and eating—it was a lovely way to catch up with an old friend and to enjoy the Sevillan way of leisure before moving on to a more austere lifestyle over next few weeks. But for now, to bed! Buenas noches.

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Big Wash

~ teganb ~ 4 Comments

One week remains before I catch the bus to the yoga training retreat . I can hardly believe I am doing this. I feel very nervous… perhaps because of the daunting programme, perhaps from worrying what it will be like and how the people will be, perhaps because it has been quite a while since I studied anything, or perhaps because I have invested much hope in this venture and I fear disappointment. Will it be the transformative experience I desire? Will it be the beginning of a career path? I never imagined it as one until recently,  and it still feels somehow strange to me. Will I be satisfied? Can I really make a living teaching yoga? What other things do I really want to do? How am I going to make the most difference to this world while making the most difference to myself as well? Is it possible to love one’s everyday routine?

Questions have been appearing almost constantly in my head of late, and I weary of them. It is easy to overthink things, which ultimately seems to separate a person from what is actually going on. Then, feeling a bit removed and disconnected, the mind spins even faster, because it is like watching a reflection of life off the mirror of the mind (or through the “vrittis”—whirlpools of the mind, mental activity—according to my yoga text). Well, surely three weeks of early morning meditation will help with that.

My vrittis are in full force these days and I feel easily distracted and often uncertain of what I ought to be doing. Strangely enough, all this whirling activity leaves me feeling like I have nothing much to say this week, and I must admit how challenging it is to maintain a weekly blog. Yes, I knew it would be hard, but contemplating a difficult task is a far cry from actually doing it. The real live act DSCF3164involves a lot more stomach than I expected: a twisty, churning feeling, that physically tightens and agitates the solar plexus as the end of the week approaches.

When the mind’s waters get choppy and the stomach starts doing gymnastics, it generally helps to just start moving—and the most therapeutic method of movement for me is going for a walk. If I don’t feel like going, I know I need it especially. Far away from the forests and shores of home, it is the riverside here that beckons my footsteps.

The charm of stone streets and narrow alleys remains undisputed, but Sevillan architectural beauty would not have quite the same effect if this city were not cloven by the elegant, gently-flowing giant, the river Guadalquivir. Apparently the name comes from Arabic, al-wadi al-kabir, which means either ‘great valley’, ‘big riverbed’ or ‘big wash’. Here in Sevilla, it is wide and calm. It is always peppered with rowers and kayakers, and every hour or so, a pack of tourists on a big oldfashioned-looking riverboat, that broadcasts information about the city over a loudspeaker, echoing in different languages across the water to the runners, cyclists, and walkers on the paved banks.

I find myself somewhere along that waterway almost every day. It feels like a friend, like a steady presence I can count on. I always feel better, at least a little, after a walk by the river.

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Pasos y Presencia

~ teganb ~ 3 Comments

Two and a half weeks have passed since I joined Robin in Spain. To my relief, it feels like longer. I had always hoped that time would expand once we took this leap, especially in these first few weeks of settling in—because at last there would be nothing to do. That is not true, of course; there is always something to do, and once you deal with one list another one quickly appears: registering as a Danish ex-pat now living in Spain, applying to obtain my EU health card, asking questions of the infuriatingly unhelpful Spanish bureaucrats, looking for an apartment, finding cheap phones, trying not to lose any more money through visa mess-up madness, etc.

But more and more both Rob and I are hit with the knowledge that it is all about perception. There is always going to be ‘something to do’, so we had better find a way of lifting our spirits despite the mountain of administrative tasks our society requires—especially of those who move around internationally.

Some people are naturally very good at dealing with logistical things. For us, they often feel insurmountable. I think we both find it less daunting to commit to plunging ourselves into a foreign language and culture than we do committing to the process of applying for a study visa. Ugh! I almost changed my mind about going on exchange to Mexico years ago because of the exhaustive requirements of the visa application. Of course I am glad I did not. And that is the thing—once you get going, it comes along alright, and somehow you do get through it. I think it just seems overwhelming for those of us who forget that a building is constructed brick by brick, and mountains are climbed one step at a time.

All this aside, there is much less to do here than either of us has experienced in many years. I am frankly very grateful for it. In the past, during times of transition, I have often found myself anxious for the next activity. Despite how much I may yearn for ‘nothing to do’ when I am full tilt into the work schedule, and/or studying, socializing, and keeping up on life admin, I have found it difficult to truly enjoy the lulls when they come. This time I am consciously savouring this feeling of limbo. Although I have had a few moments of financial panic, I know that something will come along. And when it does, I will look back at this stage, and this time I am determined that I will look back with gratitude that I made the best of it, rather than realizing that in worrying about the future, I missed it. No, not this time.

So what do I do with myself these days?! Well, lately, I fight colds and coughs. My main weapons are sleeping in and drinking tea, and I am making headway. I also practice yoga; in two weeks I start my intensive yoga teacher training, so I aim to practice at least four times a week, in hope that the inevitable butt-whipping brought by three weeks of intensive daily practice and study does not hit me quite so hard. I pick my way through the book on yoga philosophy that we are supposed to have read before going. I eat lunch with Rob after he is done with his classes, I walk by the river and through the city, I try to tackle some of the ‘things to do’ (but honestly I have not made much headway there), and I watch Spanish movies with Rob. We also meet Spaniards for language exchanges, and from one such exchange came a really positive step towards our immersion in Spanish culture: going out for dinner with a Spanish couple and understanding the majority of the evening’s conversation while successfully explaining whatever we attempted, one way or another. The night’s other success was the discovery of  a magnificently delicious tapas restaurant, which cost half as much as such a place would do in Canada… so come visit, amigos, and we’ll take you there!

Delicious tapas aside, sometimes I ask myself what all this amounts to, and why we are really here. We both have to remind ourselves many times that this is one of those brick by brick situations, and it is okay not to see the whole picture yet. So in the meantime, it is also okay to sleep in, drink tea, practice yoga, and wander the city, all the while counting the moments until the next meal… it’s still early days. I am hopeful these tiny steps are the first in finding our way to a life honouring our hearts’ desires, and indeed, first taking the time to sit still long enough to know what those are.

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Wet Oranges

~ teganb ~ 2 Comments

It is Saturday in Spain, and the last day of January. We woke up to the sound of rain in the streets, and  I found that soft and familiar song of falling water so comforting. I could close my eyes again in the dark room and imagine I was somewhere on the wet west coast of Canada. Soon the rain stopped, however, and my sleepy half-dream of cabins and coniferous forests stopped too, because if I really were on the west coast, it would have rained all day long! Perhaps it is strange to be missing such a thing, when the sun is already bright in the sky again just a few hours later, and the breeze is warm, but there is something extremely soothing about a long wet day, and rain on the roof all night long… with a few conditions of course, such as a good raincoat for walks and a warm home in which to dry off and curl up.

Not a trace of rain remains as I sit looking out the window at the bright orange tree just outside. They grow everywhere here, adding colour to the stone and brick  landscape and making streets look merry. Just as there is some deep calm in the DSCF3113sound of rain, so too is there something inherently uplifting about an orange tree. It may just be the vibrancy of the green and orange together, or the novelty of seeing such bright fruit alive and growing, but at any rate, I do not miss the rainy shores of home quite so much with that lovely tree to look upon.

A week and a half have passed since I arrived in Sevilla and since Morfar died. Gently, patiently, acceptance settles upon me as the days go by and I feel my feet sinking a little deeper into this new ground. I have learned that the Christmas and birthday cards I had sent to Morfar reached him in time, that he had been happy to read them. In them I had written how much I was looking forward to celebrating with him. Last week that occurred to me as nothing but sad, but this week I see how much it means that he knew we all were excited, we all were anticipating being together to celebrate him and his life, and though it did not happen as we imagined and hoped, he did have something very important—knowledge that he was not alone, that he was loved.

Thinking of all my loved-ones at home is a similarly comforting thought; we know we are there for one another, we are connected always, even when far apart.

It seems my heart took a while to catch up to my body this trip, but it is happening. Rob and I do our best to practice Spanish, struggling with this crazy Sevillano accent, we walk the city and riverside, and balance our desires to eat tapas and drink beers out on the town with making meals ourselves and saving money by splitting a beer in the house—about two dollars for a litre! A heartening thought as well.

And I have my orange tree. There is just something inherently uplifting about the green and orange of a naranjo—rain or shine—that comforts me.

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Beginnings and Endings

~ teganb ~ 2 Comments

Sevilla is no less beautiful than promised. In fact, its streets and cathedrals, its ornate architecture twisting through alleyways and wrapped around parks, comes to life with an awing presence far more thrilling than what the few photos I saw on the internet DSCF3114evoked. At any rate, I looked at very few, and was coming mostly on trust – Robin did the research. He ruled out Barcelona (because of Catalan) and I ruled out Madrid (too big), and then it became a game of where the cheapest Spanish lessons were to afford him a visa, while offering us a quintessential Spanish experience. Sevilla, warm southern Spain with Moorish influence on these stunning edificios, suggested a place we both would enjoy. A few days in and it has wooed me well.

Despite the winding, gothic beauty of the narrow stony streets, and the relative warmth, this trip has not started out easy. The last week has been fraught with the rapid decline in health of my Morfar (mother’s father, granddad), and on the night I arrived in Spain, my dear Morfar passed away. My Mom sat by his side, having flown over from Canada just in time, and held his hand as he laboured to draw his last breath. The rest of the Canadian family could not get there, and we are left to mourn his passing from afar. It happened so fast. He learned he had lung cancer a few weeks ago, but no one guessed he would be gone this quickly. Perhaps saddest of all is that he just turned 80, and but half a year further we were to celebrate his birthday all together in Denmark. Almost my entire close family was to be there – the first time in over 20 years for my Dad, and half as long for others. But Morfar could not make it. It became too hard to breathe, his lungs filled with fluid, and my Mom flew in just in time – just 24 hours before he died. I am so grateful they got to see each other one more time before he went. But god, it is bloody sad and I am having a hard time wrapping my head around it, and my heart.

Arriving in Spain feels like the culmination of years’ dreaming. The last few months have been overwhelmed with preparation. Now that I am here—faced with unexpected loss, still jetlagged and shaky—I see clearly and painfully how wrapped up we become in our plans, in how things ought to be, in how this or that needs to happen to make us happy. I am trying to let go of that as best I can. Plans rarely work out exactly how we imagine them, and often life presents us with something entirely different. Often we do not really know what will make us happy anyways, but certainly being present and appreciating what we have is one of the surer recipes.

I do not know what this year will bring. Walking along the river, along the cobble-paved boardwalks, I am doing my best not to fall apart as my world shifts and I don’t feel up to it. Maybe a bit more sleep will help. I think of Morfar and tell him in my heart how grateful I am for the time we did spend together. I do not know what happens when we leave this life, but regardless I wish his soul peace and so much love.

May we live and love well with the time we are given.