If I close my eyes long enough maybe it'll go away.

Hi there. Remember me? It’s been a while.

So much has happened since my last blog post and I can’t wait to tell you all about it. Nutshell: I spent the month of May in Bermuda teaching my 200-Hour Yoga Teacher Training, which was unicorns riding mermaids magic! I’m already busy planning to return to my home away from home in St. George’s for a retreat in November, another 200-Hour YTT in February, and a 300-hour YTT with some amazing guest faculty in May of next year, so stay tuned!

I want to apologize for leaving you in silence while I was away. No excuses, but some explanation: When I first landed in Bermuda, I was surprised by the amount of time I didn’t have! It was a marathon teaching nine-hour days, six days a week, while spending early mornings and evenings on ‘Mom-Duty’ and desperately trying to soak up as much of Bermuda as I could. As a result, most of the rest of my life back home (including this blog) was unceremoniously halted. Things have calmed almost back to a normal pace since then (the 100s of emails returned) and, since I last wrote, my dust-collecting blog popped into my head at LEAST a half a dozen times. Funny though, as more time went by it seemed like the breadth of what I needed to write ballooned. Nothing seemed important enough to break the silence that had bubbled up between us and so, I wrote nothing. Somehow that made me feel. Isn’t that the way? We haven’t called that friend or loved one in a while and it gets harder and harder to pick up the phone. We haven’t been to our favourite yoga class in a while and what once was a regular part of our routine that we looked forward now seems like a chore because we first have to show up on the threshold of our shame and own those pieces of ourselves that we try so hard to hide. On some level, I think it’s easier to pretend that part of our lives never existed because to show up means coming face to face with our humanity - we are procrastinators who don’t like change and would prefer to lose an important element to our self-care rather than face a part of ourselves that makes us feel shame. Funny isn’t it? 

I’ve come to see that showing our vulnerabilities to another person by writing that blog post, making that call, or going back to that class is actually where real growth happens. So this is me, telling you that this was always important to me even when my overestimation of ability to wear all my hats and run a full-time teacher training, shame for having missed deadline after self-imposed deadline, embarrassment with every passing week, and stress about what I would say in this blog post got in the way of this connection. This is me owning up to my failure. This is me trying again. 

Sometimes we just have to dive in. Incomplete, unsure, vulnerable … just as we are … perfectly imperfect people. How much energy do we waste thinking about that unreturned email or that overdue apology? In my experience, once we pull off that bandaid, take that first step, or put ourselves out there everything just gets easier after that. It feels more aligned than hiding.

And, yeah, maybe this isn’t the most life-changing blog post you’ll ever read, but I sent it. I sent it and it isn’t even a Tuesday! Take THAT perfectionism! I am re-commiting to sending you a little piece of my heart over email every Tuesday and posting it online every Friday. It would have been easier to have ignored my blog baby. If I never sent another blog post out ever again, I doubt many would notice and even less would mention it to me, so I could hide my shame. If we don’t talk about it, it never happened. Except it did happen. I am not someone who avoids. I dive right in. I tell you exactly how I feel and I trust that you do the same with me (though, from experience, I know that’s not always what happens, but that’s fodder for another blog post). I hid from all of you at the risk of highlighting this failure, and now I’m here doing just that for one moment before we move on and move up. 

I’m so glad we’re back in touch.