Hello again, dear Readers!

It’s been an interesting four months away from blogging. Did you miss me? I missed you, as I’ll share later on. I’m glad to be back, and looking forward to returning to regular blogging. Today, I want to say a few words about my break and why it was so important for me.

In November, I participated (as I do every year) in National Novel Writing Month, which is always entertaining and instructive.  I then took December off to restore and recharge, returning to my yoga teaching in January. For the first two months of 2023, I also took part in an online yoga teacher training to keep things fresh, and it’s helped to revitalize my passion for asana, yoga philosophy, and Patanjali’s Eight-Fold Path.

Actually, I’m kind of amazed that I was able to do this, as I’m generally very bad at taking time off. As just one example, when my father died in 1997, I was finishing my Ph.D. program in Education and working as an Activity Director for a local high school.  How much time did I give myself to process things? One day. After that, I returned to work and spent the rest of the school year constantly ill. Lack of sleep, high stress, and grief will do that to a person! I have heard that if you don’t take care of your health, you’ll take care of your disease, and that’s exactly what happened. I won’t go into any more details at the moment, but it was a difficult time period and not something that I want to repeat.

2022 was another watershed year for me. My husband retired in March, a dear friend of ours passed in April, and a second friend in September. What a difference twenty-five years and a decade studying yoga makes; for the first time in my life, I decided to take the time I needed to process my grief and figure out my next move. And so I did! Beyond NaNoWriMo, I’ve pottered around with various writing projects, only to find that I missed the experience of blogging. So here I am, ready to return to a weekly (or perhaps bi-weekly) schedule of writing about the yogaverse and its importance to my life.

Besides allowing myself the break, I think I may have learned some yoga-related life lessons during this time. Seva, or service, has always been an important part of my life, but it was interesting to experience how aimless my writing felt without that component. Blogging allows me to share my experience and knowledge with the world, and it gives me pleasure to be able to use my skills to help others in this way. While there is another creative project I also want to work on, my current plan is for 2023 to be a year focused on learning and sharing about yoga, meditation, and the like.

One more piece of personal information: this last week, I was fortunate enough to spend five days in Mammoth Lakes. I learned to snowshoe (at long last!) and was able to photograph winter in all its glory. It may not be yoga per se, but I recommend spending time out in nature to help the brain figure things out. I will write more about the healing powers of the environment in future installments, but I’ll content myself here with a shoutout to the Minaret Vista Trail behind the Mammoth Mountain Inn for lovely views, including trees covered with snow yet getting ready to burst out into the spring season. Is this a metaphor for the last few months of my life? Perhaps!