During yoga practice there is a strong focus on the breath. We inform the inhales and control the exhales. There is deliberate influence to reach a certain experience with the breath. The breath is very important. I have made really good friends with my breath, or so I thought. Alongside my yoga training I am also taking a self-defense course with my daughter. It was her idea and I was all for finding ways to spend time with this ever-independent teenager. While I will

Today I awoke before my alarm. Don’t you hate that? There wasn’t enough time to fall back to sleep, so I just laid there. I felt robbed. When my alarm did go off and I cursed the fact that it was much too soon, my eyes felt tight. Tight eyes are what my eyes feel like when my body wants more sleep. Interestingly, my body is often ready to go before my eyes. I kept them half closed as I walked the familiar path to the bathroom and then braced myself for the light that w

Habits and routines make efficient use of our brain’s mental powers to make decisions all day long from the moment we open our eyes in the morning until the moment we draw them closed at day’s end. Throughout our day we make decision after decision, everything from what we’re going to eat, what we’re going to cloth ourselves with, to what we’re going to say to someone, among others. Without establishing habits and routines in our day, we would crumble under the stress of de

Do you now where your phone is right now? It’s probably sitting right next to you or you are reading this on your phone. Either way, it’s nearby. If you don’t know where your phone is, somehow not thinking about it for a moment, you become a little frantic. We use our phones for much more than phones. I actually like the term I read in a fiction book once that referred to phones as screens. Screens are more personal assistants and navigators than communication devices.

I wrote constantly as a child. Filling the remaining pages of old school notebooks leftover from years past, relinquishing the stories in my head onto those light blue lines, over and over again. Then just like that the energy of the words would seize. Held hostage to those words, allowing them to control me I became lost, frightened, scorned. Simply writing what my head could hold I would get all lost in the middle and then bail. Many times my stories were left without concl