Marcia's Musings: The Long Goodbye (Kiss)
/In her cheerful, quiet room, I sit as close to her hospital bed as possible, my hand on her bony shoulder, and turn my full attention to her. Even as she sleeps, I resist the phone….
Read MoreMarcia's Musings: The Gift of Giving Your Full Attention
/
All day long, I’d roamed the combative realm of divided attention: sneaking in an answer to a text or two while in Zoom meetings; answering phone calls from colleagues and friends while writing emails or editing articles, and cramming some non-descript food into my hungry body while reading business documents. I felt depleted and alienated. Split attention takes a toll on us as we now well know, giving lie to decades of training people how to multi-task.
Read MoreMarcia’s Musings: My Heart. My Life’s Companion.
/There comes the time when we take deep stock of our lives. If we’re living a life grounded in the present and in the body, we will have taken stock frequently throughout the entire arc of our lives. What does it mean to take deep stock? When do we know it’s time to do so? How do we do it?
Read MoreMarcia's Musings: The Importance of Being Sweaty
/
Sweating often communicates the state of our emotional well-being. How many times has a friend, partner, child, spouse said to you, “I broke out into a cold sweat”? How many times have you experienced the cold sweats yourself?
Read MoreAnd Just Like That: How I Found Myself
/The feeling of happiness moved throughout my body like liquid gold, starting at my heart center. I understood what happiness feels like for me. Because I stayed present the thought was no longer just a thought – it morphed into a physical sensation….
Read MoreGrief Is No Game. Help Exists.
/
When grief comes calling, it rarely arrives alone. Sometimes guilt accompanies it. It’s complicated and many-layered. Sometimes relief does – the innate gratitude that the loved one no longer suffers – and inadvertently triggers more guilt….
Read MoreMarcia's Musings: Float Like a Butterfly
/
It wasn’t always easy to recognize positive outcomes in the age of the pandemic, given the brain’s preference for negative thinking. Especially in the darkest days our community faced together, all I focused on was absorbing the shock of the “unseen enemy” and its relentless assault…
Read MoreMarcia's Musings: The Conservation of Energy
/
My mother’s younger brother died a few weeks ago at age 88. One minute he sat chatting from his chair with his daughter, seeing her on Facetime, and the next he slumped over quietly. He left this world on the long, last exhale in an instant without noticeable stress or pain. In what certainly stands as a sign of these times, my cousin virtually witnessed her father passing, his energy moving from one dimension to the next in full digital view.
Read MoreThe Torrent of Grief, Its Pain and Its Value
/
Grief arrives for many reasons. We often identify the death of a partner, spouse, friend, child, parent, or colleague as the deepest form of grief – and rightfully so. We’ve witnessed the pain of this kind of grief etched on survivors’ faces.
Read MoreMarcia's Musings: When We See Each Other
/
In the days when we teachers taught face-to-face in the studios, the bond with students was close, in distance and in energy; the ability to see each other and learn how bodies step into poses, breath, and meditation apparent with immediacy; and feedback written on students’ faces and in teachers’ words. With the emergence of virtual classes, caused for the most-unbelievable of reasons, a pandemic, much has been lost in this bond. Without being able to see each other in person, or at all with so many at-home computers muting the video, both student and teacher reach for each other in a halting way, similar to the childhood game when we blindfolded one player who had to haltingly find the others.
Read MoreMarcia's Musings: Bone-Tired, Still Moving
/
I asked myself this question: What is the truth of this shared generational trauma? What is the role of truth-telling, or satya, as we understand it from the 8-limbed path of yoga? How am I to recognize truth? What am I to do with it?
Read MoreA Fat Cat Gets Busted (and what it means to me and you)
/Cats slink. Cats connive. Cats ponder, purr, pretend. They meow their way into our hearts and play with our emotions. These are the reasons we love them (and sometimes why we do not).
Gracie, my cat, found herself to be two pounds overweight late last fall. In consultation with her veterinarian, we cut her portions and mixed her yummier food with another kind – called metabolic and really meaning diet. Oh, the shame of it.
Read MoreBye, Bye, Blackbird
/
Out of darkness and confusion, we walk toward light and clarity, filled with resolve, mature intelligence, and hope. We will see you again – in person no matter how slowly – and soon.
And this ability of we humans to begin again and find new ways of being reminds us of these old lyrics: “Bye, bye, blackbird; blackbird, bye, bye.”
Read More