Lyon Lifestyle

How many of us ever take the time to truly appreciate our feet? I know this might sound crazy, but really, do we ever sit down and actually go inside to feel and experience them?

Other than wanting an amazing foot rub, great looking pedicure, or perfect shoe to house them in, we rarely as a culture give our feet the time of day. Yet, there is a great deal to be learned from our feet. Humor me here, and take a minute to contemplate yours.

Two weeks ago, I did a grandiose and in hindsight, stupid thing. I took a dance class that was way too high impact and aerobic for my four-month post-partum, hormonally ridden joints. Not surprisingly, I ended up with two badly bruised heels, and a possible stress fracture in my left foot.

What is intensely aggravating about all of this is that up until this point I had been doing a really good job of gradually getting myself stronger after the baby, moving steadily, in my own quiet way, into a daily cardio routine. Still, I got ahead of myself. Even though my intuition told me that it wasn’t time yet, that I’d put all this effort into building myself up, and that I could get injured in the class because I wasn’t ready, I didn’t listen and went anyways.

Where had my awareness gone? My sense of center, balance, and planted poise? Truth be told, in the moments leading up to and during that class, I completely abandoned my ground, and the reality of my present. I was too busy chasing the shell of a body I imagined as the one I’d like to have, leaving my feet totally empty, devoid of my attention.

Quite beautifully, the body always seems to speak out, at times creating palpable physical obstacles to get us to absorb the deeper implications of what we are failing to do. For me, it was failing to engage with my present ground. Now, I am being forced to studiously live inside my heels, my soles, my arches, and toes, and to experience the roots that I stand on, that keep me upright and sturdy. I am literally being brought to earth, and being made to slow way down, to take every step as walking meditation.

Given how easy it is in this overly complex world to fly up into our heads, and be preoccupied with our multi-dimensional selves, I am also currently mesmerized by our four-month-old taking delight in discovering and grabbing her feet–in yoga this is called happy baby pose—and it is the most natural, essential, and elementary of endeavors. We could all benefit from this sort of scaling back, from being guided once again to our beginnings, our roots, and to the basic building blocks of what make our bodies sound.

In many traditions, kissing the feet of another is interpreted as the ultimate sign of worship, an offering up of oneself in heartfelt surrender to a sage, or holy person of whom one is in awe. It is an act of utter receptivity, gratitude, and submission to a nobler truth as represented by that sublime creature. Imagine, when next you get swept up from your ground, metaphorically kissing your own feet, in worshipful egoless reverence. Surrendering to your feet will inevitably teach you how to emit this same egoless love out into the world.

For the moment at least, simply feel your feet. Breathe life into them, and accept where you are. Don’t fixate on where you need or want to be. Just stride forward consciously, and give from the ground up, one soft mindful step at a time.

How many of us regularly experience such exhaustion that by day’s end we don’t know which way is up? And why then do we make excuses for taking extra time to rest when we are so overextended?

In the United States, especially here in New York, we too often think something’s wrong if anyone around us needs rest. We act like choosing to rest in our everyday lives, when not reserved for a destination spa or vacation, connotes a problem, feebleness, or an illness demanding special explanation.

This doesn’t make any sense. It is seriously time to reshape how we approach rest.

A brilliant nutritionist I know likens our energy supplies to barrels of apples. Some of us, if we’re lucky, run around with our barrels half full. But the majority of us keep our barrels dangerously close to empty. We are so used to being in deficit, the notion of surplus energy is reserved for the one or two bubbly super humans we know.

Think of rest as actually putting apples back into our barrels, think of it as energetic food. Rest is after all the most natural thing in the world. Animals do it. Babies do it, A LOT. Kids do it too. Even our blackberries, phones, and computers require it. Why, as adults, can’t we?

This past winter, during the last trimester of my pregnancy, I was put on part-time bed rest. After the initial shock and fear of not being able to run all over the place wore off, what I realized was this: Rest is not a punishment. It is a practice, a gift, and a huge opportunity. In rest, there is no weakness or resignation, but insight, fortitude, resilience, mental tranquility and deep ease. Rest also does a lot more than we give it credit for. In my case, it literally grew my baby.

Still, last week I drove myself into the ground. I was drained to the core, so tired and worn out that I just wanted to cry. I simply had to stop. I put myself on minor league bed rest for the weekend, and reminded myself yet again of everything I’m writing about right now.

In yoga, savasana, or corpse pose, is by far the hardest of the asanas. The real practice, in my limited understanding, is to imbue every pose with this sense of tranquil awareness. To stretch further, imagine applying this to your life by making rest a rhythmic part of your every day. Imagine filling every action with flowing repose, every movement with the quietude and floating peace inherent to it.

You can call resting anything you like: recharging, refueling, refreshing, resetting, restoring, recalibrating, replenishing, resuscitating, restocking, restoring, rebooting. No matter the name, shine with wonderful radiant repose.

Especially now, in high hot summer, why not practice rest? This season of long drawn out siestas is the perfect time to prepare for the inevitable and exciting tumult of the fall. I’ll do it with you. Let’s make ourselves, dare I say, legitimate candidates for abundant overflowing barrels. Let’s find out together what a difference this sensibility makes in how we give of ourselves to the world, and in how we are of use to everyone we touch.

Who doesn’t get anxious when they feel out of control?

Recently my old email address was infected with a spam virus, where unbeknownst to me an embarrassing advertisement was sent out from my account in the middle of the night.

When I realized what had happened I felt incredibly helpless, like I had no control. I knew I had a crucial choice to make: to stress or not to stress. But stress is tough and sly. Sadly, most of us have come to believe that it is inevitable. We get spun out, too often and too easily. More and more we exist completely withdrawn from the possibility of living in quiet buoyancy.

In this instance though, I decided not to engage the stress. Instead of spinning out, I spiraled in.

Spiraling in when something unfortunate happens doesn’t mean being passive, or not responding. It simply means not reacting. Instead, we go to where we are staunchly rooted in ourselves. Calm, present, unperturbed. This gives us the space to respond with grace in lieu of reacting rashly, to our detriment.

It also saves our bodies the strain of a stress reaction–shoulders tightening, breath stiffening, face flushing–and our nervous systems from getting jarred. The more we cultivate this inward movement, the less stress is on speed dial. We can actually pause to think about whether we want to call up this aggression, and be overtaken by such insidious suffering.

Picture yourself sitting under an apple tree, filled with lush bursting bright red apples. But, these apples aren’t a friendly or nourishing kind. They are each composed of a visceral negative feeling. Now, imagine yourself being rushed with that very first sense of being out of control and the immediate desire to reflexively grab hold of some kind of feeling about it, ranging from mild annoyance to outright rage. Sitting in your garden, you might start reaching frantically for an apple of one kind or another. Not only will these apples expel you from your edenic center, but they will also catapult you into full-blown stress.

Before reaching for a victimized apple, or a nervous, aggravated, irked, or irate one, ask yourself, can you sit this particular apple-grab out? Try taking a minute to breathe beneath that tree. Feel the breeze, and the ground where you’re sitting. Spiral in. Absorb the expanse of fresh verdant grass around you. Experience the absence of need.

Buddhism calls this non-reaching, non-attachment; I call it, a blessing.

The next time you feel out of control, don’t attach. Just sit for a while. Smile even. Then go ahead. Act clearly and deliberately. Do what you need to do. You’ll be surprised. It should feel pretty wonderful.

How many times in our individual lives has each of us tried to reinvent ourselves? Our bodies, our faces, our jobs, our environments, our relationships, and overall lifestyles? And how many times have we fallen short of these commitments?

There is such cultural fascination with self-makeover. This last weekend in May, the unofficial start of the summer, is when many of us make vows to reinvent. We strive to look great in our bathing suits, finally meet that special someone, or just be plain fabulous.

But can we accept who we are at the very beginning of these undertakings, at our personal points of embarkation? Can we breathe in our imperfections, without falling into lambasting ourselves about not yet being where we want to be?

Right now, I am in the throes of reinvention. I am coming back from having a baby, and truth be told, I am incredibly out of shape. My goal is to re-inhabit my body, and be peaceful every step of the way.

This is hard. I am not as spry as I used to be. I bounce from how I used to look when I was impeccably toned to how I want to look in a few months, without stopping at center to accept myself today. Still, inside this destabilizing bounce, I find distinct moments of freshness. It is exciting to stand at the onset of my re-sculpting journey.

Suzuki Roshi, a wonderfully inspiring Soto Zen teacher, spoke extensively of beginner’s mind, which in my humble understanding, means to live, radiate as, and breathe like a true beginner. The minute we become jaded from experience, or from the swollen-headed sense that we have gotten somewhere, we have stepped away from peace.

We see this state of being most clearly in new babies, in their bright open gazes. They are so pure, so true and un-encumbered. Beginner’s mind incarnate.

Now when I step onto the treadmill, go up into an arm balance, or stretch on a mat, I think of my new baby, and her exceptionally clear and unabashed gaze. I absorb Suzuki Roshi’s teaching in the vision of her face. I become clearer, less foggy, and am able to experience myself in this same trusting way. I understand that my only real work is to touch this place again and again.

Come on. Join me. Reinvent yourself, your more obvious outsides or your subtler insides. Just be a baby at it–eyes wide, unblinking, no hesitation or commentary. Peer at yourself lovingly and openheartedly, at all those things you want to change, and see that there is no space for judgment or for anything else besides peace and breath. Let each new look be a first beholding, a wondrous sense of wow. Be totally awake and sweet. Just go for it.

Close to the stroke of midnight, on April 6, I delivered my second baby, an angelic little girl named Stella. After 40 hours of contractions, a wild car ride over to the hospital with my husband, and an amazing labor, I ended up needing a C-section—my second, and a true heartbreak.

One week after the delivery, I wound up with an acute case of contact dermatitis, in other words, a severe rash, from an allergy to the adhesive tape over the incision, which ended up spreading to other parts of my body and requiring oral steroids for 10 days to get it under control.

To put it mildly, things did not go according to plan.

During my pregnancy, I had become incredibly attached to not having another C-section. I was so fixated on the outcome being different from what I had gone through during the birth of our son Gavin five years ago, that I mistakenly didn’t make room for the possibility of another labor ending in surgery, nor could I come remotely close to accepting the likelihood of this less favorable turn of events. And never in my most well wrought visions of disaster would I have forecasted the allergy to tape that I had developed since my first C-section.

Hence, along with my hormones dropping vociferously, the physical healing from the surgery, the family adjustment, the crazy nursing schedule and lack of sleep, and the unfortunate but necessary treatment of my rash, I have had to face the overwhelming emotional swell that all of these events have created. Suffice it to say, I have not felt so raw in an exceedingly long time.

Because of all of this, for this month’s post, I am simply sharing with you a list of a few very palpable lessons, however familiar, that I have been reminded of through this very intense and personal time:

• Attaching to our expectations and to our glorious scripts of the future is a dangerous proposition, sure to disappoint, and furthermore, a fantasy.
• Thinking we are in control, is just that, thinking.
• When in doubt, be grateful; when all else fails, breathe.
• There is nothing like the physical body, under the most painful and surprising of circumstances, to draw us directly into the present moment and force us to face ourselves.
• There is nothing like getting stripped down and laid bare (and I literally couldn’t wear clothes with my rash) to be reminded of what really matters in this world. Namely, love; the people closest to you; the sweet simple stretch of a day that is made only of quiet company, a big cry, a hot shower, a solid meal, a necessary nap, a little laugh, a sense of awe at this being it, and in the end, a sense of giving it all up.

According to the book The Secret Language of Birthdays, Stella arrived on the Day of the Experimenter, and one on which visionaries are born. Given her head position when she came out, with her face pointing upwards, as if she was already looking expectantly up into her future, I will probably also have to remind her to stay in the moment, to not get too far ahead of herself or too strongly attached to a desired outcome, to be OK with whatever does present, and to find peace even in the middle of major difficulty.

Or maybe, when I really think about it, she is in all her lovely blessedness and calm the one who already lives this stuff. She was probably quite sagely just transmitting it all back to me.