an update from teacher Sondra Sun-Odeon
I just returned from NYC at the top of the year, and am very happy to be back in L.A. and especially back at Namaste! Last August, my friend, poet/musician Jasmine Dreame Wagner, and I left LA to go on tour across the U.S., performing our songs and poetry across the country for 2 weeks. Highlights of the tour included staying with friends in their geodesic dome home on BLM (Bureau of Land Management) land just outside of Santa Fe.
Landing back in NYC after tour, I attended an annual yoga retreat held at a Sufi retreat center in the Berkshires with one of my training teachers. I also volunteered at the Basilica Soundscape Festival in upstate NY, seeing some of my favorite artists perform inside a cavernous reclaimed 19th century factory (serious vibrational healing) and played a few intimate shows with dearly-missed and talented friends in Brooklyn.
I didn’t make new year’s resolutions, but I am trying to hold true to my mantra of the last couple years: to appreciate, be present and not take things for granted.
Spending time with my parents and establishing a new relationship with them has been a big part of that practice. I left California in my teens for the East Coast and never looked back. I found that, decades later, I was still relating to them from my very angry teenaged mindset. So, it’s been part of my practice to cultivate something different between us; simply showing up is new and different, as is being less attached to how I want things to be. Appreciating what is there instead of focusing on what isn’t is central to that. Reading Pema Chodron sure helps, too.
Landing back in L.A. after a year that saw 30,000+ miles of touring and travelling, I am really appreciating stillness in my life. I have been nourishing the soul with lots of writing and alone time, as well as feeding my body foods to rebalance my vata dosha (really out of whack from all the traveling and 4 months of NYC!). I am kind of obsessed with bone broth and making raw cacao + fresh young coconut shakes right now.
Key to rebalancing is: doing less and leaving enough time for myself. Such a challenge for vata dosha.
I’ve been doing L.A. without a car and riding a bike between the studio and home in Mt. Washington, taking the Metro and enjoying carpooling to the grocery with kind friends and neighbors; it’s not so bad. I’ve also been doing laundry in my sink, old-school, with a washboard and drying it in the sun. I call it laziness and not wanting to haul laundry to a laundromat on my bike–you can call it part of “my new greener lifestyle.”
My favorite meditation lately has been walking around the neighborhood and meeting random people. One day on a walk, two dogs wandered down the street and past me. I tried to catch up to them to see if I could find their owner’s number on their collars, but they eluded me. An elderly gentleman watering his yard nearby said they got out and wandered from their owner’s often, and soon we were deep in conversation about dogs, the neighborhood, and incense. Then we discovered that he had worked for the father of a musician friend of mine! So, wandering dogs on the loose brought together this random stranger and me, and we were connected by one degree. An hour later, Ken gave me a Moody Blues CD to listen to, and I was hugging him goodbye–promising to bring him some music and to return for tea soon. Truly, the world is small and we are more connected to each other than we think.
No comments
Post a Comment