“nyasa” = to place

“krama” = step by step

Change is challenging.

When confronted with change, it’s easy to get swept up in anxiety, discomfort, depression, or panic.  We distract ourselves, or seethe as we create a million contingency plans.  We cling to our “creature comforts” – those small habits we’ve created that anchor us in an easy ride of familiarity, that soothe us when we get ragged around the edges.

So how can we cope?

While she was going through a particular challenging time, my Mum said to me, “It’s not one day at at time, honey.  It’s [read more...]]]> “Vi” = in a special way

“nyasa” = to place

“krama” = step by step

Change is challenging.

When confronted with change, it’s easy to get swept up in anxiety, discomfort, depression, or panic.  We distract ourselves, or seethe as we create a million contingency plans.  We cling to our “creature comforts” – those small habits we’ve created that anchor us in an easy ride of familiarity, that soothe us when we get ragged around the edges.

So how can we cope?

While she was going through a particular challenging time, my Mum said to me, “It’s not one day at at time, honey.  It’s one hour at a time, one minute.”  We can cope with change by getting out of our head – which is wired to try to analyze and “fix” our problem – and move into the spaciousness of the present moment.  In the present moment, we are generally “okay.”  However, we are so used to living in the past and the future (in analyzing past actions, in projecting future results), that we have forgotten how to arrive in our own skin.

Our yoga practice can help.

In the “vinyasa krama” practice, which literally means “to place step-by-step in a special way,” we cultivate our capacity to return to each unfolding moment.  When we bring our attention to how we place our feet, our hands, or move in and out of our asani – we are continually brought back to each arising moment.

The first yoga sutra is “Now the exposition of yoga is being made.”  The very first word in the sutras is “atha” or NOW.  This is a clarion call to return to the Now, the only moment that truly exists, the only moment in which we can actually accommodate change.

As you practice your vinyasa krama, open to step by step progression of your asana.  Use this practice as a reminder that our deepest creature comfort is our fundamental and eternal connection to ourselves.

Pema Chodron writes, “Only to the extent that we expose ourselves again and again to annihilation, can that which is indestructible in use be found.”  As we ride the currents of change, the dauntless center within us becomes polished and revealed.

ZEN is expensive. The flattering Groove pants, Lululemon’s answer to Spanx, may set Luluheads, the devoted followers of the yoga-apparel brand, back $108. Manduka yoga mats, favored for their slip resistance and thickness, can reach $100 for a limited-edition version. Drop-in classes at yoga studios in New York are edging beyond $20 a session, which quickly adds [read more...]]]> From the New York Times. Some food for thought: What is yoga?  What is your yoga community?  Does it reflect what you need?  As a side note, Yoga for the People, based on Gumucio’s model, is now here in Vancouver.

ZEN is expensive. The flattering Groove pants, Lululemon’s answer to Spanx, may set Luluheads, the devoted followers of the yoga-apparel brand, back $108. Manduka yoga mats, favored for their slip resistance and thickness, can reach $100 for a limited-edition version. Drop-in classes at yoga studios in New York are edging beyond $20 a session, which quickly adds up, and the high-end Pure Yoga, a chain with two outposts in Manhattan, requires a $40 initiation fee, and costs $125 to $185 a month.

You can even combine yoga with a vacation in the Caribbean, but it will cost you: in August, the luxurious Parrot Cay resort in Turks and Caicos has a six-night retreat with classes taught by the “yoga rock stars” (in the words of the press release) Rodney Yee and Colleen Saidman. The cost? A cool $6,077. (In August!)

And is it surprising that yoga, like so much else in this age of celebrity, now has something of a star system, with yoga teachers now almost as recognizable as Oscar winners? The flowing locks of Rodney Yee. The do-rag bandanna worn by Baron Baptiste. The hyper perpetual calm exhibited by David Life and Sharon Gannon, who taught Sting, Madonna and Russell Simmons. The contortions (and Rolls-Royces) of Bikram Choudhury.

Yoga is definitely big business these days. A 2008 poll, commissioned by Yoga Journal, concluded that the number of people doing yoga had declined from 16.5 million in 2004 to 15.8 million almost four years later. But the poll also estimated that the actual spending on yoga classes and products had almost doubled in that same period, from $2.95 billion to $5.7 billion.

“The irony is that yoga, and spiritual ideals for which it stands, have become the ultimate commodity,” Mark Singleton, the author of “Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice,” wrote in an e-mail message this week. “Spirituality is a style, and the ‘rock star’ yoga teachers are the style gurus.”

Well, maybe it is the recession, but some yogis are now saying “Peace out” to all that. There’s a brewing resistance to the expense, the cult of personality, the membership fees. At the forefront of the movement is Yoga to the People, which opened its first studio in 2006 in the East Village on St. Marks Place, with a contribution-only, pay-what-you-can fee structure. The manifesto is on the opening page of its Web site, yogatothepeople.com: “There will be no correct clothes, There will be no proper payment, There will be no right answers … No ego no script no pedestals.”

One more thing: There are no “glorified” teachers or star yogis. You can’t even find out who is teaching which class when, or reserve a spot with a specific instructor. And that’s exactly the way that Greg Gumucio wants it.

LATE on an overcast Saturday earlier this month, just a little before sundown, Mr. Gumucio, the founder of Yoga to the People, was sitting on the rooftop of his East Village studio, surprisingly refreshed after a birthday party downstairs for his son, who had just turned 5.

Propped on the ledge on a round pillow, his wavy, shoulder-length hair framed by the urban jungle backdrop of tar-covered roofs, Mr. Gumucio recounted his biography, and how it was linked with that of Bikram Choudhury, perhaps the most famous name in yoga today.

“The idea for Yoga for the People came to me because of Bikram,” Mr. Gumucio said, explaining that he worked for Mr. Choudhury for six years, from 1996 to 2002, sometimes running teacher training for Bikram Yoga in Los Angeles, commuting from Seattle, where he was living. He channels Mr. Choudhury, one suspects not for the first time, talking with a raspy, slightly accented voice: “Boss, do me a favor, take everybody’s class and tell me what you think.” Mr. Gumucio obliged, and when reporting back, mentioned one teacher whom he didn’t like. Mr. Choudhury was not sympathetic. Just the opposite, telling Mr. Gumucio to, in essence, suck it up and go back to the class — that the problem wasn’t with the instructor, but with Mr. Gumucio himself. “You are your own teacher,” Mr. Gumucio said he was told. “You are responsible for your own experience.”

It was a revelatory moment for Mr. Gumucio. If the student was more important than the teacher, why was there such an emphasis placed on the individual instructors? Too often, Mr. Gumucio saw students stop doing yoga because they couldn’t practice with a favorite teacher. Why not jettison that system? Why not just assign students to the next available teacher?

A second revelation occurred in class when he was struggling to keep his body in a difficult position. “I was sweating, my muscles shaking, in triangle pose, and Bikram was talking about how fast he was as a boy in Calcutta. How he could catch this dog.” The situation was almost more than Mr. Gumucio could bear. “In my mind,” he recalled, “I was thinking ‘What is wrong with you. Stop this stupid story!’ ”

Later, Mr. Choudhury again dismissed his complaints, telling Mr. Gumucio that distractions were everywhere: “Candle, incense, music, easy to meditate!” Mr. Gumucio recalls being told. “Try being calm and peaceful in your car when someone cuts you off.”

Message learned. Yoga isn’t about a pristine environment — yogis can work downward dog to downward dog, no matter where they are, even if in a crowded, unadorned studio. “Being able to do yoga with a foot in your face, that is a really powerful practice,” Mr. Gumucio said. He would take that no-frills philosophy with him when he left Bikram in 2002, and a few years later (after a stint as a mediator in small claims court), in 2006, moved to New York to open his own studio. “The first few months there were four or five people, but within three months, it really took off,” he said.

Today. Mr. Gumucio has three studios in New York (including two hot-yoga studios that charge $8 a class), one in San Francisco, one in Berkeley, Calif., and one to open later this year in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He has just signed a lease in Chelsea and is considering expanding to Austin, Chicago and Los Angeles. (But his philosophy of keeping a low profile seems to be working: a question to many students about what they think of Mr. Gumucio usually provokes little more than a blank stare and “Who?”)

High volume is the key to his business model — he says up to 900 people may go to a Yoga to the People studio in a single day, with perhaps half of them paying at least something in the form of a donation — as well as an important part of his overall philosophy. “I truly believe if more people were doing yoga, the world would be a better place,” he said.

LAST Sunday morning, the sun streamed through the windows of the clean airy loft on the second floor as the teacher, Haven Melynn, stood at the buzzer letting in students from the street. On a metal stand sat an empty tissue box. Some students dropped a donation into the box, others didn’t. The students fit in one studio, and at prime times, the teacher will send any overflow up to the studio above, and then the studio above that.

Mats are rolled out, a few inches apart, with no one under the illusion that it may be an empty class. The classroom holds about 60 students, and people are socializing, chatting about their late nights, where to get falafels, and upcoming art exhibitions. Music plays quietly in the background. No opening “Oms.” (“I like that there isn’t any chanting, or big spiritual message,” Layan Fuleihan, a college student, said afterward. “I like that you make the class what you want.”) Instead, Ms. Melynn started off with slow movements to warm up, sun salutations, then quickly picked up the pace. Jammed, yes, but the yogis stuck to their own mats, boundaries defined, during a sweat-producing vinyasa class, flowing and moving, as the teacher cajoled people to make cathartic exhales of HAA-sss — all to the sounds of a play list that includes Michael Jackson and the Dave Matthews Band.

Yoga to the People isn’t the only entity raging against the yoga machine. In New York, other studios are popping up, offering affordable, if not entirely donation-based, yoga. Do Yoga and Pilates, in TriBeCa, is donation-based; Tara Stiles, who has an iPhone app with Deepak Chopra, has opened Strala Yoga in NoHo, offering multiple class levels for $10 each. Yoga Vida NYC on University Place opened in January. Classes are small and it costs $10 drop in, $5 for students. “Our studio isn’t better or worse, it’s just different,” says Hilaria Thomas, yoga director of Yoga Vida NYC and a former instructor at Yoga to the People. “Different energies.”

Better-known rivals in the yoga world don’t seem to take offense at this back-to-basic movement. “I think the donation model is awesome,” says Baron Baptiste. “It’s a balancing act. If someone has the means for what I’ll call ‘high end yoga,’ like going on exotic retreats, they should enjoy it.” He adds, laughing, “I never know what the term rock star yoga teacher means. Someone like Iyengar, one of the most famous teachers in the world, is he a rock star? Is Iyengar the Bono of yoga?”

Mr. Gumucio knows his niche — “the ABC’s of yoga” — and that Yoga to the People has its critics. Its detractors say that classes are too big, that there isn’t a lot of advanced alignment breakdowns, that the exclamation HAA-sss isn’t the way you are supposed to breathe. He mimics a naysayer, sniffing: “Oh, that’s not yoga!” He laughs and shrugs, a wordless: Who’s to say what is yoga?

For 12 years, I had a job I loved as the editor of House [read more...]]]> I loved this article from the NY Times Magazine.  At some time or another, most of us have experienced a slide out of the comfort of our lives.  Whether it’s been through trauma or an internal shift, we’ve experienced a descent that leaves us clutching our habits and stripped to the bone.  Dominique’s journey reminds us that transformation does come, and that joy arrives in smaller packages than we might expect.

Losing It, by Dominique Browning, from the NY Times Magazine

For 12 years, I had a job I loved as the editor of House & Garden, a magazine that celebrated the good life. It would be an understatement to describe this enterprise as part of a company not primarily in the business of philosophical, spiritual or moral soul-searching. Condé Nast’s roots and branches are in the material world. The good life at House & Garden generally meant cultivating your own backyard rather than being involved in the body politic. I pushed against the limits of making a so-called shelter magazine by publishing articles about spiritual issues and the environment, but I always felt clear-eyed about how things stood. I spent more than a decade in the belly of the beast of muchness and more. That was a precarious place to be when the real estate bubble began to leak.

The folding of the magazine was ruthless. Without warning, our world collapsed. No one was expecting it, though with five publishers in 10 years, we had our share of turmoil. I came to work on a Monday in 2007, went to the corporate offices for a meeting, had a different meeting, got the news and was told to have everything packed up by Friday. Security guards were immediately ­posted by the doors.

In the four days we were given to pack up our belongings, I was overwhelmed with an urge to hoard and began stuffing every House & Garden paper bag, pencil and notepad I could get my hands on into a box, so that I would never run out of office supplies. I salvaged enough to run a small corporation from my kitchen. I didn’t think of this as stealing. I thought of it as a twisted sort of recycling — part of the strange new economy of severance into which I had been thrown. Everything with our logo on it was destined for the Dumpster anyway.

Even so, a few weeks later I realized I had some gaping holes in the inventory: I had no ink for my printer. The pages of my résumé looked faded, ghostly. You would think I was fading, too, but I wasn’t. I was getting plump. All I could think about was food. This was the beginning of being hungry all the time. My addled brain interpreted the white noise of unemployment to mean that I was going into hibernation, that I had to lay in reserves. After the closing of the magazine was announced, my public line was, “We had a great run, we took a magazine from zero to 950,000 readers in 10 years, fabulous renewals, we won awards, published six books. . . .” I was a zombie. “Great run . . . 950,000 readers . . . six books. . . .”

But privately, I was in a whiplashing tailspin. My nightmare had finally come true. For years, I had a profound dread of unemployment that went way beyond worrying about how to pay the bills. I would like to say that this was because of the insecure nature of magazine publishing, but my anxiety had more to do with my own neuroses — though I didn’t think of it that way. Work had become the scaffolding of my life. It was what I counted on. It held up the floor of my moods, kept the facade intact. I always worried that if I didn’t have work, I would sink into abject torpor.

I have always had a job. I have always supported myself. Everything I own I purchased with money that I earned. I worked hard. For the 35 years I’ve been an adult, I have had an office to go to and a time to show up there. I’ve always had a place to be, existential gravitas intended. Without work, who was I? I do not mean that my title defined me. What did define me was the simple act of working. The loss of my job triggered a cascade of self-doubt and depression. I felt like a failure. Not that the magazine had failed — that I had.

The thing about running a magazine is that there is always too much to do. I liked not being in control of my time — I was always busy. I didn’t want time to think things over, things like feeling guilty about spending more time with my office mates than with my children; feeling sad that those children were leaving home; or feeling disappointed in love or frightened by terrible illness. Everything else, in other words. The demands of my job kept me distracted. Besides, no one else was paying my mortgage.

With the closing of the magazine, my beloved family of colleagues was obliterated. And so was the structure of my life.

Within hours of leaving my office for the last time, I could hardly bring myself to care about my reputation. I just wanted to eat. I began calling every employed person I knew to take me to lunch. I wanted to fill my calendar with the promise of meals, even if they were only penciled in — this, after all, being Manhattan. Only food could ward off the rage, despair and raw fear that overcame me.

How had I managed to get this far in my life completely unprepared for the unknown — which I had always known was out there?

During my first post-employment lunch, my panic was full-blown. It was all I could do to keep myself from wrapping a dozen breadsticks in a napkin and tucking them into my bag. I floated the idea, actually, and my companion laughed slightly, nervously, gauging the level of my seriousness. I managed to control myself. He is a good friend and gave me loads of advice, which I heard through my frantic chewing. I ended the meal extracting a promise of several more meals in the future; I wanted friends bearing menus.

After a few weeks of being unemployed, I began to settle into a routine — of getting up.

“Today is Saturday,” I said to myself one morning. I repeated this several times, trying to convince myself to get out of bed. Saturday is what I came to think of as one of the nice days, like Sunday — that is, when I considered days at all. “Today is Saturday. No one is working today, so you are no different from anyone else,” I would say out loud.

In fact, I found it hardly necessary to be aware of what day it was. One of the pleasures of a workday morning had been to rise early, have a cup of tea, walk through the garden and get to the train on time, where I could read the paper front to back. Now that I did not have to get to work, I no longer had a structured time to read the daily paper, so I would pile it into a stack, thinking I would get to it later, until I realized I was creating a weekly daily.

I missed Fridays especially. They once meant relief, time for rest and housekeeping. Now every day was Friday. Or Monday. Whatever.

Time hangs heavily on the unemployed soul. If I ate an egg at 8 a.m., by 9:30 I was starving. I became obsessed with eggs, gazing on their refined shape in wonder. Perfect packets of nutrients. I ate eggs all day long. When I had a job, I never thought about eggs.

I would feel busy, and then, when I was in bed again, realize I had done nothing. The last time this happened I had a newborn and was so exhausted from nursing through the night and keeping an eye on the sleeping infant all morning that I couldn’t get into grown-up clothing until late in the afternoon. For heaven’s sake, I hadn’t even thought of it as grown-up clothing since I was a 5-year-old dressing for kindergarten. Frankly, I no longer saw any reason to get out of my pajamas at all. A long coat covered everything up when I went out for food.

The pace of my life had become so slow that I was struggling to keep up with it.

“How are you today?” my sister Nicole asked whenever she called. She phoned several times a day. “How was your morning?” my sister wanted to know.

“Incredibly busy. Unbelievable.”

“What were you doing?”

“Sleeping.”

In this way, being unemployed is a lot like being depressed. You know how there are millions (O.K., a handful) of things you swear you would do if you only had the time? Now that I had all the time in the world — except for the hours during which I was looking for work — to read, write, watch birds, travel, play minor-key nocturnes, have lunch with friends, train a dog, get a dog, learn to cook, knit a sweater, iron the napkins and even the sheets, I had absolutely no energy for any of it. It made no difference that music and books and nature had long been the mainstays of my spirit. Just thinking about them exhausted me. I had absolutely zero experience in filling weeks — what if it became years? — with activity of my own choosing. Being unemployed meant being unoccupied, literally. I felt hollow.

“Today is Saturday. Get out of bed.”

Saturday meant that I could feel a little bit normal. Saturday is not a workday. What mattered was that everyone else’s Saturdays were different from Mondays and therefore the same as mine. I rose early. I made a breakfast of the leftovers from a post-employment lunch and then I put on a hat and mittens. Did I mention that we were all fired just as the holiday season was upon us? So much for Thanksgiving.

I headed into the streets. The early sunlight slanted across the shop windows. Everyone hurried past me. Suddenly I noticed that the men on the sidewalk looked strange; they were in overcoats and polished leather shoes and carrying briefcases. The women were dressed up. They had introspective, determined, grim faces. Strange for a Saturday.

That’s when it hit me.

It wasn’t Saturday. It was Friday.

After a month of unemployment, it had come to this — foraging for my dinner, at 4 in the afternoon. In my own kitchen. I had developed a habit of eating leftovers from meals enjoyed days earlier; my breakfast of spaghetti and meatballs at dawn sickened me by noon. Before too long, I was hungry again, but balky, wary of my own housekeeping. Better to have a drink. Safer.

Normally I like a bottle of Guinness stout when I need a nutritional hit, but I’d gone through my supply. I spotted a nearly empty bottle of Lillet moldering at the back of the refrigerator. Sugar and liquor only improve with age, right? I emptied it into an oversize breakfast cup and read the recipe on the bottle. A twist of lime? Who keeps limes? I threw in a slice of lemon. Then a few more. Half a lemon. Vitamin C. I like to rehearse the nutritional content of my food, and there are times when a drink qualifies as a meal. I took a sip, and it wasn’t half-bad, or, I suppose, it was only half-good. Note to self: Next time, make an effort. Have a whiskey sour. More vitamin C.

Drink in hand, I decided it was time to wash the windows on the second floor. I could use a little exercise, I thought. Funny how sugar works: suddenly a surge of energy. Cleaning was an activity I had thrown myself into in recent days. I might be a mess, but at least I could control the mess in my house.

“How are you today?” my sister asked. She was down to calling two or three times a day. “How was your morning?”

“Incredibly busy. Unbelievable.”

“What were you doing?”

“Vacuuming.”

I got a big sponge out from under the sink, filled a bucket and climbed the stairs to my bedroom. A few more sips of the Lillet to fortify me for the job, and my mind was racing. As I reached for the corner with my sopping sponge, sucking on the lemons at the bottom of my cup at the same time, I imagined the casement snapping under my weight.

I watched myself fall out the window. I watched my cup shatter on the flagstones.

I looked down from the window and saw myself splayed on the stone terrace, my back cracked and spine twisted — like the lime that’s supposed to be in my drink? — my head resting at a birdlike angle. This is where they (who?) would find me four days later, when it occurred to them (who, though?) that I hadn’t been seen for a while, hadn’t kept an appointment (do I have any?) and hadn’t called the children.

The children? I can’t help it. I think of Alex and Theo as children still, though they are grown and out of the house. The children were not going to be the ones to find me broken-necked on the terrace. Frankly, no one would. I’d rot.

I decided I was in no condition for housekeeping this evening and dropped my sopping sponge into the bathtub. O.K., so now I had watched myself hit bottom. That’s what you have to do to get better, right? Anyway, I was hungry. For a change.

There were three jars of peanut butter — protein! — on the shelf. I didn’t even bother to find my reading glasses so that I could choose the freshest jar, but I took down a dessert plate, just to maintain standards. I fished around in the utensil drawer and found a spoon, unscrewed the lid and dredged deep. I dolloped the stuff onto the plate — an extra helping so I didn’t have to go back downstairs for seconds. I put the plate of peanut butter, a half bottle of wine, a glass and a linen napkin on a tray and climbed back to my bedroom.

I started to lift my glass in a toast.

“To nothing.”

I thought better of it.

“To life!” I said out loud. Then I gave myself another one of my hourly lectures. Buck up. Just because something failed doesn’t mean you’re a failure. Just because something has ended doesn’t mean it was all a mistake. Just because you’ve been rejected doesn’t mean you’re worthless and unlovable. Sound familiar? It should, if you or anyone you know has gone through a divorce. This felt like the same thing.

Worse. I had no control over any of it. And no one was holding a safety net for me. For years I relied on only myself, but my confidence was shattered. Now what?

I began keeping notes about how I was feeling, what I was doing. Writing had always been my way to absorb things; I often wrote out my troubles. It even crossed my mind to write for a living. I had not changed my lifestyle while I was working at Condé Nast, so I had saved some money. I knew that writing wasn’t lucrative, having spent my career supporting writers. But I figured if I got consulting work and lived carefully, I could subsidize myself. Then I developed a strange typing problem — and I am a world-class typist, having spent years as a secretary. I kept mssng the “i” key — thngs kept comng out whtout t. There was certainly nothing wrong with the middle finger of my right hand. Mssng the “i” meant constant retypng. That was the end of wrtng.

Within months of House & Garden folding, the entire economy was in freefall. Advertising was vanishing, layoffs and buyouts were announced. I was beginning to feel like an antique, an artisan whose skills were no longer even respected, much less needed. Editing? How quaint. Managing creative people? All we’re trying to manage is to get rid of more of them.

It was strange and maddening to be forcibly retired. Even the generational rhythms were out of whack. It seemed just yesterday that my father retired. How could we have reached the same stage of life together?

Four months after being laid off, I decided to sell my house in the suburbs of New York. The stock market was sliding perilously. I didn’t want to spend my savings maintaining the mortgage and high taxes. I wanted to be out of debt.

It took me ages to create my home — 25 years, and all the years before that of daydreaming about how I wanted to live. This was the home I thought I would grow old in. It was a forthright, dark, wood-shingled, center-hall colonial revival, nearly a hundred years old. It was supposed to be my Forever House — the home you think you will never leave, the house you love beyond all others, where you’ve recaptured only what made you feel safe and happy in your childhood and left the rest behind. The Forever House is where you’ve passed along the values you admire to your own children — and filled the rooms with laughter and tears.

I called a real-estate broker, a cheerfully competent person who arrived disconcerted at the kitchen door, unwilling to brave the front path overhung with gnarled, carefully pruned azaleas. They gave the entrance character. Was I thinking, Character doesn’t sell, when I made my home? No. I was thinking, This looks good. To me. We toured the house: “And over here is the laundry room, with bookcases built in — ”

“I’ve never seen so many bookcases!” the broker said. “People don’t want bookcases. They don’t even want libraries. They want media rooms. Where did you say you hid the TV?”

I could see her mind whirring as she began to figure out just what type of character she had on her hands . . . single, unemployed, not going out much, reading instead.

We walked through the kitchen. She eyed the walls warily.

“Interesting color. Very.”

Isn’t that what people say when they can’t think of anything nicer to say?

“You’ve decorated your house so beautifully,” she continued. “This kitchen is gorgeous. Now you’re going to have to clear all the counters. Books. Knickknacks. All the stuff. I love what you’ve done with this house. Make sure you put it all away.”

Knickknacks? Maybe houses are like children. You can see yours only through eyes of love. Soon strangers would be tromping through my house, passing judgment, but the only way to have an open house is to shut away everything that made it your home.

“Don’t worry,” the broker went on. “You don’t have to be here. You shouldn’t even be in town! I’ll handle everything. Don’t forget! Counters! Walls! Personality! Cleared!” The broker smiled graciously. She was fantastically reassuring.

I felt as if I were in the presence of a dying beast. If Wendy and her brothers could have a big dog for a governess ­— well, this house could be my Nana. It was steadfast, if creaky; it gave me years of solace and protection. Every once in a while, when I thought of how I was about to abandon it, I would lean into a wall and kiss it. I loved my house.

I could not step past the threshold of a son’s room without becoming engulfed in memories, triggered by things as slight as the worn patch on the armchair where my elbow rested while cradling a nursing baby. This was the home I imagined my children would return to visit, with their children, whose first steps would be taken in the garden, their tiny fists curling around the white azalea branches for support, just the way their fathers’ had. I wish we still lived in a world in which houses were passed down through generations, but our sense of home has become portable. That may be one reason we invest our possessions with so much more meaning — they, rather than rooms and gardens, carry the memories.

The house sold quickly. It struck me that I had lost House & Garden, the job, and was now losing house and garden, the life. What took years to create was about to be undone in a matter of minutes. Come to think of it, kind of like being blasted out of a career.

I had access to a city apartment owned by a friend, but I couldn’t commit to living there all the time. It made me too sad — an unresolved chapter of my last decade. I decided to move to the small, coastal Rhode Island town where, after divorcing years ago, I bought a run-down Modernist house that had been on the market for years. I was rebuilding it. I know I was lucky to have such a choice — no, not just lucky! I had worked hard to save enough to buy that house. It was a wrenching move. I was haunted by the anxiety that it wouldn’t be the last, either. This was just the beginning of letting things go — starting with the Forever House.

I called Alex. “How can I give this house up? I’m walking around thinking this has become the museum of my happiest moments. I’m making a big mistake. Don’t you think? The museum of my happiest moments. . . . ”

Alex was used to me by now.

“Time for a new museum, Mom.”

Spring blew in so wildly that year that it seemed unnatural, or perhaps I just noticed what spring feels like once I wasn’t sealed in a climate-controlled building all day. Weather — the actual experience of it, not the forecast — is one of the more dramatic discoveries to come with a slower pace of life. There were days at the office when I didn’t know whether it was muggy or cool, or if it had rained. It dawned on me that there was something unsavory about having been so cut off from nature that I was surprised by the golden hue in the slant of light at four in the afternoon — on a weekday, no less.

I took to wandering in my garden at all hours. As if to give me one last chance to change my mind about leaving, spring unfolded in splendor. The daffodils multiplied generously and spilled across the front in a riot of gold. Bunches of hellebores appeared in March and nodded their prim white, mauve and purple caps for more than two months; when I bent down to turn up a small head and peer into a quiet, trusting face, I winced at the thought of leaving them vulnerable to whatever depredations a new owner might visit upon them. I apologized in anticipation. I strolled the paths, examining the thick, furry spools of the unwinding ferns; the gnarled purple fingers of the peonies clawing out from the damp, fragrant earth; the green stubs of the Solomon’s seal; the sharp tips of the hosta encircled by improbably large patches of bare ground that would soon be hidden by gigantic leaves, bearing aloft the fragrant white wands that seduce the moths at dusk.

With all the anxiety about the move, my brain flipped a switch, and I went from sleeping all the time to being utterly lost in sleeplessness. In exhaustion, my memory faltered. Black holes gaped open before me as I spoke; in the middle of a sentence I groped zanily for safe passage to the next word. During the moments of sleep that I could snatch, I had vivid, disturbing dreams. I was being born — I was blinded by a bright light — and seconds later I was dying. I was reaching for the telephone to call an ambulance but couldn’t remember which number to dial: 411? 911? 411? 911? 411? 911? What did I need? Help? Information?

I turned to the wisdom of the ancients. I went to Ovid, where women run from rapacious gods, and Dante, where women writhe in purgatory, and Homer, where women unravel their work, and finally I pulled off the shelf the old black leather-clad King James Version of the Bible I was given in high school. I read feverishly from cover to cover. I had forgotten how much of it is about fear — over and over again, the response to change, even to the miraculous, is fear. I was fighting fear. And what was I so afraid of? Being alone with myself long enough to wonder what is the purpose of my life?

I turned most frequently to the Psalms, whose gorgeous, intricate, sensual prayers blanketed me in wonder. There I found my anthem for that year, the most eloquent expression of grief I ever read: “I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint: my heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels.”

One night, at four in the morning, in a panic of sleeplessness, I went to my piano and on impulse pulled an old volume of music off the shelf, J. S. Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations. I picked my way through the first aria, which has a quiet, dignified, spare quality. It is elegant, contained; it holds much in reserve. The music did nothing for my sleeplessness; if anything, within hours I was more completely, wonderfully awake than I had been in a long time. Unexpectedly, I felt a peace suffuse my bones as I lost myself in Bach’s lines. My own anxieties were no longer drumming through my brain; my mind, that hobbled old draft horse, stopped loping along in the same rut it followed night after night. It was locking into someone else’s harmony.

Bach has become a nightly visitor. I am obsessed with him: his musical tricks, jokes and puns; his charismatic energy and passion; his resilience through tragedy; his rigorous discipline; his bedrock belief in a force greater than anything human.

I have to teach myself, all over again, how to practice, how to silence the critic in my head. I have to remind myself that the repeats matter, that respect for the rests is important. What my fingers lack in speed, my heart makes up in feeling. If I have to, I will crawl through sarabandes and quadrilles, letting the dance fill my soul.

Slowly, slowly, the months go by, each one a variation transposing loss, loneliness and anger to gratitude and hope. I no longer dread the advent of another rosy dawn. As I stop struggling so with fear and simply accept the slow tempo of my days, all those inner resources start kicking in — those soul-saving habits of playfulness, most of all: reading, thinking, listening, feeling my body move through the world, noticing the small beauty in every single day. I watch the worms, watch the hawks, watch the fox, watch the rabbits. I open my heart to new friends. I settle into my new home; its healing balm has been there all along, nestled in a sofa that beckons me to pick up a book, hovering outside the window inviting me to take a walk. I find room in my life again for love of the world, let the quiet of solitary moments steal over me, give myself over to joy. What a surprise! That I can cook a meal for my children, or take a long walk on the beach, or watch an osprey wheel through the sky, or set down a page of thoughts — these are moments of grace. Old Testament loving-kindness, the stuff of everyday life.

One adventure is over; it is time for another. I have a different kind of work to do now. I am growing into a new season. At the water’s edge, watching the tiny, teeming life of that mysterious place between high and low tides, the intertidal zone, I begin to accept the relentless flux that is the condition of these days. I am not old and not young; not bethrothed and not alone; not broken and yet not quite whole; thinking back, looking forward. But present. These are my intertidal years.

In those sleepless nights, when I am at the keyboard, I connect with something I may have once encountered as a teenager and then lost in the frantic skim through adulthood — the desire to nourish my soul. I do not have the temerity to think I have found God; I think instead that I have stumbled into a conversation that I pray will last the rest of my life.

I cannot move through the music the way I hear it in my head. Nothing works the way it used to. My hands feel stiff. But every once in a while, I accomplish a passage adroitly. Fingers dance over keys. I take all the repeats. I observe the rests. I enjoy myself. And I am happy for small-boned miracles.

Dominique Browning writes a column for the Environmental Defense Fund Web site and has a new blog, SlowLoveLife.com. This piece is an excerpt from “Slow Love: How I Lost My Job, Put on My Pajamas and Found Happiness,” to be published next month by Atlas & Company.

Three times.

In a row.

“Just hold one moment while we transfer you to confirm,” they’d say sweetly, just before I heard a strange sound.   The sound of silence.  The vacuum of a disconnected phone line.  The sound of my impotent, mediocre frustration growing to a boiling point of irrational, helpless rage.

Nothing can be quite so delightful as customer service, eh?

Or how about when the woman in customer service would ask me for all my details, “I’ll just need that information before transferring you,” and the guy in cancellations would say, “I’ll just need all that information again, you’re [read more...]]]> I got disconnected three times.

Three times.

In a row.

“Just hold one moment while we transfer you to confirm,” they’d say sweetly, just before I heard a strange sound.   The sound of silence.  The vacuum of a disconnected phone line.  The sound of my impotent, mediocre frustration growing to a boiling point of irrational, helpless rage.

Nothing can be quite so delightful as customer service, eh?

Or how about when the woman in customer service would ask me for all my details, “I’ll just need that information before transferring you,” and the guy in cancellations would say, “I’ll just need all that information again, you’re in a new department.”  Then, moments later, the guy says, “You seem irritated at me already!”  I say through gritted teeth, “I’m not irritated at you, it’s not personal, I’m irritated because I’ve been disconnected twice already and -” CLICK.  I think he’d decided he didn’t want to deal with one more stress case on the phone.

Ah, the rage of powerlessness.  A tiny fist shaking at an faceless, stonewalling bureaucracy.

And finally, when I do finally get to someone who can help me, wouldn’t you know that I then had to sigh, “I have to go.  I’ve run out of time.  Just make a note on my file,” knowing that I’d just have to call back and start everything All. Over. Again.

During this little adventure, I was not at my yoga best.  As I left the phone and the house behind me to bike downtown for class, I was still fuming with the tape of “angry and wronged customer” running through my head.  How dare they have such lousy service!  How dare they be so inconsiderate of my time and my needs!  How dare they WRONG ME SO!

But what could I do, I realized.  It was done.  Over.  The moment was past.  Now, I couldn’t change a thing.  If I wanted to enjoy my commute and my class, I was going to have to find a way to let it go.  To leave my anger behind me.

It’s a challenge to leave anger behind, especially when it feels sooooo righteous.  My brain would much rather stew in a morass of “why I’m right and they’re wrong” than think about how nice the weather is or even (*gasp*) contemplate how difficult it must be to have to talk to angry customers all day.

But what good does being “right” do me?  Sure, I get to shore up my ego, but at the same time I get this strange hardening sensation happening somewhere in my chest.  The brick laying of an impenetrable walls of certitude.  It certainly doesn’t get me any closer to actually getting a resolution on my phone issue.  Customer service is completely unaware that I am sending psychological daggers at them during my bike ride.  Absolutely no one was benefiting – least of all me – from rehashing the situation.  All I was doing was wasting time that I could have spent enjoying the ride, feeling the wind, breathing.

As I rode, I had to laugh to myself.  Or really, at myself.  I don’t want to live a life hashing out imaginary conversations in my head just to prove that I can come out of a situation looking better.  Looking “right.”  I tried to let go.  Which is really hard to do, because it’s really a matter of undoing something.  But the intention was there.  And my anger started to fade.   I started to enjoy the ride.  And sure, I caught myself circling back into my defensive brain loops more than once.  But I’d just laugh at myself, tell myself it was okay, and try to focus on riding my bike again.

There is a Zen koan.  Something to the effect that there is a monk hanging out on the side of a cliff by his fingernails.  He will soon fall off.  He can’t pull himself up, and below him there is a Tiger circling, ready to pounce.  Just then, he spies some strawberries and is able to take a bite of one.  How sweet the juice is!

What is Seeing?  It’s when we strip away the filters through which we most often see the world and take the time and space to witness what is actually before us.  Usually we half-ass our seeing.  I look at my partner, but what I’m really seeing is what I expect to.  I impose upon him everything that I think a partner is, or should be, or what my own expectations [read more...]]]> Last Thursday evening, I attended a talk by Reginald Ray, founder of Dharma Ocean and tantric buddhist practitioner.
He spoke about the intimacy and the power (and terror) of really Seeing another person.

What is Seeing?  It’s when we strip away the filters through which we most often see the world and take the time and space to witness what is actually before us.  Usually we half-ass our seeing.  I look at my partner, but what I’m really seeing is what I expect to.  I impose upon him everything that I think a partner is, or should be, or what my own expectations are.  I will frequently assume that I understand a situation or person without actually taking the time to see and hear them.  How many times have I been caught up short in an argument, saying, “I didn’t know you felt/thought that way!”

Seeing – and then allowing ourselves to be seen – is actually terrifying.  As an acting instructor, one of my favorite exercises is to have people simply enter the room and stand in front of the group.  And wait.  And stand.  And wait.  And do nothing.  Because – as an audience – we are actually Seeing them, they are feeling the intensity of being Seen. And because they’ve been asked to simply be there and do nothing, there is no distraction available but to simply endure it.  It’s a terrifying and liberating experience.  Terrifying because we feel vulnerable, but also liberating because we can realize in that moment how powerful Seeing actually is.

When we really take the time to See and Be Seen, it is amazing to notice how quickly our defenses can rise.  Even with our closest friends and partners, how much do we hide?  How much do we resist intimacy?

After Reggie’s talk, I had tea with my friend Vicki in the library’s atrium.  As we chatted, a homeless man came up and started to talk to us.  His name was Norman.  And as he spoke to us, I tried to SEE him.  Rather than scuttle away or assume that he wanted something from me, I just took some time to see him for who he was and what he was doing.  I found out that Norman wasn’t scary, although he was pretty pretty drunk.  This previously invisible man became visible.

This week, I’ve been practicing Seeing People.  Seeing my waitresses, the woman behind the counter at the visa office, the grocery attendant.  My friends, my lover.  People BLOSSOM with being Seen.  They light up like plants in sunlight.  Creating the space to see another person  reveals our underlying human connection.  Time slows down.  We relax.  Common ground rather than difference is discovered.

When we practice yoga, or when we meditate, we can practice Seeing ourselves.  Can you give ourselves the space to be – without judgment, just with presence and compassion?

I’ll share my typical checklist:

-lose five pounds

-go to yoga EVERY DAY

-finish writing book

-resolve all unresolved psychological issues

-do something really important that will make everyone love me

Hmmmmm. Lofty, anyone?

Resolutions are excellent.  They invite us to visualize, set intentions, make goals.    Like many of us, I love the idea of a clean slate.  From this brilliantly cleared slate, my life is an open book with nowhere to move but forward into greater and loftier etheric realms of evolution.  [read more...]]]> So it’s New Years. So you made a resolution. What is it this year?

I’ll share my typical checklist:

-lose five pounds

-go to yoga EVERY DAY

-finish writing book

-resolve all unresolved psychological issues

-do something really important that will make everyone love me

Hmmmmm. Lofty, anyone?

Resolutions are excellent.  They invite us to visualize, set intentions, make goals.    Like many of us, I love the idea of a clean slate.  From this brilliantly cleared slate, my life is an open book with nowhere to move but forward into greater and loftier etheric realms of evolution.  Like wiping away the niggling and painful habits of the past in one fell midnight-bedazzled swoop so that I emerge phoenix-like into the new year, ready and prepared to seize the day and realize my dreams.

So then what happens when mid-February rolls around and I have not gone to yoga for a week and have gained two pounds and my book is a mass of unrecognizable scribbles on a post-it note?  My ego happily chimes in: you are not good/dedicated/hard-working/talented/insert adjective here enough to get things done. You might as well give up now and eat another cookie.

Surely this is not the way.

The yo-yo of self-esteem that depends on goals being met or lost creates a win-lose situation.  Well guess what?  Eventually, we all lose.  While goals are great for getting us motivated and giving us vision, what do we do when the thing we wind up with doens’t match what we thought we wanted in the first place?  For example, maybe the book didn’t get written.  But instead I went to India, studied yoga for two months straight, and had an adventure?  Keeping resolutions might keep me so busy lamenting over what I didn’t accomplish that I forgeto to actually feel good about what DID happen!

Here’s an exercise.

Based on what you were able to do last year, write out (in retrospect) your resolutions for 2009.  Take stock of all that you DID accomplish.  The strange, unexpected twists and opportunities that life dumped in your lap.

Now, how does that feel?

But if we think about the body and its functions, the chakras do seem to match up pretty well to how we work.

The root chakra – muladhara – is at our pelvic floor and deals with earth, downward energy, and groundedness.  If we think of our hips and legs as what connects us to the earth and literally roots us, well, it makes sense.  If people are “ungrounded,” they tend to be light, frenetic, “in their heads,” and not connected to their lower body.

The second chakra below [read more...]]]> The chakras can seem a little…well, out there.  Whirling wheels of energy?  Rainbow light?  Huh?

But if we think about the body and its functions, the chakras do seem to match up pretty well to how we work.

The root chakra – muladhara – is at our pelvic floor and deals with earth, downward energy, and groundedness.  If we think of our hips and legs as what connects us to the earth and literally roots us, well, it makes sense.  If people are “ungrounded,” they tend to be light, frenetic, “in their heads,” and not connected to their lower body.

The second chakra below the navel – svadisthana – is a water center and deals with sexuality and creativity.  Sure, the kidneys and the sexual organs.  Makes sense, right?

The third chakra at the solar plexus – manipura – is a fire center and deals with our will power, transformation, and heat.  Sure, the stomach, digestion, core power, the adrenals.  Hmmm, things are still matching up….

The fourth chakra, anahata, is our heart center and deals with our relationship to ourselve and other and our capacity for compassion.  Anyone who’s had a broken heart has probably had that terrible “heavy-heartedness” or collapsed feeling in the chest.  Similary, “open-hearted” people often meet the world with a physically expanded chest.  Sensibly, the element of this chakra is air, which relates to the lungs and heart.

The fifth chakra in the throat, vishuddha, deals with space and communication.  Literally the home of our vocal cords, this chakra’s energy reflects our capacity for self-expression.

The sixth chakra at our forehead, ajna, relates to our ability to visualize.  We are entering into the land of imagination and are leaving the world of physical sensation.  Not surprisingly these final two chakras have to do with the higher functions of our mind.

The seventh chakra at the crown of our head, sahasrara, is the least physical – the furthest away from our feet – and involves self-realization and our connection to a higher power.    Whether we think of this connection as relating to a higher spirit or Heaven, we usually relate spiritual expression to something “above” or “beyond”.  Not unusual then, to find the home of this chakra at the highest point in the body.

Though at first the chakras can seem esoteric, some of these practical connections between the individual chakras and our physical body may give us pause.  Here are things that make you go “hmmmmm….”  If some of these parallels pique your interest, check out one of my favorite books: “Eastern Body, Western Mind” by Anodea Judith.  She offers fascinating correlations between developmental psychology, jungian archetypse, and the chakra system.

Through the [read more...]]]> Our ego is like a sheet of glass that exists between the world and our mind.  As information from the world filters through our senses, it passes through our ego on its way to our conscious thought.  We screen though everything we perceive: “I like this because I did something like it before and that was good,” “This has made me look bad in the past,” or “This reminds me of the time…”.  Whether we’re aware of it or not, our mind is continually making lightning quick assessments based on previous experiences in order to organize ourselves in the world.

Through the years, the sheet of glass begins to get a little, well, dirty.  Our experiences, both positive and negative, begin to form a film over the glass that distorts the way that we perceive our environment.  As these mis-perceptions get confirmed over the months and years, we soon have a good ol’ crusty cake of samsara baked over our plate of glass.  Like a windshield that has endured a lengthy road trip, our glass has become overlaid with the splatters of past experiences.  Soon we aren’t able to see through the glass anymore at all!   Instead, we’re just acting out based on previous experiences.  We’re sleepwalking.

Now, our mind is designed to draw the line between cause and effect; it’s one of those nice things it does that keeps us safe.  (Who wouldn’t want to remember that the stove is hot after burning themselves once?)  But our mind sometimes is indiscriminate or can get too good at its job, and begins to draw lines of cause and effect that aren’t really useful to us.  Instead of keeping us safe and aware, our mind traps us in narrow lines of expectation.

Part of our work in our yoga practice is to PRACTICE freeing ourselves from expectation.  I’m emphasizing the word practice here because it’s really okay if we’re not good at it.  By actively letting go of expectation, we can start to clean off our nasty, cluttered windshield.  We can begin to perceive the world as it is – not as how we expect.

In your yoga practice this week, can you dare to not know what will happen?  Dare to surprise yourself?  By undoing expectation, we can discover that there is a wealth of feeling, sensation, and intuition that we may been neglecting.  The world will literally look and feel different.

Be patient with yourself and keep clearing off your windshield.  Soon, who knows?  You may even get that new car smell.

Such musings were interrupted by a voice to my neighbor to the left.  It was one of those rich and resonant voices that reminds you of James Earl Jones.  The kind of voice that Patrick Stewart and Sir Ian McKellan spent years in drama school to [read more...]]]> My session at the Vancouver Yoga Conference had taken a pause.   An hour-break, then we’d all come back for four more hours of chakra realization.  So far, I’d been banging my hips and sacrum on the ground, trying to tune into my pelvis and the first three chakras.  Now I was fantasizing about tuna sandwiches.

Such musings were interrupted by a voice to my neighbor to the left.  It was one of those rich and resonant voices that reminds you of James Earl Jones.  The kind of voice that Patrick Stewart and Sir Ian McKellan spent years in drama school to develop.  A voice that puts fussy babies to sleep and reassures angry crowds.

The voice belonged to a man radiating kindness.  I was complimented on my note taking, asked very politely if I would be interested in a five-minute experiment in YogaFLIGHT.  YogaFLIGHT?  Was that like Acro-yoga? I asked.  Similar, yes, but YogaFLIGHT was the integration of two passions: yoga and skydiving.  Finding the freedom of weightlessness here on the ground.

I put off the tuna sandwich.  Definitely interested.

Slade, my yogaFLIGHT guide, started me off in a variation of Prasarita Padottanasana.  He lay on his back and supported the weight of my hips with his feet, then stretched my arms over my head for one of those deep, delicious expansions.  “Breathe,” he reminded me.  Oh right, breathing.  I closed my eyes…and let go.

YogaFlight's sKY and slaDE

To be honest, I cannot tell you exactly what happened.  Slade’s quiet, confident voice would occasionally say things like, “Now reach for your feet,” or “This is called sleeping tortoise,” and I would find myself suspended in a miraculous yoga concoction.  I don’t know how it looked from the outside, but from the little crowd of smiling faces that I awoke to I can imagine it looked pretty fun.  However, I can describe how I felt: present,  connected, safe, light, expansive, joyful.  As if the playfulness and wonder from my childhood could merge with a deep and present awareness of another human.  For those five minutes, everything dropped away except gravity, partnership, and breath.  Guided by Slade, this divine experience was uplifting and centering at the same time.

For those of you who have not yet experienced the freedom and joy of partner yoga and “flying,” I humbly and fervently recommend you do.  I was lucky to have YogaFLIGHT drop into my lap unexpectedly, and even more fortunate that my first guide was such capable and trustworthy partner.

The rest of my day sparkled.

More about sKY and slaDE.

But here I am visiting my old Yoga Works crew. And they study Iyengar.

See, in the yoga world, there are three main lineages: Ashtanga, Iyengar, and the yoga of Desikachar. Most our our Western yoga springs from the same teacher (the granddaddy of yoga as we know it, Krishnmacharya). But where ashtanga focuses on movement and breath, the Iyengar tradition [read more...]]]> So for that past few years I’ve been practicing ashtanga. Flow, flow, breath, breath. There is a cycle and rhythm to the practice. You move. You keep going. You jump around. You breath some more.

But here I am visiting my old Yoga Works crew. And they study Iyengar.

See, in the yoga world, there are three main lineages: Ashtanga, Iyengar, and the yoga of Desikachar. Most our our Western yoga springs from the same teacher (the granddaddy of yoga as we know it, Krishnmacharya). But where ashtanga focuses on movement and breath, the Iyengar tradition focuses on alignment.

Ruthlessly. Meticulously. SLOWLY.

So now I’m not jumping around. I’m laying on the mat and contemplating the slight external rotation of my thigh in the hip socket as I reach my other leg into the air in supta hasta padangustasana. And then I’m holding it there. For a long time. I’m meditating on the percentage of weight in the ball of my foot during my forward bend. I’m finding that extra degree of external rotation in my upper arms in downward facing dog.

It’s slow, it’s sweaty, it’s focused, it’s hot.

The exquisite attention to detail is like a life-sized magnification glass. We’re using the acute sensation of one part of the body to develop focused concentration (or dharana) that helps settle the monkey mind down. Similar to ashtanga, it’s not really about the body (though it sure can feel that way!), but about the mind. The bodily sensations become a lens for the practice and a means of cultivating mindfulness in our lives. After all, if we can focus and breathe in the discomfort of utkatasana (fierce or chair pose), we may have a little more space to be present in oh, say, an argument with our ex about who left the fridge open. And the capacity to focus on the details in our practice makes us more sensitive the the miraculous detail of everyday life.

We tend to think of joy as something that involves big events: weddings, success, births. And while this is true, the sustaining marrow of life is found in the smallest of everyday occurrences. It’s finding the extraordinary in the ordinary. The shape of a flower, the smile of a friend. The play of light on a skyscraper at sunset. These are the small joys that sustain us when the greater flow is not revealed.

The devil is in the details. And through those tiny portals lies the magnificent expanse of the divine.