February ReFresh

I am giving myself a little break in February. First, I have decided to pause my yoga classes on Monday mornings. I am teaching a number of other classes in the week and the early mornings on Monday have been weighing me down. While I love seeing the beautiful faces of my regular students, I need to give myself more time in the morning to ease into the week. I am still undecided if I will start back up in March. Stay tuned.

I am also giving myself a little break from my memoir. As some of you know, my family and I took a cross country adventure six years ago. While we traveled I journaled and when we returned I decided to write a memoir about our trip. I started slowly when we returned and over the past three years I have finished the manuscript and taken a ton of classes at the Hugo House to refine the manuscript. Now I am in the editing phases and trying to create a proposal to pitch to agents and publishers. I realize this is a challenging business and have felt like I have been driving around in circles for a few months without any focus on where I am actually going. So I am giving myself a break from the whole process for the month. No editing. No drafting proposals. No researching agents. Just letting it go for a bit.

Instead I am going to try and be more creative in other areas. I am taking myself on field trips, this week I went to the Van Gogh Immersive Exhibit. I am also trying to do things out of my comfort zone, so I went alone. I am going to pull out my paint by numbers and my watercolor notebooks. I will do my best to write on the blog, but you might see more poetry or fiction, maybe I will share some of the art I create.

The idea is to invoke a bit more of my creative side, pull in the qualities of the goddess Saraswati. Since the beginning of the year I have been enrolled in a yoga teacher training class focus on finding our winter dharma using the principles of Ayurveda. This week’s class focused on the goddess Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of knowledge, music, art, speech, wisdom, and learning. My goal this month, instead of beating myself up for not working on my book or telling myself my edits aren’t good enough, instead, I am going to sit quietly, call on the wisdom of Saraswati and give myself the freedom to create whatever comes up.