{"id":420,"date":"2011-01-27T07:02:16","date_gmt":"2011-01-27T12:02:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.katrinakenison.com\/?p=420"},"modified":"2011-01-27T07:02:16","modified_gmt":"2011-01-27T12:02:16","slug":"you-have-what-i-want","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/you-have-what-i-want\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cYou have what I want.\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Every morning, I come downstairs and do the same thing: look out the window and greet the mountains, put on a pot of coffee, flip open my laptop, check the weather, scan my email.<\/p>\n

The first letter I see today is from a reader, a mother who had written me some months ago with what I considered the highest of praise: she called my books \u201cyoga for the brain.\u201d\u00a0 Of course I\u2019m delighted to find her name in my in-box again.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have a personal question for you,\u201d Sarah’s note begins,\u00a0 \u201cand please feel free not to answer it.\u201d\u00a0 I read on, intrigued.\u00a0 \u201cIf I have a bad parenting day,\u201d she continues, \u201cor if I\u2019m stuck in a rut, I pick up one of your books and it calms my spirit. . . . Your words exude a deep sense of calmness, and a connection to your spirit.\u00a0 Where the heck do you get that from?\u00a0 Really, I want to know.\u201d \u00a0 Her letter ends with words that bring me up short:\u00a0 \u201cI just feel like you have what I WANT.\u201d<\/p>\n

Someone out there wants what I have?\u00a0 How strange to think that, while I\u2019m struggling along here, feeling neither wise nor terribly calm, and certainly not very sure of myself, someone else seems to think that I have things all figured out and squared away.<\/p>\n

The truth is, I’ve spent most of January sitting in a chair, trying in fits and starts to write a new book proposal and judging every paragraph.\u00a0 I spend an hour on a sentence, then throw it away, certain it\u2019s not worth reading, wondering why my writer friends seem capable of knocking out great stuff without breaking a sweat while I agonize over every word.\u00a0 I look around the house at all the tasks that are undone: the pile of stuff on my desk that I promised to plow through before the end of the month; the exhausted paperwhites, deep in their post-holiday forward bends, dropping petals all over the floor (way past time to throw them away and get the vacuum out!); the blinking light on the piano pulsing \u201ctune me\u201d; the pile of laundry in the basket, waiting to be folded. I think of the friends I\u2019ve been meaning to call, but haven\u2019t, because I\u2019ve been glued to my desk, feeling the pressure of my own self-imposed deadline.<\/p>\n

I think of the painful conversation I had the other night with my husband, his admission that he feels a little lonely these days even when he\u2019s with me;\u00a0 his accusation that I\u2019ve been oblivious for weeks, so focused on my work that I seem to have checked out of my life. \u00a0 Each day of this cold, snowy month, my neighbor Debbie has come by my house, quietly doing one good deed after another:\u00a0 replenishing my birdseed supply, taking Gracie for a walk, leaving me her copy of Yoga Journal, even hauling the snowblower out of the garage and doing our walkways after the last storm.\u00a0 I keep meaning to write her a thank you note, to invite her out for blueberry pancakes at our favorite cafe.\u00a0 But I haven\u2019t done either.<\/p>\n

All these lapses, my own failures of presence and attention, leap to mind as I read Sarah\u2019s\u00a0 letter.\u00a0 If only she knew how easily I lose sight of the beauty of the world.\u00a0 How easily I wander off track, get lost, and flail about, rather than staying balanced in my own quiet center. If only she knew how overwhelmed I often feel myself.<\/p>\n

I gulp down a bowl of cereal and head downtown to yoga class. Alexandra greets every one of us by name as we enter the room and roll out our mats.\u00a0 Her humor, her grace, her presence never fail to lift my spirits. Today, I\u2019m so soothed by her quiet way, by her stillness leavened with a kind of inner light, that I find myself thinking, \u201cWell, I want what SHE has.\u201d<\/p>\n

We began in a reclined hero pose.\u00a0 Long experience has taught me to move into this one slowly, and with care.\u00a0 So, while my classmates plop their butts down easily between their spread calves and lay back, I futz around: a block under my rear end, a bolster beneath my back, a slow progression through my tight hips and thighs and calves, to a supine position.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know if I\u2019ll ever be flexible enough to do this pose without props; what I have learned, though, is that if I\u2019m patient with myself, if I take it slow and breathe my way down on to my back, I\u2019ll be ok.<\/p>\n

And so, I set up my little arrangement — block, bolster, blanket — and ease myself toward the floor.\u00a0 One breath, two.\u00a0 Allowing rather than doing.\u00a0 Letting go rather than holding on.\u00a0 Laying there, listening to Alexandra\u2019s quiet instructions, I feel something I\u2019ve been holding on to for days begin to release.<\/p>\n

Why have I been making this all so hard?\u00a0 For weeks I\u2019ve been muscling my way into Writer Pose, trying to force words onto paper, while ignoring the protests of my spirit.\u00a0 And what do I have to show for it?\u00a0 A very few pages wrought at considerable expense — I\u2019m tired, frustrated, insecure, behind in everything, and on top of all that, I\u2019ve hurt my husband\u2019s feelings by being so wrapped up in my own.<\/p>\n

No wonder Sarah\u2019s letter makes me feel\u00a0 uncomfortable. What I have, after all, is nothing special.\u00a0 In fact, I know all too well the trap of assuming that what\u2019s hard for me is easy for everyone else, whether it\u2019s writing an essay or flowing through a vinyassa in yoga class.\u00a0 I look around the room — at my lovely teacher in her self-contained wisdom, at the young women whose limbs are as flexible as pipe cleaners, at the friend who has just lost fifteen pounds and looks great — and recognize a familiar old emotion in myself.\u00a0 Inadequacy.\u00a0 The sense that who I am, what I\u2019m capable of, is never quite enough.<\/p>\n

And yet, lying in my fully supported hero pose, I know that my challenge in this moment is not to get my bottom onto the floor, but to quiet the noisy buzzing in my mind and tune in to my own body instead, to trust that who I am really is ok, and that, contrary to that negative, nattering voice in my head, I already have everything I need — to do my version of hero pose, to write my next book, to live my own good life.<\/p>\n

\u201cBe content with what you have,\u201d wrote Lao Tzu in the Tao Te Ching, \u201crejoice in the way things are. When you realize nothing is lacking, the whole world belongs to you.\u201d The quiet center, the calm place I seek — it has been right here all along. \u00a0 I can tie myself up in emotional knots, trying to write from sheer force of will, judging myself for what I haven\u2019t done, comparing myself to others and coming up lacking every time.\u00a0 Or I can ease back into my life the way I\u2019ve finally learned to ease my middle-aged body into this most challenging yoga pose: by offering myself the kind of compassionate acceptance I so easily extend to everyone else.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the only way to achieve wholeness is to embrace our own fragility, to acknowledge our weaknesses and broken parts, and to minister to those parts with tenderness.\u00a0 And perhaps our real work as humans is not to become more like someone else, not to look at what another person seems to have, and try to figure out how to get it for ourselves — but rather to discover that which is unique and precious to us<\/em>, and to lovingly attend to that.<\/p>\n

And how lucky we are, to have the support of the universe as we embark on this transformative work of caring for our own souls:\u00a0 books to inspire us on our journeys, role models who can point the way, poems that give voice to the words in our own hearts, teachers willing to meet us where we are, friends who appear at our sides offering encouragement and companionship, loved ones who patiently wait for us to look up and to remember that we are loved.<\/p>\n

It is, in fact, a great honor to know that something I\u2019ve written has shone a light on someone else\u2019s path.\u00a0 What I want, what we all<\/em> want, is to feel that our gifts, whatever they are, have been of some use.\u00a0 Our lives become meaningful in service to others.\u00a0 First though, we must be able to see, and to honor, the light within ourselves.\u00a0 Perhaps today, as I do the dishes, fold that laundry, sit at my desk waiting for words to come and then, later, reach out over dinner to take my husband\u2019s hand, I\u2019ll remember that nothing is lacking, that the whole world already belongs to me, if I can simply allow myself to receive it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Every morning, I come downstairs and do the same thing: look out the window and greet the mountains, put on a pot of coffee, flip open my laptop, check the weather, scan my email. The first letter I see today is from a reader, a mother who had written me some months ago with what […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15183,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,26,30,38,39,40,43,14,16],"tags":[57,258,295,409,447,479],"class_list":{"0":"post-420","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-acceptance","8":"category-faith","9":"category-gratitude","10":"category-marriage","11":"category-midlife","12":"category-mindfulness","13":"category-practice","14":"category-soul-work","15":"category-yoga","16":"tag-acceptance-2","17":"tag-lao-tzu","18":"tag-mindfulness-2","19":"tag-tao-te-ching","20":"tag-transformation","21":"tag-yoga-2","22":"entry"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/600x600.png?fit=600%2C600","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=420"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}