Laughter Yoga (but not)

I'm down for the count tonight - I've been fighting a cold all week long and I have a huge week coming up.  Big things coming up for Karma Kids and my three-day Doula Training is going to be right smack in the middle of it this Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.  My plans with my beautiful friend Laura are cancelled (including my plan to take my first gentle yoga class since rehabbing my hip and hamstring) and I'm hoping that between all the prep work I have to do for doula training I can get enough rest to beat this thing.

In the meantime, this has totally made my day.  It has pretty much nothing to do with yoga in any way, but I guarantee it will make you laugh.  I love me some good bloopers and a good case of the giggles.  Enjoy a rush of mood-boosting endorphins, fire up your belly muscles, and boost your mood.  Late Night with Jimmy Fallon = Laughter Yoga (but not really).

Hope to be back next week with an exciting announcement about Karma Kids Yoga, an update on how my doula training went, and something I've been wanting to write about for a month now - my life-changing physical therapist!

Despair is the greatest sin

I was fully prepared to let myself off the hook again today.  My weekly-blogging has been once-every-two-or-three-weeks blogging lately.  There's a lot going on with work, and I've been desperate to spend every single second Marc and I both had free together - which unfortunately were not that many seconds.

He left today to go do another show at the beautiful People's Light & Theatre in Malvern, PA.  It's a beautiful theatre, a great company, and the show will be tons of fun with fantastic people.  I wish I were going with him.  I wish he were staying here.  I wish the contract wasn't so frigging long.

I have a lot on my plate today - things that I've been neglecting in favor of all else we've had going on - and especially since I'm not feeling terribly inspired or, honestly, terribly happy, I was going to give myself another pass.  Next week I'll be more "YoginiAnnie" like - not today.

However.

As I've written before, and as much wiser and more eloquent people than I have said, yoga isn't just about being shiny and happy and Instagramming yourself in a headstand.  It's accepting the present and yourself, no matter what.  Suffering isn't caused my the circumstances themselves (even when that's really hard to believe), it's caused by our inability to accept and integrate them into our present.

I have a ton of reasons to be grateful.  My overall health is good, and my health is being improved by a phenomenal physical therapist who will hopefully be getting me back to running (!) and taking yoga classes for myself in the next couple of months.  My husband's not going off to war or dying, he's going to Pennsylvania to do what he loves.

One of the things on our to-do-before-PA list was to finish the series Masters of Sex, which we both absolutely love and which featured our beautiful friend, the insanely talented up-and-coming actress Katie Parker in the last two episodes.  There's a beautiful scene between two characters - one a Christian and one an atheist - who are both struggling deeply with emotional issues.  Barbara, the Christan, says at one point that, "Despair is the greatest sin."  To my Christian readers, this probably isn't a big revelation (ha) to you, but I had never heard that before.  You mainly just hear about murder, adultery - the more obvious stuff.  But despair?

It seems like a really bold statement to me.  Similar to the idea that suffering isn't caused by the world or external circumstances - it's caused by how we react to those circumstances.  We have the ability to accept, make peace with, and maybe even find joy in everything - to indirectly quote Angels in America, in every awful thing.