Author: Katherine

I have been spending time with my best friend during the last part of her life at a Hospice. The view out of her window is a garden.

For some reason I have been seeing everything as a window the last few days: the body language of loved ones, the skill of staff, the room itself as a window into all those who occupied it before, her surgeon’s words who likened the cancer in her body, ‘to a dandelion gone to seed and blown across her abdomen’.

Mostly, I am thinking about what I imagine as her windows; her view. At times I believe I have seen her clearly aware of both sides of the window of her body. Looking in. Looking out.

My view has been fractured. I keep thinking, ‘she is still here.’ She is still ‘in there’. At some moments it seems there must be a way to close the cancer window and ‘fix’ these unwelcome circumstances that have so swiftly swept my beautiful, exuberant friend toward the end of her life. I also see that the time has come to open the window wide for peace, to release her tethers through the freedom of a merciful last breath.

When I was a little girl, I had two windows in my bedroom. One looked out into fairly dense forest that went gradually downhill toward a pond that you couldn’t see through the trees. Out of my other window was a crooked apple tree surrounded by grass. Lots of light came in through this window especially in the morning.

I want to unflinchingly look now through windows like those. I want to persist and assist in this willingness to see what’s bright, lush, crooked, dark and deep. I want to practice the traverse down that slope into unknown waters and explore trust in the impermanence of one moment constantly dying to the next.

Is there a way for you to do the same with your difficult moments? Your joy? Your boredom or loneliness?

Awareness is truly a radical kindness for yourself and others in the great turn toward it all.

And for my incredible best friend who has lived her life packed full of adventures, enjoy this link to a site that shows the view from 50 windows in 30 countries. She would have loved to visit them all.

You’ll absolutely want to attend Guelph Yoga Fest happening on August 28th! This is a 1-day event and you will find me there offering a very special guided meditation class. In addition, Mindku.com; the corporate wellness company I have been working with, will be offering a full season of our program for one lucky organization to use for up to 50 employees. Our program runs through the Slack application. If you want more details about this, just send me a message 🙂

At the Yoga Fest Vendor Market you get to experience a number of healing services and wellness products from local small businesses.

Sign up for FREE healing services such as:
• Thai massage
• Acupuncture
• Fascial stretch
• Reiki
• Chiropractic care
• Guided meditation
• IV drip treatment
• Counseling services

Or shop for a number of complimentary wellness products like:
• Crystal kits
• Yoga jewelry
• Activewear and yoga gear
• Online wellness services
• Sonic journey and soundscape instruments
• Ganoderma-enhanced coffee
• Organic and vegan body oils and skin care products

The food truck @pablasstreetfoodofindia will also be serving up some tasty options for lunch!

To top it all off, a line-up of wonderful yoga instructors from across the city will be teaching yoga classes to bring the community together with movement, mindfulness, and breath.

Guelph Yoga Fest is also a fundraiser. A portion of proceeds from this event will be donated to Hospice Wellington to support individuals with compassionate palliative care.

As an added bonus for early registrants, we are giving away a few raffle prizes in advance. In our raffle, there are over $4,000 worth of prizes up for grabs. If you have already registered for Yoga Fest or if you do so before next week, you will be automatically included into the draw.

When you purchase a full-day ticket, you will receive 3 FREE raffle tickets included with your pass so that you have an even greater chance to win.

Space is limited and tickets are selling fast – don’t wait any longer to register!

Get your passes today and be entered into the raffle by clicking the link:

https://yogachiropractor.com/guelph-yoga-fest

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What if you lost your kids in a wilderness area measuring about half the size of Belgium? Imagine you set them off ahead of you with some camping gear but knowing you are carrying most of what they need to survive including all the food. They are nowhere in sight and the rough trail you are trekking through has abruptly come to an end.

This is what happened this past week on a canoe camping trip with my family and some friends. One moment we were following a path and the next, there was no clear way to go and the kids were gone.

Immediately there was fear amongst the adults. We dropped our packs and canoes and started calling out to them. 

My heart rate accelerated and a barrage of thoughts began: How would we ever find them out here when everywhere I looked was dense forest? How had I not anticipated the danger of them losing their way? Did they even have their water bottles?

This worry was short-lived because soon the kids called back out to us without a worry in the world. They had already made it to the next lake undeterred. They’d forged ahead even though the path wasn’t clear.

Think of the times when you have done the same; when you have lost the job, a relationship, an opportunity or a loved one and you have plowed through the overgrowth, jumped over the fallen trees and beyond the difficulty because reaching your lake was a stronger drive than the fear of loss along the way. This can be a natural attribute of youth. This can also rest upon the belief of something bigger. 

Think of times when you were like the parents in this story; when your thoughts and emotions ran wild while you dropped everything and stopped moving forward. How can you begin again after that kind of hijack? How can you take the necessary steps and choose to skillfully respond to the barrier on your path?

Sometimes you will recognize the difficulty as part of the adventure. You might call out to your fear and be answered by the voices of those who have gone ahead.

What about when there is seemingly no one to lead? Think about those times when your path became unclear because it was only yours to follow for a little while. Or when your path ended in rejection or a deep loss. How do you carry on?

Consider the practicality of presence.

Your mind can’t drag you from one scenario to the next when you are rooted in presence. When your mind is steady, the resulting effects on the body become steadier too. This can be a great benefit to manage where you’ve come from and to assist in knowing where to go next. Practising present-moment awareness, over time, will also help you notice how all things rise and fall away. Change is ever-present in our thoughts, emotions and circumstances. Watch this in yourself. Watch this in nature. Watch this in those around you.

Perhaps there are no dead ends. Maybe, when it feels like you don’t know which way to go, it is your internal compass asking you to pay closer attention to exactly where you are.

Note: If you enjoyed this post, have a look at another called, ‘The Weight You Carry,‘ written after a previous back country camping trip 🙂

Do you know that unique green of spring? Willows begin spring-green and seeing them never fails to make me pause and ask myself if I can live up to their example.

I imagine other trees do the same this time of year and that after a short while they decide to burst forth too.

‘Let’s do it,’ they say, after watching the Willow so brave and delicate all at once.

After all, they have watched her green wisps reach across a canvas of grey-brown and into weather that begins to nurture and then turn back on itself. She sways gently and is tossed wildly. She is rooted strength and flexibility, trusting that spring will unfold and so will she.

Sometimes the change-makers are who you least expect.

I wrote a poem this week that I’ll include below about a time I ran right up close to a deer in the woods. He wasn’t startled. He just stood. Watched. It made time instantly less elastic; moments just piled on top of each other and I was aware of each. I was in real time; inside the power of presence. Everything else dropped away.

Imagine living your life like that? Is it even possible to grasp that kind of fullness? Of course there are the practical matters we must attend to that make the past and present useful. And yet, what a human frailty it is to allow the past and present to use us much more frequently so that it is the present moment that seems to disappear.

Presence is where magic lives.

How often do you run oblivious through the forest to shake off a demon from the past? How often do you focus on the path ahead completely unaware of what lives all around you? How often do you side-step the magic and look back over your shoulder afraid of what you might lose, or what will ‘never be’ in the future?

The present is truly all we have. Choose it. Live it. As I write this, I want to stop forgetting that simple truth. As you read this, I hope you remember too.

Do you know those days when grief or an ending has a grip on you in a way that makes you pay exquisite attention?

My grandmother died this week and her funeral was this morning. Everywhere I looked today there were opportunities to surrender. There are opportunities of course everyday if we make the choice to truly live the moments we are given.

I wrote a poem for my Grandma that I read as part of her eulogy. Maybe sharing it again here is another way to let her go; to let her soar.

What is our obligation to ourselves and each other in regard to listening? I mean, deep listening so that the wisdom of the body reveals more than our thoughts and spoken words.

I have felt increasingly heart-sick with events in the world and with the echos of divisiveness seemingly louder than the unity and oneness that also continues to have a voice.

I am pulled to consider how our collective consciousness is a direct result of our neglect to nurture awareness within ourselves.

The practice of turning toward difficulty, to listen with the intention of upholding space and safety for ourselves and each other allows all of us to become more of who we can be. This is an art form of vast importance.

Isn’t loneliness a result of the absence of deep listening of self and other? What lengths will you go to to be heard? To not hear? And isn’t reactivity, a protection of the smaller self, a source for violence through thoughts, words and actions?

If I can learn and practice to rest in silence, to let go of the conversations in my head, to create necessary boundaries, I believe it allows for the space and capacity to be with difficulty, differences and with what is as opposed to how I wish things were or could be. There is freedom, peace and opportunity within that. There is a gift right there for each of us to receive and to give to others.

Notice your tendency, when someone wants to share with you, to respond with agency – to fix, judge, be offended by or run away from. Consider how instead you might be called to be a witness to another’s struggle. Consider how you might choose and practice peace.

Deep listening may feel like an approach that is too slow or irresponsible when it delays doing. And yet, listening to yourself and others can be the grounding presence necessary for sustainable response. Listening can provide you with the energy, attention and focus to love; to truly explore love.

Become a beacon of peace in the world. Radically depart from all of your ‘I am important’ proclamations and decisively move instead toward a witness-consciousness.

Allow listening to become an art. Give to yourself. Give it away as a gift. Make the choice, moment-by-moment, to use inner listening as an act of service for all of us on the planet. We need beacons.

In the words of holocaust victim, Etty Hillesum,

“Ultimately we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it toward others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will also be in our troubled world.”

Sometimes as a writer, it isn’t easy to see what is working in your own writing. What may have produced sparks on the first read becomes dull and diminished a few versions later. Mostly it works the other way around and revisions bring out the light but when it doesn’t, when the writing is revised from the outside in, revisions have the power to reduce what was about to burst into spectacular flames into a heap of lifeless ash.

What about ways we might revise ourselves for ‘our own good’ at the request of those around us? What if what drives us to revise is to have more, do more, be more?

I’m a list-maker and historically a people-pleaser. Sometimes my lists reveal how my people-pleasing can revise the fire right out of me.

Recently, I was going through my memory box to find old photos for a friend and came across one of my list books from almost two decades ago. When I look at the things on those lists that were consistently crossed out, they were (and still are) the tasks that make my heart beat a little faster, gets my creative mind in high gear and brings a spring to my step. My twenty-something self knew herself. She just didn’t trust that she did.

How does revision show up in your life? What are the ways you feel you always fall short of your list? Instead of revising from the outside, what about stoking the fire from within? What if the authentic self has little in common with more and better and resides instead in the presence of what is already magnificently there?

Instead of attempting to revise who you are, explore how you might re-vision who you’ve always been. Fall in love with yourself today.