Know you're enough

Reading from Tuesday June 9, 2015 yoga class

I love books, especially yoga books!  :) I ordered the new book by Colleen Saidman Yee, entitled "Yoga for Life: a Journey to Inner Peace and Freedom."  It is a fabulously wonderful book by a yoga teacher who has a lot of courage to include what she has in the pages of this book.  So inspiring, so real, and so from her heart.  It was SO good that I read the book in two days.  I couldn't put it down.  I had the privilege of meeting Colleen and her husband Rodney Yee after taking a class with them at Yoga on High in Columbus Ohio with my buddies Becky and Bev.  There is a framed picture of the three of us with Colleen and Rodney and it sits on top of my book case full of yoga books. I am standing right next to Colleen.  Everytime I go by the picture (everyday), it makes me smile and after reading this book, it makes me smile even wider.  

In the introduction to the book which she entitles, "Know you're Enough" she says, and I quote...

"I watch women's chests. I watch the arches of their feet.  I watch the positions of their pelvises and the placement of their heads.  I watch women holding it all together, afraid that if they slow down, everything will fall apart.  I watch women being ashamed that they are aging and feeling unworthy of love.  I watch women collapse.

I also watch women's perfection, courage, compassion, and grace.  We women can balance our heads over our lifted chests, supported by strong legs that are connected to the earth.  We can raise the arches of our feet and we can soften our faces.  We can carry ourselves in the world with confidence and ease."

She ends the introduction with this beautiful paragraph:

"Today, I'm fifty-five years old and happily married.  I don't do drugs, and I'm a vegetarian.  Instead of chasing synthetic highs, I've learned how to extract a high from the beauty of an ordinary day.  I've learned that the best high exists in the joy or the sadness or the mundaneness of the present moment, unfiltered.  Yoga allows me to surf the ripples and sit with the mud, all the while catching glimpses of the clarity at the bottom of the lake: my true Self."