I haven’t been the best blogger lately. All summer, really. And the more I think about it, the worse I feel. Because, truth be told, there are about ten drafts sitting in my dock…awaiting a lot of refinements, links, pizzazz, photos, music, lights-cameras-action! What the heck.

I’ve decided to stream-of-conscious-write just to get some things out. Flow like yoga. So I’m sharing a bit about non-doing—never to be confused with doing nothing—that I’ve sent out in my lifeyum newsletter about yoga classes. Thought I’d share it with my b-friends (blogosphere friends), again with the hope that you still like me despite my stunning lack of attentiveness. And I still owe a huge debt of gratitude for some lovely awards that I’m feeling increasingly embarrassed to have received. The post will come.

In the meantime, here’s where I’m at: Balancing between being a good mother, wife, friend, teacher, yogi and well…non-doing. Just being. Listening to the sounds of nature. Taking walks. Observing. Breathing. Letting everything else go, for little bits of time.

Summer in my world has been an exercise in restraint from the habitual patterns of planning, organizing and packing in as many activities and accomplishments as possible — even fun ones.

Oh, the pleasure of trips to visit dear family and the ocean, staying up late to watch movies or catch fireflies. And all the great progress on lifeyum and exploration of my yoga practice this summer:

* Wanderlust Yoga Festival (video recap here),
* workshop with legendary teachers Rodney Yee, Colleen Saidman, David Swenson, and Shelley Washington,
* and most recently, working with Jennilee Toner and the next group of Hot Warrior Yoga teachers goddesses! at The Yoga Spa in Ballston Spa

But even the slightly relaxed state of summer still feels like going-going-going. So I recall Jon Kabat-Zinn’s reminder that non-doing is not the same as doing nothing. In Wherever You Go, There You Are, “dwelling in stillness and looking inward for some part of each day, we touch what is most real and reliable in ourselves and most easily overlooked and undeveloped.”

Ah, yes. Then there is the perfect passage from Henry David Thoreau‘s Walden: “There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hand. I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath,
I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller’s wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been.”

At peace with things as they are, moment by moment.

Then, maybe, a yoga class. That’s where I get my present moment and gratitude button reset every time. Hope to see you at one soon…if not this week!

[Click here to view my latest newsletter. Thanks to Cathy Ann Drury, My Newsgirl, for her fabulous template design.]