I’m in my hometown this week, supporting family members through a difficult time.
This is following my mother’s death last summer after a brief, acute illness.
This is the place, as my cousin put it, where the exit sign off the 401 says “Welcome to Where You Came From (but changed since).” I haven’t lived here since 1988, but it’s where my family has been from for literally centuries. I have an epigenetic imprint on this place, but it’s like echoes, a dream. I’m staying in an air bnb that has a Bitcoin theme. It used to be a two story nightclub. I never danced here, but I ate my first pasta carbonara right next door.
It’s been a tough year for family things, and once again, I find my ground through yoga. I forgot to pack enough socks when I jumped in the car, but I remembered my travel yoga mat. Always.
I’ve been cycling through Adriene’s seven day sequence called “Yoga Ritual”, for the third time in the past few months. (I access it through the Find What Feels Good app, which I pay for — I’m sorry that I can’t find a free link).
The ritual is a 15 minute flow followed by a 5 minute meditative sit. Simple. 20 minutes to find your presence and breath.
The flow is simple — starting every day with child’s pose, then a flow that includes a couple of three legged dogs, a few eagle poses, a lot of folding. Every day is a variation on the same flow. It’s a deliberately repetitive series, to focus on presence, awareness, what’s new today.
When I was doing Day 4, Oxygen, I was in a balancing eagle pose, looking at a point ahead of me for focus — the drishti. And I remembered a post I wrote back in the first year of covid, just around the time we were seeing that covid was a long-term space for us. About finding a focal point off the mat — a drishti for life — is really important when the world around us is a swirl.
Right now, my grounding point is connection, showing up with compassion, with acceptance. I know that in my head — but that 20 minute yoga and meditation practice reminds me to feel it in my body.
What’s YOUR drishti when the world is a swirl?
Fieldpoppy is Cate Creede, who is from the part of the world currently known as Windsor, Ontario. This territory is within the lands honoured by the Wampum Treaties, agreements between the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, Lenni Lenape and allied Nations to peacefully share and care for the resources around the Great Lakes, and specifically of the Three Fires Confederacy (Ojibwe, Odawa, Potawatomi) and Huron/Wendat Peoples.
