I’m so lucky to have had DEEP, WISE teachers over the years.

One is a root yoga & meditation teacher of mine, Jess Lazar.

When I met her at 25, she was newly divorced, the mom of two young girls, and had just turned 40 (which felt like a million years away and now I turn 40 in a few months myself ;).

She mentioned casually “my sister just gifted me this song for my birthday.” (I now gift people songs and poems all the time ;)).

And I then she turned it up REAL LOUD and directed all of us buttoned-up, Washington DC Type-As to get on all fours and “find your spine.”

(Mic drop on the power of that embodied lesson right there.)

Jess, aside from being a rock-and-roll-badass-yoga-teacher was also a card-carrying-Jewish-Buddhist and deeply steeped in Zen koans, which she wove into her classes with casual fluidity.

If you’re not familiar with koans — they are a type of dialogue, story, question, or paradoxical statement used in Zen Buddhism to help students reach insight and enlightenment (casual). The purpose of the koan is to get the student thinking beyond conditioned thinking and explore heightened states of awareness and understanding.

There’s an official list of koans, but Jess had come up with a few catchy ones of her own.

And this is one that helped save me in my very tumultuous 20s:

“You’ll do a thing until you don’t.”

This simple sentence felt like the opposite of shame-fueled self-improvement plans (which, I hope you see, believe, and know deeply that 40 EM is NOT!).

It was all Mary Oliver’s “You do not have to be good, you do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting, you only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”

It’s instructive here on our last day of “Let Go” — where the point is not to solve / fix / get better / beat ourselves up or self-flagellate even more in those ways we often or always do.

The point of this week has been — as always — to simply notice instead.

To notice what grips us, what’s too heavy to carry, what’s time to put down.

And then cue the compassionate refrain, if you’re still human & working on it today:

“You do a thing until you don’t.”

Or my own personal mantra of the last few years:

“I’m still learning, I’m still learning, I’m still learning.”

You can also play the Rolling Stones on repeat and find your spine on all fours. I probably will ;)

All of this counts as your Real Life Wild moment-to-moment practice today.

see you right back here tomorrow,
Cath

Remember, Saturdays can just be taking the practice into the Real Life Wild and moments of your day. But if you’d like to sit today… one more chance to CHOOSE. Stick with what you chose yesterday if you loved it. And if you hated it, stick with it again too ;)

Reflection: If you want to write today, try this. What’s the thing “you’re doing until you don’t?” See if you can see it with curious observation instead of shame or guilt. If no one else was going to read what you wrote (they’re not!) and you didn’t have to actually change anything (you might ;) — what would you right about this thing?

— OR —