In yoga class, after the final Sun Salutation, I invite my students to stand for a moment and listen to their heartbeat. And they listen. And I wait for them to listen, and I listen too. But then something else begins to happen. They start to anticipate. I can feel this anticipation rise like a deep wave in the ocean and ripple through the room. They want the thing that’s coming next. Because the thing that’s coming next is the reason most of them came in the first place. They’ve been slogging for an hour through postures like Three-legged Dog and Cobra and Locust and Crow. They’ve been trying their best, twisting their tired, tight bodies into Triangles and Trees and Tables, and now, finally, it’s time. It’s time to play dead.

The final pose of every yoga class is one called Savasana, which is Sanskrit for “Corpse pose.” It’s the pose where you lie on your back and practice being dead. Except that I don’t refer to it as “Corpse pose.” I don’t emphasize the “dead” part of it. Instead I say, “It’s time to integrate the practice,” (which is true). Or I say, “It’s time to let your body “set” like Jell-O,” (which is also true). Or I say, “It’s time to take a little nap, like in kindergarten, except without the cookies,” (also true, I don’t serve cookies).

Because if I were to say, “Now I would like you all to lie on the floor and contemplate your mortality and the fact that one day you will be dead,” maybe people wouldn’t be so keen to do that, and that might be bad for business.

So instead I allow them to think of Savasana as “nap time” and they are happy about that and go immediately into their “nest making” routines. Some fold multiple blankets into complex origamis of shoulder and neck supports. Others take bolsters and position them “just so” under their knees, or lie back over them, offering their throats and hearts up to the sky. Some just put on socks and a hoodie. Some cinch the hoods so tightly around their faces they look like little Unabombers. Most of them place eye bags over their eyes.

And then in my best Valium voice I take them down into their bodies. I give them permission to let go. I take them deeply into the places they hold tension: jaws, necks, shoulders, low backs. I encourage them to melt, to surrender the weight of their bodies to the earth.

And then I watch them. I hold the space for them. And for me, this is the most sacred time of all, and my most important function as their yoga teacher. I watch over them. I watch my vibrantly alive, breathing, aching, complaining, chronically tight and overly-stressed students, die.

Some twitch involuntarily. Some fall asleep and snore. But most of them drop into the deep, soft beds of themselves. I watch over them as they sink into the primordial ooze. Expression melts from their faces and they become totally real, and in this “practiced death” more fully alive than when they were “ocean breathing” during Downward-facing Dog.

And then, sadly, I must bring them back to life. The incantation I use is this: I say, “Begin to deepen your breath. Wiggle your fingers and toes. Come back to your body. If you’re wearing an eye bag, remove it now. Begin to stretch—a long, languorous, luxurious stretch. Slowly bend your knees. Roll over to your favorite side. Begin to let the day back in. Notice the color of the day. Notice the sounds from outside. Notice how you feel.”

And then, slowly, they begin to press up to a seated position. They look out the window at the sky. Their eyes reflect the light of the day, but also something deeper, something intangible and curious. I am sad that they can’t stay longer in this deep, soft stillness. But they can’t. They have to go home, or to work, or otherwise rejoin the program already in progress. So we chant “Om,” and look into each others eyes and bow “Namaste,” and then they go.

But one time, a woman stayed behind. “I have to call my husband,” she said, “because I don’t think I can drive now.” “Okay,” I said. And we talked quietly for a while and eventually she said, ‘Okay. I think I can make it home on my own now. It’s not easy coming back from the dead, you know.”

“I know,” I said.

From my second story studio window I watched over her as she made her way across the street, got into her car and drove away.

“Namaste,” I whispered.

©2008

Tragically, I think I have fallen in with the ranks of “The Boring Food People.” Recent evidence? When I bumped into my hair stylist in Wegman's the other day, I started talking to her about the virtues of Ezekiel 4:9 Sprouted Wheat Bread, instead of how cute her shoes were.

For a few months now I have been doing this "food thing.” I don't want to call it a "diet" because it's not really a diet (even though it probably IS); and I don't want to call it a "detox" either, because that makes it sound like some gastro-intestinal haz-mat dump procedure, and it isn’t that either. What this “food thing” involves is the simple elimination of dairy, sugar and flour from my diet. And why am I doing this? I don’t really know.

It was only going to last for 3 weeks. That’s because I can do anything for 3 weeks. Actually 4 weeks, but let’s not quibble. (See April’s Mt. Home.) And the timing was perfect because it was spring when I started, and what better time for a dietary clean-out-the-pipes thing than spring, right?

That first week was rough, though. Nothing I had on hand was anything I could eat. But after a spendy trip to Wegman’s, I was both psychologically and fiscally committed. I netted so much lettuce-y looking foods you'd think I was raising rabbits. I bought escarole. I bought agave nectar. I bought quinoa (which I can even pronounce now). I bought buckwheat groats and amaranth and even a fennel bulb.

It was hard at first, what with all the chopping and the mincing and the sautéing and the stirring and the angst-y worrying: “Is this what this stuff is supposed to LOOK like? But now I am a complete convert to this dairy-free, wheat-free, sugar-free, whole foods lifestyle. The only trouble is I can’t seem to stop talking about it. I am obsessed with food and shopping and label-reading and if you get me started talking about it, you WILL be sorry. (Just ask Emily, my hair stylist.) And if I happen to show up on your doorstep with a pamphlet and an armload of kale? Just pretend you aren’t home.

I’m not doing this because I have to. I don’t have allergies. I’m not diabetic. I don’t have celiac disease. There isn’t any real reason for me to join the ranks of the fanatical foodies. But since I’ve started eating this way, I feel light and clean and I have more energy than a baby ferret. Something is clearly UP with this food thing.

But the downside is I may be becoming just a teensy bit of a pain in the ass. Evidence? The other night at dinner I asked my hostess, “These glazed veggies? What did you glaze them with?” “Brown sugar,” she said. “Have you ever tried glazing with agave nectar?” I said. Her eyes glazed over.

So you want to know what I ate today (so far)?

1 cup of coffee (half decaf/half regular) with soymilk. (The decaf is Starbuck's Komodo Dragon which is decaffeinated w/o chemicals.)

1 Vans All Natural Wheat-free /Gluten-free blueberry waffle topped with cashew butter, organic mixed berries (frozen but thawed and warmed up) sweetened with a touch of Raw Organic Agave Nectar.

While reading the Sunday Times, I munched on Mary's Gone Crackers (Gluten free, Original flavor).

And now, while I'm writing this and trying to decide what to have for dinner, I am crunching on dry roasted edamame (lightly salted).

Scintillating reading, this, no? But now do you see what I mean?? This is what I have BECOME .

And what’s worse, a big part of me thinks YOU should care about this. Why? I don’t even KNOW! All I know is that I can’t seem to stop TALKING about it. (Or, pressing Caps Lock, apparently.) It’s like there is something in this food that is making me talk about the benefits of amaranth and cold expeller pressed oil, at odd and startlingly inappropriate moments, to anyone who will listen.

And what’s more: there is a big part of me that believes that if everyone started eating quinoa and glazing with agave nectar, the whole world would be a better place, and all of our problems would be solved, including global warming and the mortgage foreclosure catastrophe.

And yesterday? I dumped the petunias and planted lettuce in ALL the flower boxes on the porch.

There is a 12-Step program for this, right

©2008

In my childhood fantasy, I saw myself tippy-toeing down to the kitchen in the middle of the night and doing all the dishes in hot, soapy water. I would dry them with a terry towel and put them away. I would then scour the countertops, remove months of built-up grease from the stove top, and polish the chrome kettle until it gleamed. After sweeping and mopping the floor, I would then creep back to bed and wait for morning, as excited as a kid on Christmas Eve.

In my fantasy, my mother would awaken the next morning with her usual hangover, coughing her two-pack-a-day cough, and stagger to the kitchen expecting to encounter the usual month’s accumulation of moldy food stuck to melamine plates, curdled liquids in half-filled coffee cups, overflowing ashtrays and a vast array of empty tonic bottles.

In my fantasy, she would reel back in amazement to see the empty sink, the pristine countertops, the gleaming kettle. And then, in a moment of pure awakening, my mother would see at last, a new way of being, a new possibility for how to live. It would be, anachronistically, a moment of “shock and awe.”

She would then (in my fantasy) ask me to show her how in the world I had worked this miracle. And I would. And after the kitchen, we would have the vacuuming lesson in which I would sit her down and explain the intricacies of bag replacement, and the marvels of the retractable cord. In my dream, my 9 year-old self would watch proudly as my mother squired the Kirby canister through the network of rooms that was our Levittown ranch.

We would then move on to the yard, and I would show her how to prime and start the lawnmower, and how to wield a trowel. Side by side, mother and daughter, we would plant a border of petunias and marigolds in the front yard.

After my mother died I had a lot to do: see lawyers, pay bills, and make calls—the usual “executrix of the will” stuff, the obligatory “dutiful daughter” stuff, onerous, burdensome tasks that only fueled my tendency to procrastinate.

Instead, I cleaned. I scraped moldy food from plates, and gagged as

curdled and reeking stuff slurped down the drain. I filled two black garbage bags with tonic bottles and another two with Vodka bottles. It took me three days of non-stop scouring to make the kitchen somewhat decent.

The old Kirby canister, an antique by now, was still in mint condition in the closet, as if it had never been used. The old lawnmower had rusted in the garage, and still no flowers grew.

All my life, as far back as I can remember, I wanted to fix my mother. I wanted to clean up her act. The day I sold my childhood home, I walked one last time through the empty rooms, denuded of furniture and dishes and vacuums and lawnmowers. The realtor had hired a lawn service to clean up the yard.

I realized that day that only death could fix my mother. The only thing I could do was clean her house.

Kathleen Thompson is the owner of Main Street Yoga, 10 S. Main St., Mansfield, PA 16933. To contact her call 570-660-5873 or online www.yogamansfield.com or email mainstreetyoga@gmail.com.

I don’t actually buy these books. I’m too embarrassed (because c’mon, really.) But I do stand in Barnes and Noble and skim them. Because I am that person who can do anything for 30 Days.

Examples: I was a vegan for 30 days. I meditated everyday for 30 days. I took a digital picture and posted it online for 30 days in a row. I quit coffee for 30 days, and sugar, and alcohol (but not in the same 30 days.) I became a ridiculously early riser for 30 whole days. I started a conversation with a stranger every day for 30 days (which wasn’t such a good idea.)

I posted an entry on my blog every day for 30 days. For 30 days I committed to reading an hour in a book that was not work or school related. I walked an hour a day for 30 days. I even stopped reading while I ate for 30 days.

The thing about doing these things for 30 Days and only 30 Days is that I am then free to go back to sleeping in, drinking coffee and eating while reading if I want to after the 30 days are up. I don’t have to change my whole life forever, and I like that. But during these weird little 30-Day money-back, no obligation, risk-free “trial periods” I can experiment with being a different kind of person—the kind of person who doesn’t eat meat, or drink coffee, or eat sugar, for instance. For 30 days I can be a little bit strange, a little bit odd, even a little bit “off” (as in the case during the no-coffee experiment).

And then, after the 30 days are up, I have 30 days worth of results to look at. I then know, with absolute certainty, how I operate when my life has more veggies, less sleep, more human interaction, or less stress. After the results are in, if I want to continue, I can re-up for another 30 days, risk-free. I found that being a vegan was too hard for me, for instance, but I did like how I felt with no meat in my diet. So, now I know.

By the time this issue of Mt. Home hits the stands, I will be into a 30 Day Yoga Challenge at my studio. I have challenged people to see if they can practice yoga for 30 days in a row, and I have made it financially enticing for them to do so (30 Days for $30). It will be interesting to see these people experimenting with being “a person who practices yoga everyday” if only for 30 days. I predict the first 2 weeks will be the hardest as people realize that yoga feels on the inside a lot different that it looks on the outside. But I’m one of those people who believe if you haven’t tried something for at least 30 days you simply don’t understand it.

I predict that the Challenge participants will start to become a little different, a little strange, even a tiny bit odd during their 30 days of practicing yoga, and that’s okay. They will at least know, with absolute certainty, what it feels like to be fully human and fully alive for a brief time. Then, if that becomes too much, they can revert back to their old ways. But at least they will be able to say that at one point in their lives they used to be a person who did yoga every day. They will have tried it for 30 days, so now they will know.

Kathleen Thompson is the owner of Main Street Yoga, 10 S. Main St., Mansfield, PA 16933. To contact her call 570-660-5873 or online www.yogamansfield.com or email mainstreetyoga@gmail.com

In this movie, an envoy from outer space is sent to Earth because it has come to the attention of the galactic neighborhood that we Earthlings have discovered atomic energy and are planning to use it aggressively. Mr Carpenter, the alien, completely disguised as “one of us” is told by a respected American scientist that if he wants to capture peoples’ attention and get his message across, he will need to do something really, really dramatic, but not destructive. Mr. Carpenter decides he will stop the Earth for half an hour, from noon to 12:30 the following day.

So at noon, everything stops. Cars won’t start. Trains don’t move. Phones don’t work. There are shots of stilled manufacturing plants. Big Ben does not toll. Nothing moves. Nothing works. In China, in London, on farms in Kansas, people are frantic. They are shown out in the streets, pulling their hair, falling to their knees, looking up at the sky, reaching with outstretched arms. Please! Help! What have we done?? In short, there is much existential angst.

Then, suddenly, at 12:30, everything starts up again. But then Mr. Carpenter is found out for the alien he is and the army shoots him. His robot, “Gort” brings him back to life briefly so he can make one last impassioned plea to us Earthlings before they take off in their spaceship. Here’s what he says (more or less):

“Beware Earthlings. If you use your atomic power aggressively, you will affect the entire galaxy, so we will have no other recourse but to destroy you. Remember: We are watching.”

Then, they take off.

Back then, I think the reason this movie scared me so much was because I knew we would not heed Mr. Carpenter. I knew, even then, that as a species, we Earthlings were profoundly stupid. I feared the end of the planet was coming. And very soon.

Watching it this time though, what captured my attention most was the “stilling of the Earth.” When the earth stood still there was this breathless, tense present. People were completely stuck being themselves without any distractions. Nowadays, it would be like losing cell service or the internet. Nobody could even text you and say, “Dude. Do you not have service either?” You wouldn’t even be able to turn on CNN and get the Breaking News.

But this time I saw a link between the stilling of the earth and meditation. Yes, this is precisely what I do, what every meditator does. Every time we sit down we make The Earth Stand Still. And we do it because we know there is a message, a warning, or something else we need to know for our survival, waiting to get through to us. And the only way we will be able to “get it” is this way, this very dramatic, but not destructive way: We have to sit down, shut up and be still.

At first there is a lot of hemming and hawing and hand-wringing about whether we really should make the Earth stand still, especially today, given that there is a dump truck loaded with work idling right outside our door. But soon, even those thoughts drop away. And as we notice that our heart is beating, and we are breathing, the merry-go-round of our life slowly grinds to a halt. Now there is a little bit more space. If there is some message out there we need to get, now it can get through because we’ve hung up the phone, our line isn’t busy. We’ve made the Earth stand still.

When the movie was over, I knew my present interest in meditating and silence and yoga began all those years ago, when, as an eight year-old, I watched The Day The Earth Stood Still. Back then I thought it was all about the spaceship and Gort and Mr. Carpenter. But now I know it was about that scene of suspended animation, of everything quiet: no car horns honking, no power lines buzzing, no machines grinding out living that brought me to the meditation cushion and the yoga mat.

Kathleen Thompson is the owner of Main Street Yoga, 10 S. Main St., Mansfield, PA 16933. To contact her call 570-660-5873 or online www.yogamansfield.com or email mainstreetyoga@gmail.com.

I am becoming more and more convinced that we are defined by the things we love. Not by the people we love, (though they are more than happy to define us), and not by our jobs (which can change an average of four times during our lifetime), but by the things. There is even a new trend in obituaries which bears this out. In more and more obituaries, after the naming of survivors, there is a small list of the things the deceased loved. For example: “Mary loved crossword puzzles, quilting and bird watching.” Or, “Jack loved fly fishing, the NY Yankees and playing gin rummy.”

I love this trend, yet it always makes me a little sad too, because I wish the list was longer. I know Mary and Jack loved more than those things, and I want to know what other things? What else did they love?

So with Valentine’s Day afoot I thought: “What better time to make my list; a list of things I love, the things which, for better or for worse defined me. At first I could only think of things like raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, but then I warmed to the task and came up with over a hundred things before supper time. Here is a partial list (in no particular order): I love to iron. I love to pick lint out of the vacuum brush with a toothpick. I love Sudoku puzzles and sitting up to my neck in hot, bubbly water.

I love the day the screens go on. I love cinnamon toast and falling asleep on the couch in the afternoon with golf on TV. I love fireworks and the smell of play dough and a Bombay Sapphire martini, up, with a twist.

I love the Rose Parade and Mallow Cups and those tiny flowers that grow above tree line. I love marching bands and Easy Pass and root beer floats. I love being part of a cheering crowd at a major league baseball game. I love movies that end with reconciliations after long estrangements.

I love champagne and catalpa trees and puppy breath. I love roller coasters, cedar waxwings and the little spit sink at the dentist. I love the sound of ankles popping in yoga class and eating with chopsticks. I love a great massage, jumping double dutch and looking down at the ground from an airplane.

There’s more on my list, but the point of all this is that the things that we love want to love us, too. They are there all the time, all around us, waiting for us to notice them and love them. That’s because it is only when we love them that they can come into being. It may be hard to imagine a Sudoku puzzle waiting for you to love it, and in fact it’s not really the puzzle itself that waits, it’s that part of your brain that loves to work in that weird way and only gets to do so through the puzzle.

Everything you love wakes up a different part of you and lets it become real and alive. And when you notice that you love something, then you are living “in love.” Loving is simply the act of noticing that you love what you love.

So I invite you to do it. Make a list of all the things you love. Keep adding to it as you notice more and more things. They can be silly things or serious things. The only criterion is that you love them. Every time you hear yourself say, “I love that!” write it down. Keep a “life list” like bird watchers do, of all the things you notice that you love. The longer your list, the more “definition” you will have as a human being. Some people say, “You are what you eat.” I say, “You are what you love.”

email-mainstreetyoga@gmail.com

you can view past articles at http://www.mountainhomemag.com/

But I warned her: “You think yoga teacher training is going to be all spiritual and quasi-athletic, but they are going to take you apart and put you back together in a whole new way. You won’t even recognize yourself at the end of the month. You sure you want this?”

Only a few years earlier she had watched and listened to the blow-by-blow account of my own personal transformation at Kripalu, at the age of 51, when I submitted to yoga teacher training. She had watched her mother drive off frightened and wavering about her life’s purpose and direction, and return clear and steady. And now, she wanted this for herself. Who could blame her?

But I worried. Transformation isn’t the kind of thing that can be scheduled into your Covey Planner. Transformation is all about timing. Like the koan about the teacher appearing when the student is ready, the individual has to be ripe, the stage set. Maybe she was ready. She thought she was.

I also worried that she might be more in love with the image of the yoga teacher, with its stretchy couture and its eco-friendly accoutrements, than with the heavy responsibilities that come with taking people into areas of themselves they haven’t been in a long time, if ever. And I also knew that in order to guide others into these dark areas, she would have to go there herself.

When I did my training at age 51, I had been practicing yoga on my own fairly regularly for over 30 years. I didn’t go to the training because I wanted to teach, but because I had hit a wall in my practice. I kept feeling that there were all these important things going on beyond the postures that I just wasn’t getting. I felt that my teachers were “holding back” on me; that they knew “secrets,” that only teachers got to know. I wanted in on those secrets.

I drove myself to Kripalu for my month-long training in a cold rain. I felt giddy with excitement. Then I felt afraid. Then I felt nauseous. Then I felt sheer, gasping-for-breath, paralyzing panic. I clutched the steering wheel. What was I thinking? I couldn’t even do a headstand. Hell, I couldn’t even do a decent forward bend! I was 51 years old for chrissakes! What was I doing? Who did I think I was? What the hell was the matter with me? I pulled off the road and considered turning back. I sat for a while, cried, shifted the car back into drive and kept going. It continued to pour.

A month later, on the drive back to Mansfield, my clothes smelled like incense. I still had the red tilak paste bindi on my forehead from the graduation ceremony. When I stopped in Cooperstown for my first cup of coffee in a month, the cashier looked at me funny. In my strange mental state I thought he could probably tell that I now had “the secret of yoga,” but then I saw my face in the rearview mirror and knew that I just looked like a peculiar woman with a red dot on her forehead.

Yoga school had spiritually “rolfed” me. Rolfing is a hands-on manipulation of the body that hurts a lot, but releases, realigns and balances you. But instead of just rolfing my body, yoga teacher training had realigned and balanced my whole conception of myself. All those questions I had asked on the drive to Kripalu: What was I doing? Who did I think I was? What the hell was the matter with me? Had been answered.

I had gotten what I went there for: the “secret of yoga.” And it only took one explosive bonfire of anger, sixteen sleepless nights, a quart of ink spilled into three notebooks, eight pounds of tofu and two gallons of tears.

And now my daughter said she wanted this too. Or her version of it. And although part of me felt flattered and validated, another part recoiled at the thought of my baby going through such inevitable existential pain, alone, in a dorm room filled with twenty other souls suffering similar, sleepless hells.

So I sat her down and told her the secret of yoga. After all, why should she have to go through all that suffering if I already knew it and could just tell her? Wasn’t it the parent’s job to smooth the way for the progeny? And the “secret” wasn’t even a secret. We were never sworn to secrecy with blood or spit or ritual. So this is what I told her:

“The path of yoga is NOT like getting on Rte 80, taking the westbound ramp and ending up in Pittsburgh. On this path, you get on Rte 80 and your car immediately breaks down. You then spend the rest of your life trying to get it up and running again. And while you sit on the side of the road it rains a lot. And most of the time it’s dark. And then there’s fog. And it’s either too hot or too cold. And meanwhile everyone else seems to be zooming along just fine, having intense, amazing, mind-blowing experiences, whereas you are sitting, broken down, on the side of the road. And this is the path of yoga, your path if you really want to go this way. But what you will learn at yoga school is not just how it feels to face this broken-downness, but how to accept it, --and this is the kicker—and, how to be happy about it!”

I might as well have been trying to describe what blue looks like to a blind person. She tried to understand. She really did. She even tried to believe me, but I could tell she didn’t. Some things you have to find out for yourself, and this was one of them.

I drove her to Kripalu. I met her roommates, helped her unpack, and left. The next time I saw her, I knew she KNEW. She looked beat, she looked beautiful, and she took one look at me and started laughing and crying hysterically.

After her graduation ceremony we drove home together. This time she was the one who smelled of incense and sported the red dot in the middle of her forehead. She looked more tender and vulnerable than I had seen her since her days as a baby in a crib.

She never had that nervous breakdown, she said. Instead, her transformation came in the form of a total disarmament. During her training she was challenged to lay down all of her psychological defense strategies, all those ways of operating in the world and with other people that supposedly kept her “safe” and “unhurt” but also numb. She was asked to see if she could actually live like that, and to her amazement, she found she could. So instead of feeling “broken down” she now felt “broken open.” No more armor. The secret of yoga, for her, she said, was the art of being tender and broken-open all the time. Armor doesn’t know the difference between love and hate, she said. When you defend against pain, you also armor against love.

“So what this means for you, Mom,” she said, “is that it’s okay to sit happily broken down on the side of the road, but if somebody stops, it’s also perfectly all right to accept a tow.”

Ah.

Kathleen Thompson is the owner of Main Street Yoga, 10 S. Main St., Mansfield, PA 16933. To contact her call 570-660-5873 or online www.yogamansfield.com or email mainstreetyoga@gmail.com

I always try to envision that. My kid, gasping for air, going blue, looking at me with terrified eyes, and me, grabbing my own air mask and putting it on first. I really can’t see myself doing that—putting my own mask on first.

Even though I understand the reasoning behind such advice, (that I am no help to anyone else unless my own situation is stable), still, it seems to go against all my instincts. It seems selfish that I get to breathe first.

So here it is, a few weeks before Christmas, the most wonderful time of the year. The hap, happiest time of the year. The season of giving. When you care enough to send the very best. When Peter comes home from college (for the 14^th year in a row) in the Folgers commercial and the whole machine of it is once again attempting to suck me into its vortex. A vortex aswirl in butter cookies and wrapping paper and One Day Only sales at Circuit City.

The plane is clearly going down. I feel the cabin pressure drop. There isn’t enough air. Only six shopping days left. Two masks fall from the overhead compartment. So now what do I do? Go shopping for those last few things on my list? Bake another batch of cookies? (My kid is turning blue. She’s gasping. She really needs that new game.) Or, do I put own my mask on first and go up to my room, close the door, and become quiet for a while.

Back before the swirling vortex of Christmas began I knew, without qualification, that nothing was more important than this period of quiet every day. Without this, I was just a character in somebody else’s video game, at the mercy of the cultural joystick, a soulless automaton. But if I spent some time alone everyday, breathing, writing, meditating, I could step out of the game and see it, and not be played by it.

But what is more, as a result of this period of self care and self nurturing I now had something to give to the crazed child, the demanding parent, the frazzled boss. Since I now could breathe fully and easily myself, I could help others don their own masks, or at the very least not add to the chaos.

So, if you want to, try this. Write down these six words on a piece of paper: Nothing Is More Important Than This. Then close your eyes and think about it. What is the one thing that when you do it, seems to give the rest of your day sweetness and balance, and when you let it get crowded out by the “shoulds” and the “oughts” you lose all sense of sanity and proportion and start to gasp for air, turn blue and get that terrified look in your eyes.

Possible answers could be your daily prayer or meditation, your daily walk, your morning alone time, or any personal ritual that grounds you, and gives you stability and ballast in your life.

Because if you are all used up and empty, how can you give anything to anyone else? When the “Nothing is more important than this” thing gets done each day, it is equivalent to putting on your oxygen mask first. Only then will you be able to share your gifts with others. Only then will you have any gifts to share.

Happy Christmas.

Kathleen Thompson is the owner of Main Street Yoga, 10 S. Main St., Mansfield, PA 16933. To contact her call 570-660-5873 or online www.yogamansfield.com or email mainstreetyoga@gmail.com.

But then there was a snafu with the tickets. They didn’t come. I emailed the monastery. They sent them, they said. I didn’t get them, I said. Don’t worry, they said. Bring your invoice to the door.

On the day of the talk I got up and meditated. I dressed in Dalai Lama appropriate clothes, looped my mala beads around my wrist, and folded my invoice into my bag. I was a little worried about this lack of a physical “ticket.” What if I got there and they said, “Sorry.” What if I was turned away at the door to the Dalai Lama? Would I be able to accept it with an attitude of calmness and nonviolence and go home in peace? I wondered.

As I drove along Rt. 13 in the silent car, thinking calm, positive thoughts about the Dalai Lama, and life, I was startled by flashing red and blue lights behind me. A cop was pulling me over. Surely there was some mistake. But no. I tried to explain to Officer Sullivan that I was calm, centered, aware, driving conscientiously, carefully, in full control of my body, mind and emotions. Officer Sullivan said his laser had “pinpoint accuracy.” I got my first speeding ticket.

I drove the rest of the way to Ithaca blasting Krishna Das, wondering “What would the Dalai Lama do?” No answers were forthcoming.

But happy day, I got in with my invoice. My seat was great, with a clear view to the stage, his throne, and the chanting monks. Soon the Dalai Lama himself appeared. And that’s when everything began to tank. He spoke mostly in Tibetan. Through an interpreter. It sounded something like this. Dalai Lama: Geechy goo dzi pombo jo-jo. Loody sha-sha, tomee dah, ta sherra jie. Sher mona shera sheval, nay nay shera. (For 15 minutes.) Then the interpreter went on about “proofs” and “steps” and the 8 Magic Pathways and the 5 Treasures of this and that.

Suffice it to say, I did not learn how to train my mind. But I did learn a lot about irritation, frustration, boredom, sadness and anger as I sat there for two hours being ticked at the Dalai Lama for not meeting my expectations. And making me get a speeding ticket. And depriving me of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to transcend my mind and feel uplifted, which I had paid good money to do.

It was only the next day, as I was mulling over the whole disappointing experience, that I remembered how tired the Dalai Lama looked, sitting up on his throne, bored, while his interpreter droned on. I remembered how he dug out a little visor and put it on his head to shield his eyes from the harsh lights that were trained on him. I thought about his age, 72, and how this had been his third talk in two days and how he must have been pooped. I thought about how hard it must be to be the Dalai Lama with everyone always expecting you to say brilliant and inspiring things all the time.

Then I thought about Officer Sullivan, sitting in his patrol car in a clump of weeds somewhere, with his pinpoint accurate laser, and his whole grab bag of human troubles, doing a job where people either feared him or hated him, but doing a job that needed to be done. And I knew then that we were all the same: me, the Dalai Lama and Officer Sullivan. All we want is to be seen, loved, accepted and appreciated. And all we want is to be cut some slack when we disappoint.

So I forgave the Dalai Lama and Officer Sullivan that day. Because really, we are all just doing the best we can with what we have. Me included.

Kathleen Thompson is the owner of Main Street Yoga, 10 S. Main St., Mansfield, PA 16933. To contact her call 570-660-5873 or online www.yogamansfield.com or email mainstreetyoga@gmail.com

.

As these words spilled out of my mouth they surprised me. “I NEED a drum???” Did I say “need”?

I have never before needed a drum, wanted a drum, played a drum. Drums are loud. Hell, drums are percussive and I prefer meditative. Not to mention the fact that I have a quirky, some would even say unconventional, sense of rhythm. My piano teacher, in a fit of exasperation, once had me march around her studio clicking two sticks together saying out loud, “A one, and a two, and a three, and a four. A one, and a two, and a three, and a four.” And I was 45 years old at the time.

“What kind of drum do you need?” Tom, the owner, asked.

“I don’t know.” I confessed.

He looked at me. “Here’s what you need,” and he went to the back of the store and produced a drum with a beautiful carved wooden base, about two feet tall.

“This is a djembe (pronounced “gem bay”),” he said. “It’s an African drum.”

Tom then explained the difference between African drums and Latin drums.

“The Africans believe that the heartbeat of the earth is brought up through the drum by the drummer’s hands. That’s why the movements of the drummer’s hands pop up off the drum into the air,” he explained.

“Latin drummers believe the heartbeat of the universe is pulled down into the drum through the drummer’s hands. That’s why Latin drumming is done with hands close to the drum head.”

He illustrated these techniques first on the djembe, and then on a conga. I was entranced.

Another customer entered at that point and Tom left me, saying, “There are many djembes here of this size. The drum heads are made of goat hide. Go find your goat. You will know it.”

I walked tentatively along the row of djembes. I touched them all. I didn’t pound them, I “petted” them. Some skins were mottled, others flawlessly white. Some even had goat fur around their edges.

I kept coming back to one. It was soft, with a little brown stripe down the center. My hands liked it. My heart liked it. This was my goat.

Tom returned. “Find it?”

“Yes. It’s this one.’

He played a riff of beats on it. “This is a good one.”

He took my picture with a Polaroid, holding my goat. Everyone who has ever bought a drum there has their picture hanging on the wall.

Back home I began to play it. Tentatively at first, but I soon learned the bass, the tone and the slap. When I played my drum I became calm. It seemed to put my head in sync with my heart and my heart in sync with the pulse of the day.

As I continue to play, I notice I gravitate toward the same rhythm all the time (much to the extreme annoyance of anyone within earshot) but it seems natural, this rhythm, and intuitive, and distinctly mine It’s like I’ve always known it, always had it in me somehow. I recall what Tom said about how the drummer’s hands pull the rhythm out of the earth through the drum, and I wonder if I’ve somehow managed to tap into my own private artesian well of beats, my own personal rhythm.

Now, a year later, I finally get why I needed this drum. Playing my drum settles me down, grounds me, entrains my heartbeat with the rhythmic pulse of everything around me. It allows me to get down with my bad self, jam with it, rock out with it. When I play it I feel like I’m part of the band, part of the tribe.

And I am.

Kathleen Thompson is the owner of Main Street Yoga, 10 S. Main St., Mansfield, PA 16933. To contact her call 570-660-5873 or online www.yogamansfield.com or email mainstreetyoga@gmail.com.