Like how life is. Life can be very messy, not just dirt. More like mud sometimes. And we just have to tolerate the mess and the discomfort that comes with it.

For some people, going camping out into the wilderness, no showers, lots of mud and very few amenities is heaven for them. (My husband’s favorite place is a dune shack on Cape Cod with no electricity and lots of mice!) For other people going to a four star hotel, dining with white table cloths and dressing up for a night out to a charity ball is their heaven. For either preference, the opposite is almost unbearable. Yet life presents situations at home and at work where we oftern have to be in both worlds. And tolerate the discomfort that comes with that.

We try to work with it, to go along with the non preferred activity. The discomfort creeps down under the surface, into our cells and joints and muscles and bones. It causes our bodies to become out of sync. And yet when we get forced out of our comfort zone, for whatever reason,  we grow in amazing ways. I know I can be stretched sometimes and yet I need to re balance when that happens so I can come back to my center or rather, reestablish a new center. So many times, when I so resist the change, eventually I realize that this “new” center is a better place. Not only for me, but every one else around me.

Yoga is that re balancing for me. It is as if my yoga practice throws me into the washing machine of life to bring me back to my body and back to the ground of my life to see where I am. It twists and squeezes and literally washes out my old attitudes and make me, forces me, to keep reevaluating where I am and what things are like, right here, right now.  As my practice tosses me around in  the soapy water of the time on my yoga mat, I keep being reminded that things change, and that what is now, is. The less I try to resist what is, the fewer struggles I will have.

 The cycles of life, being dirty then clean, stretching  then resting, inhaling and exhaling , this is how it works.  I keep leaning that lesson each and every day to realize that life really is clean and dirty and then clean and dirty all over again. And again. And again.

So,  I’ve agreed to  join my husband, and bring our two children, to the dune shack this summer for a couple of nights. I’m already working on being more open about the mice.  I’ll let you know how it goes.