Summer Updates & Class Recording
Hello, dear readership sangha!
This post is a hodgepodge of updates and thoughts: welcome!
TL;DR updates: Wildcat Yoga Club is back! You can still jump into the Mercury Retrograde meditation and writing immersion with a paid subscription to this newsletter.
Summer Practices
Summer is a season of contradictions. Because I have the summer off from teaching college writing, it’s deeply restful. I’m sleeping less, though. The sun is out, so I am, too, I suppose. And the daily rhythms of my family are more syncopated and spotted with shifts in time signature and key. Unlike the school year, where everyone leaves the house and comes back at roughly the same time each week-day, every day in summer is unique. For someone like me who is prone to spreading myself too thin and to over-doing things, I have to counteract all of this mobility, irregularity, and (dare I say) whimsy with a heaping tablespoon of inertia: the energetic equivalent of a weighted blanket, if you will. What does that look like? Well, I’m glad you asked, because this is the kind of thing I need to write down so that I can remember what to do the next time I’m spiraling😉.
How to stand still while moving
take a cool-ish bath with a lot of lavender-scented epsom salts and stay in there as long as possible;
eat the same thing for breakfast every day;
claim “your chair” or spot in the living room and sit there whenever you need a break;
do everything a bit more slowly than you need to;
spend a morning with your plants, especially if you think you have more pressing concerns; the plants will set you right.
Last year, you may remember that even though I was drawing a ton, I didn’t feel like I had made much art. That feeling has passed. Not just with respect to the art I’m making right now, but as I look back on what I drew in my sketchbook last summer, I can see so much more clearly all of the effort and labor that was underway. It just goes to show you that it’s probably best to wait a minute (or a lifetime) before you come to some sort of conclusion about yourself (lolol).
Avoiding “Performance Creep”
Sometimes I avoid writing here because I feel like I have too many things I want to include (but haven’t quite finished yet) or because the updates are too numerous or too high-context to explain in the time I have allotted for writing here. The result is that I have an ever-expanding cache of draft essays and letters that grow stale while I debate their relevance and merit with myself. Eek/ yikes/ ugh. I know I’m not alone in feeling this way, of course, but I didn’t know there was a name for this! Yesterday while listening to the latest episode of the Happier podcast, I learned that this is called “performance creep.” Hosts Gretchen Rubin and Liz Craft discussed that similar to home improvement projects that expand beyond their intended container, practices or habits can start to mutate in ways that ultimately lead to avoidance. One of the examples they gave was how a simple game night among friends can get out of control when hosts feel pressure to make things fancier and fancier. There comes a the point where no one feels like they can host anymore because they feel like they can’t measure up to the new expectation, so the group falls apart. The remedy the Happier gals suggested was recommitting to the original purpose of the project and just doing the thing.
This feels related to the hedonic treadmill— a phenomenon describing how each time a person “upgrades” their life by receiving a raise or achieving a milestone, the feeling of accomplishment is short-lived because expectations rise with the salary, etc. In other words, when we start to earn more money, we expect our standard of living to rise, too, which causes people to spend more. To bring this back to my own newsletter avoidance, I’ve noticed that when I share something that I consider more complete or of higher quality, it sets a new expectation for the quality of all work. I want everything to meet this higher standard. The attention to craft and improvement are not the problem; the deviation from purpose is what creates the logjam. Perfection is getting in the way of connection. So here I am, sharing an update!
Wildcat Yoga Club
I’ve been teaching yoga since 2006 and recording my classes since 2008. For the first handful of years, I shared those classes on my podcast, but in 20….15 or 16 I created a membership site called the Wildcat Yoga Club that housed archived classes and in which I shared live and pre-recorded classes of all sorts: movement, meditation, pranayama, dharma, embodied voice, active listening. Once grad school really got cooking and I started teaching college writing in 2022, I had to let go of that project. I did a REALLY STUPID thing when I closed the site, though: I did not back up my files!
A year ago, I felt like I was starting to have the capacity to re-open the Wildcat Yoga Club, but rebuilding it from scratch felt really overwhelming. Well, I’m here to tell you that I finally feel like I am up to this task and have begun re-assembling archived classes and adding new ones! For now, folks who have paid subscriptions to this substack can just email me to be added to that site’s membership roster, but it should be totally up and running in the next few months. I’m really excited about this and look forward to practicing with all of you again.
Meditation and Writing Mini-Immersion
For the period of Mercury’s retrograde in Cancer (that’s June 29-July 23), I’m sharing a guided meditation and writing practice every single day. It’s been a few years since I last hosted one of these meditation and writing immersions, and I AM SO HAPPY TO BE BACK.
For my writing life, it has been so fruitful in unexpected ways. What I mean is that most days, I think I’m going to write about one thing, but the prompt and the act of moving my hand across the page pulls something out of me I could never have imagined.
Want to sit and write along with us? I send out a new practice every morning around 5:30am PDT. You don’t need to start from the beginning. Just begin where you are. Here’s the full archive of these practices if you want to do a deep dive.
Our next mini-immersion will take place from October 31-November 21. We’ll be towards a more radical experience of compassion and writing the major arcana of the tarot deck. You don’t need to know anything or be anything to do these practices. All they require is that you show up.
Practice Video
In case you didn’t know this, I teach live yoga and meditation classes via ZOOM to paid subscribers of this newsletter. I usually hold these once a month, but I’m able to teach a bit more during the summer. The calendar of past and future classes is below.
Online Summer Yoga Classes for Paid Subscribers:
Thursday, July 9 at 8am PDT
Thursday, July 16 at 8am PDT
Thursday, July 23 at 8am PDT
Thursday, August 27 at 8am PDT
Thursday, September 3 at 8am PDT
Thursday, September 10 at 8am PDT
Online Meditation & Writing Immersion for Paid Subscribers: June 29-July23rd/ Daily guided meditation & writing prompts during Mercury retrograde in Cancer
I record these classes so folks who can’t join us live can still experience these practices. The recording of this week’s practice video is at the bottom of this post. Past classes can be accessed here for now and on the Wildcat Yoga Club website as I add them. 🐬
Aaaaand, that’s the update, folks!
What’s new with you?
love to all+++
kelly
Other Opportunities to Practice
I teach a weekly hatha yoga class at Yoga Refuge in Portland, Oregon, on Fridays at noon. I’d love to practice with you there in person.
I have a collection of practices over on Yoga Anytime; for 30 days free practice, use the code SUNROSE <3
