dr. kristin shepherd

Earlier this week a friend called and
mentioned she’d convinced a group of coworkers to do an introductory yoga
series. She offered to attend the classes with them, only to discover
that, “there’s no other way to say this, the teacher is really
b*&^%y! I have to help them recover after each class!”

Another friend goes to a studio where
the teachers tell you where you can and cannot place your mat
according to your skill level. No kidding.

This morning I arrived early for a teaching gig and walked in on 80 women, mostly seniors, doing yoga. Sun Salutations adapted for seniors, using chairs. The entire room was laughing. I heard fart jokes. The overwhelming impression was one of relaxed happiness and no shortage of love.

It makes me realize how short life is and how important
culture is to me.

I admire the teachers who amaze us with technique, strength, and flexibility. No question, I’m inspired by that.

I appreciate charisma, organizational
skills, the occasional push, humor, and broad knowledge.

But I don’t go back if it doesn’t
feel warm. I want enough love and openness in the room that I can
feel good in there whether or not I feel great about myself, my body,
or my day. I want so much warmth in the room that it reminds me that I have a heart and that my heart is being taken care of. (Not asking for much!)

The warm fuzzy thing isn’t for everyone, though.

What do you need in the room?
Intelligence? Quiet? Edge? Progress? Community? I’d love to hear. What quality is most important to you in a class?

Thanks to yoga for being so varied that
we can all find our place. Thanks to the beautiful women doing Sun Salutations today.

Thanks to you for the conversation,

kristin

Dr.
Kristin Shepherd is a chiropractor, actor, and speaker (About All
Things Wonderful) in North Bay, Ontario.  Join her on the web,
on Facebook,
on Twitter,
and on iTunes.

We can talk for days about what the
central point of meditation is. It’s possible that it’s different
for each of us.

For me, there’s no question. It’s
a lifelong discovery process of looking more and more deeply into who I am, what is truth, and what remains when I let go of everything. It’s the digging of that well,
and the absolute, flat-out joy that results from the digging.

The rest are just happy side effects.

During a daily practice, we train our
focus. If we didn’t, I’d spend my 30-60  minutes
thinking of better ways to stop my dog from eating disgusting, rotten
food off the street, or wondering what I’m going to do with the
rest of my life, or being frustrated that I still can’t do a
headstand in the middle of the room. You know, really important
stuff.

Training my focus is like using my
camera.

My camera comes almost everywhere with me. It
just feels better than cursing myself for not bringing it, which is
what happens every time I leave it at home.

Why do I take it everywhere? Because
beautiful, surprising things show up every place I go.

Here’s the thing, though. I point the
camera to the left, and all I see is morning traffic. I point it to
the right and zoom in, and I see a gorgeous pairing of chairs, one
for a kid, one for an adult, which makes my eyes well up, thinking of
love and parenting and the wise words that come from kids’ mouths.

Untrained focus is like a camera that
just swings all over the place. No sense of purpose, no sense of direction, at the whim of whatever honks loudest in your life. Lousy pictures. Trained focus is a camera that looks
where you choose to look.

Beyond photography, trained focus means
that I can either see the 3,000 random realities in front of my face: dog woofing
cigarette butts for all I know, my head hurting a bit, my inadequate
headstand, loud traffic. Or I can decide to focus on the truths I find beautiful: dog is alive and well, I am extraordinarily healthy
overall, I can do headstands and handstands against a wall and I
learn more every day, and traffic means that people are going places,
the world is humming, all is well.

Focus means that I fill my head and my
energy with the thoughts that do me good.

Again, this is a side effect of
meditation for me, but with side effects this good, isn’t it worth
a few minutes of your morning?

Thanks to yoga for training more than
our bodies.

Thanks to you for the conversation,

kristin

Dr.
Kristin Shepherd is a chiropractor, actor, and speaker (About All
Things Wonderful) in North Bay, Ontario.  Join her on the web,
on Facebook,
on Twitter,
and on iTunes.  

We talked last time about meditation
being like digging a well, except that the digging is more like
successive letting go, and with each letting go, we sink a little
deeper until we reach the wholeness of who we are, that joy place,
that place where there are no problems, there are no questions to
answer. If you’ve been there, you know what I mean. It’s who we
are.

It is not, however, where most of us
spend our days. Instead, we spend some part of the day with deadlines (what a horrifying word!),
timelines, family-lines, walk-the-dog-lines, not to mention all the
bogus insecurities and the bogus insecurity camouflages (clothes,
hair, makeup, cars, houses, titles …) that are also not who we are. 

So the benefit of spending morning time
with the greater part of me, the most whole and most holy place, is this:

I know myself to be huge and loving and
safe no matter what, so open and huge that the world and its
vicissitudes float right through me. When I open my eyes after a dose
of this, the life stuff that used to affect me–the money worries,
the body worries, the driving part of achievement, the heaps of time I spend
in the future and past–all of that is stripped naked and looks a bit
more ridiculous than it did before I closed my eyes. 

This change of perspective from surface to roots, to core truth, makes me less reactive, more patient, braver, and more useful in the world.

That’s gold for me.

Is this your experience? Does it sound
worth sitting for a few minutes each morning? (My not-so-secret goal
is to talk about how delicious this is until you fall in love with it
too.)

Thanks to yoga for not taking my surface definition of reality too seriously.

Thanks to you for the conversation,

kristin

Dr.
Kristin Shepherd is a chiropractor, actor, and speaker (About All
Things Wonderful) in North Bay, Ontario.  Join her on the web,
on Facebook,
on Twitter,
and on iTunes.

It’s like digging a well every
morning. I breathe my way down through layers of restlessness, distracted focus, speedy thinking and 50 other kinds of discomfort.
Sometimes this takes two minutes. Sometimes the entire practice is
the digging, although the digging is more like continued letting go.

On the other end of this letting go is a huge
opening which I sort of fall into (this may be different for each of
us) as though I have traveled through a wormhole to some other place.

The great joke is that by the time I
arrive there, I understand–no, I know–that I am actually
here, that I have arrived back home. That, in fact, I never left, but was a bit distracted by my mind waving its frantic hands in front
of my eyes.

The beauty of this is that every
morning, or most mornings, I spend time in the hugeness of what I really am, or Love, Truth, Heaven, Joy, Grace, Silence, Infinite, Whole. Impossible to
put in words, but I keep trying for fear that leaving a blank page
for you won’t do the trick. Perhaps it’s enough to say that these
words point to what we are underneath without wrapping it up too tightly.

Again this sounds woo-woo, but it
isn’t. It is the palpable reality of meditation.

And what if this isn’t your
experience? If you haven’t experienced the huge bliss place?

Then you’re digging. Have a little
faith, just for the short while it takes to meet your resistance on
the way home. Meeting our resistance and being willing to sit with it
rather than run from it is the trip of self-discovery, and we might as well enjoy the
trip.

Has this been your experience? Are you
digging?

Thanks to yoga for bringing us home
over and over and over. Thanks to you for the conversation,

kristin

Dr.
Kristin Shepherd is a chiropractor, actor, and speaker (About All
Things Wonderful) in North Bay, Ontario.  Join her on the web,
on Facebook,
on Twitter,
and on iTunes.

A friend called this morning, unable to tear her thoughts away from an all-consuming problem in her life. She wanted help.

Here’s a reason to meditate.

Unable to tear her thoughts away? That’s a bit like me going to yoga class and being unable to tear myself out of Downward Dog.

This sounds ridiculous, but it isn’t. I love Downward Dog. I find it easier than almost anything that comes before or after during a class. It is a familiar place for me. I know it isn’t best practice for me to stay in Downward Dog for the entire day, but I’d do it for an entire class if I had my druthers.

Similarly, my friend knows that staying with lousy thoughts is an easy, seductive rut but isn’t good for her. She comes back to the painful story over and over like an obsessive-compulsive wound-picker who would love nothing better than to be free of herself.

Somehow, we expect to be able to control our bodies – time to brush my teeth (good hands!), time to open the door (good wrist action!), time to move out of Downward Dog (eyes ahead and jump forward) – but not our thoughts. “I can’t help thinking about this,” we say.

But we can. In fact, the moment I notice myself thinking an unwanted thought, I can make a choice to move my thoughts somewhere else, somewhere more loving, more joyous. If my thoughts return to lousy, shmucky, destructive places, I make the choice again. I make that choice 570 times a day if I need to.

This is a practice, just like our yoga on the mat is a practice. Some days I’ll be a genius with it, some days I won’t. Such is humanhood. But the practice works.

Meditation is this practice. It is the practice of letting go of my sticky attachment to thoughts.

Something to contemplate next time I am drawn to fear or worry, next time I judge myself, or you, or my life.

And just another reason to adore meditation.

Thanks to yoga and to meditation’s central place in yoga. I’m so grateful for both.

I’m also grateful to you for being here. Thank you for the conversation,

kristin

Dr. Kristin Shepherd is a chiropractor, actor, and speaker (About All Things Wonderful) in North Bay, Ontario.  Join her on the web, on Facebook, on Twitter, and on iTunes.