I promised to blog on the weekly themes of the forty-day yoga challenge I���ve undertaken at YogaOne, sharing the realizations that are sure to come anytime we commit to being more present in our lives in concrete ways. I���ve been busy meditating and practicing yoga and am a wee bit behind on blogging, so here���s a triple post for you on the past three weeks I���ve spent focusing on equanimity, restoration and centering.

Equanimity
mental or emotional stability, especially under tension or strain; calmness; equilibrium

Notice that equanimity is not about creating an environment free of stress, it���s about us learning to maintain our stability even when���especially when���we are under pressure. It���s not about creating a facade of calm, but of returning to our ever-present core of calmness. Sounds so lovely, but these forty days are not about learning to say they lovely words, they are about cultivating practices that take these words off the page and into our lives���hopefully beyond the forty-day program. Here are two of the ways I experienced equanimity during this week:

Meditation... I have a bench in my bathroom where I often meditate. It is against the back wall of our house which vibrates almost incessantly from the roar of traffic on I-10. You see, our urban neighborhood is paradoxical in that feels like the country but is just yards away from the widest freeway in the world (not exaggerating; truth). This was the perfect setting for me to practice feeling calm and still inside while my body was soaking in tremors from the outside world.

Chanting... One of my own goals for 2016 was to learn to chant in Sanskrit. I can do it when a teacher is doing a call and response, but I���ve never taken the time to memorize them, so that I can invoke those sacred vibrations as part of my own practice. After a few misses, I found a version of my favorite chant (Om Nama Shivaya) that resonated with me. For the curious, it translates as ���I honor the divinity within myself.��� Another common translation is, ���May the greatest that can be in this world be created within myself, within others, and within the world.��� I downloaded it and listen to it on a never-ending loop when I���m navigating Houston traffic. Not only can I now sing it without the audio, I have a new go-to tool for cultivating equanimity even in the most hostile of environments.

Restoration
a return of something to a former, original, normal, or unimpaired condition

Sometimes we must subtract before we add. If you���ve ever renovated an old house, you know this is true. You start updating, but then you find things that were hidden from plain view and are in desperate need of repair or even removal.

When we undertake restoration in our own lives, we discover who we really are and what we can do without. Sometimes we are surprised by how we can function without those props that we thought were absolutely necessary.

Lent, my other forty-day commitment, overlapped with my yoga program and was a key part of this restoration lesson for me. This year I gave up playing games on my phone. I can get rather obsessive about them, and I know they suck way more of my time than I���m comfortable with. Without them in my life, I really do feel like I underwent a restoration. All told, I gained hours and hours of time each week. And I have been able to fill that time intentionally rather than mindlessly since I can���t just pick up my phone and zone out. Because there is merit in downtime (especially the non-screen variety), I picked up a Celtic coloring book, and when I get the gaming itch, I grab my colored pencils and lose myself in coloring intricate knots and crosses. The picture at the top of this post is one of my masterpieces!

Continuing this exploration of doing without, during a group meditation following a yoga class, I realized I���d inadvertently given up one of my sacred cows���my mandatory two hours a day at write at Starbucks. Generally, setting aside that time has been life-giving to me and my work, but when I begin to think I have not had a successful day if I cho0se other pursuits on a given day, I have crossed a line into compulsivity. Believe it or not, I have gone several days without setting foot in my coffice, and I���ve survived. Even thrived, because I am listening to what truly serves me that day rather than obeying a self-imposed mandate .

Centering
to collect to or around a center; focus

The focus on equanimity and restoration lead seamlessly into this past week���s theme of centering.

We did one complete class with a block between our legs to help us direct our energy to our physical center line. After all that work on staying calm in the face of outside agitation, it was amazing how fast we all got flustered by those blocks! The work was to focus on our breath rather than wishing we could ditch those blocks. It gave us a tangible experience to lean on when we left the studio and encountered the natural turbulence of life.

Another bit of imagery I uncovered this week was during an impromptu meditation session three of us fell into following a yoga class. With no teacher guiding us, we sat in silence until one of us���a Jamaican woman with a voice so soothing it transports me to my own little internal island reverie every time she speaks���began describing a field of lavender. We each chimed in with our own images and then sat in silence once more. Although no one had mentioned water as part of our collective meditation imagery, I began to sense my lavender field was on a bluff above the ocean. It occurred to me, as I ���heard��� the surf pounding the shore over and over, that I can find my own calm field anytime. I can mentally perch on a bluff above the powerful tides pulling me this way and that in my own life. I can appreciate the view, but I do not have to be at the whim of it���s tidal fluctuations.