Dreaming Paris

(Facebook readers, click the link at the end of this note to see pics and video) I like doing yoga. I like that you do the moves in a flowing, stretching, almost dancelike way. I like that the classes that I go to use relaxing, meditative music. And I love coming to the end with Savasana, the Corpse Pose, where you just lie there in tune with your body, relaxing. Yoga has become a replacement for what I would sometimes get at church, but the benefit of yoga is that you're never made to feel guilty, or like you're not measuring up to God's standards. Yoga is about listening to yourself, to the rhythm of your body, and paying attention to the sensations. It quiets your mind so that you can go deeper within to a place of calm and peace. When I'm doing yoga regularly, I can cope with my life better. It also helps to put the right nutrients in my body, and though I haven't lost any weight since my last post about loving myself, I feel so much better in my mind because I've replaced a lot of bad foods with good ones. I've discovered that cherries are the perfect food for me when I begin to crave sweet foods. And I bought a bag of clementines the other day. Those are so delicious! As I peeled the first one over the sink, I realized that the smell of tangerines is Christmas to me, which is probably why I love them so much. I love the taste, of course, but when I smell them, all the things associated with Christmas flood my mind. That's also why I love chocolate covered marzipan. It's a Christmas treat, so to get it in the middle of the year gives me a feeling of my favorite time of the year. Anyway, eating cherries and tangerines makes it easier to stay away from the sweet stuff, though I have an allowed limit of 3 Hershey's miniatures a day if I feel I need them. The last 3 days I definitely have. The time of the month approaches soon. Yoga, though, isn't so easy because it requires some discipline. There's no discipline involved in going to the refrigerator and grabbing some fruit instead of going to my stash and grabbing some candy. In fact, I keep it hidden so that my daughter isn't tempted, and I can't just go to it any time I want because she could discover the hiding place, so that helps to keep it from me as well. But in order to do yoga at home, I have to push the coffee table out of the way, make sure the floor is swept and mopped, pull out my mat and block, and then set up my computer so that I can either watch a yoga DVD or put on my special music and do my own sequence of moves. It's so easy to let other things get in the way of doing yoga at home. But I'm going to show you how easy it is for me to go to yoga class, as well as it's being a delightful place to go. It's called The Lotus Pond, and you won't see the inside or the back on my video, so here are some photos from their website. Through the windows inside you look out onto the pond, which isn't in their photos, and I don't know why because that's a big draw of the place. The room you see is their great room. They also have a smaller one, the lobby, the office (where I have a feeling a kitchen is also located), and a loft. It was originally someone's home. This is from the front looking over to the right side of the building. If you go on around you'll see their organic garden and the pond, and then you can look back to see the back of the house: The dark part of the house on the right is the great room, which has windows all the way around. This view looks out onto the garden (which is about where the person taking the picture must have stood), and the end view at the right looks over the pond. I always try to position myself so that I can view a statue of buddha out on the pond as my center point of vision for when I need to focus. Those are the windows that look over the pond, and to the right are the windows and a porch that you can see in the previous picture. And now to show you how easy it is to get there.