December | 2012 | 4 0 2

Day 12: Good Advice

I’ve been freelancing for a little less than two weeks and I’ve already learned some very good lessons.

If you freelance or work from home, here is a list of suggestions for you:

1. Don’t wait until you think you might be leaving your office/apartment/dwelling to brush your teeth. The reality is that you might not leave at all, so you’ll end up brushing your teeth twice at 11 p.m. just to meet your daily quota. You most likely don’t have dental insurance, so this is an important point.

2. Waking up and heading straight to the computer is a bad idea. Wake up and take a moment. Grab a glass of water. Change into your yoga pants. Brush your teeth.

3. Eat something. Anything. Four cups of tea into the day, you might not feel hungry, but your delirious and semi-angry emails to people you don’t know will say otherwise.

4. Take advantage of the flexible schedule. Now that you can work at night instead of in the morning, don’t blow off the morning dance/yoga/insert-your-own-passion-here class you always used to miss. Get your butt out of bed, brush your teeth and go!

5. Don’t ever turn down a coffee or beer date. If someone wants to hang out with you, immediately say, “Yes. WHEN?” Your daily interaction with Brian Boitano will not be enough to satisfy your very basic need to be around others.

6. Don’t depend on your mail carrier to hang out and talk to you.

7. Before you spend 30 minutes blowing up your fit ball so you can work and develop killer alignment at the same time, make sure it’s the right height for your desk. If not, you will get really excited only to sit down and find your keyboard at eye-level.

8. Make yourself some reasonable short-term goals and then chill out. Not sure what you’ll be doing a month from now? It’s okay. Right now, you’re probably just hungry.

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December 5, 2012

Day 11: Head to Toe

Last week, I started a series of posts about “people you should know.” Technically, it started with one person, but no one called me out on the fact that there is no such thing as a series of one. Now that there are two people, it’s official! (Related: There is no such thing as a “first annual” event. Don’t even try it. I won’t go.)

Matthew Sanford

Sanford is a yoga instructor. He teaches all types of students from all walks of life, all over the country. He is often quoted as saying, “Your body is the best home your mind will ever have, and it’s the only one you get.”

Sanford’s home/body is that of a paraplegic. He became paralyzed from the chest down during a car accident at age 13. In “Waking: A Memoir of Trauma and Transcendence,” (a phenomenal book) Sanford describes his spinal cord injury as fundamentally a mind-body injury—one that is experienced internally as a separation between self and body. His journey to reconnect to his paralyzed body, rather than overcome his injury, brought him to yoga at age 25.

If all you know about yoga is that it can be a little mushy (love all beings, live in the present, breathe, etc.), think about this: yoga is hard. It’s strenuous and frustrating. Focusing on pressing through the heel, engaging the inner thighs, breathing smoothly, not thinking about grocery shopping, not thinking about not thinking about grocery shopping, etc. is hard enough with all limbs intact. What does a person do when he’s asked to press though a heel he can’t even feel?

Through years of continued practice and a few harrowing setbacks (he once broke his femur while trying an advanced yoga posture), Sanford learned how to live in his body and engage his mind in the experience. As he healed, he began teaching adapted yoga classes to students with a wide range of abilities and impairments. In “Waking,” Sanford writes, “I teach them the subtleties of sensing energetic sensation, about moving inward and connecting through their bodies on a level that includes the silence, and it works! They experience gains in strength, balance and flexibility. They too gain a measure of calm and a feeling of wholeness. The practical benefits of energetic realization are not just flukes of my particular experience.”

In 2001, Sanford founded Mind Body Solutions, a nonprofit dedicated to “transforming trauma, loss and disability into hope and potential by awakening the connection between mind and body.” Currently, he teaches a form of yoga developed by B.K.S. Iyengar, who said, “When one is free from physical disabilities and mental distractions, the gates of the soul open.”

For more from Sanford in his own words, check out The Body’s Grace, Krista Tippett’s On Being interview with him from May 2012.

December 3, 2012

Day 9: We Are(n’t) Young

A friend and I went to a concert last night night (on a weekday night… wild!). The band was fantastic, the audience was happy and fun, and the bartender was equal parts grouchy and endearing.

Blog-as-diary in three… two…

We were the oldest people there.

But we blended in well. Skinny jeans, messy buns, strategically placed “Oh, this old thing?” scarves. And it didn’t bother me that we were respectively old; it just occurred to me.

I don’t actually feel any different than I did ten years ago. Sure, a few things have changed. Now, I spend an extra minute poking and prodding at my messy bun until most of my grey hair is covered. And if I felt stressed out in 2002, I’d snowball myself into tears. In 2012, I just get sort of crabby and the left side of my face goes numb. A sign of maturity, I believe.

If I were my mother, I would currently be the proud parent of a four-year-old and a two-year old, and have another bundle of joy on the way. I’d live in a house with a yard and would carpool to preschool with my favorite next-door neighbor.

As not-my-mother, I have a fish and three complicated plants that miraculously come back to life every few weeks. I live in an apartment, grow herbs in the parking lot (also miraculous) and really only talk to my neighbors when my underwear escapes from my laundry pile and sits in the hallway for a couple of days (“Whose is that?! So weird.).

The not-doing-what-your-parents-did mentality is not new. I’m just surprised at how quickly and accidentally it manifested itself.

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