What Cambridge taught me about living fully - and why I lost it the moment I got home

I went to Cambridge alone for five days and came home a slightly different person. Then real life happened and I lost it almost immediately. This episode is about that — the pausing, the clarity, the losing it and how to find small pockets of it again inside the fullness of your actual life. I speak alot about motherhood in this episode, and it's for any woman who wants to feel more at peace, aligned and weave yoga practice into your days. 

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Transcript

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A little about the trip

SPEAKER_00 1:44

I went to Cambridge for five days, y'all. And I, if you don't know this about me, I'm a mom of three. I have kids age three to eleven. So my some of my kids are still on the really young side. And to be honest, going to Cambridge was very foreign for me and quite brave, and I don't mind bragging about that a little bit. Because I had just never left my kids for five days before, and I had never gone that far away. And moving towards the trip, because I booked it several months in advance, because Judith Hansen Lassiter, who is a world-renowned yoga teacher, she is not just an incredible yoga teacher and author and physical therapist, but she is just a really tremendous human. And she's 79 years old. And I knew and have known for many, many years that one of the things I wanted to do was go and be in person with her before she completely retired. And so I booked this trip months in advance. And it was really edgy for my family for me to go and do this. But I knew intuitively that this is where I needed to be. And so just even leading up to the trip, I'm like meticulously planning out my schedule because I knew I had like very limited time just to do whatever I wanted to do and to go and explore. Um, and also that I had this like bulky days of training that I needed to prepare for. And so I mapped out what I was gonna eat, where I was gonna go, what I was gonna do in order to help myself feel comfortable taking that adventure that I so very badly wanted to go on. And then I get there, and oh my gosh, if you've never been to Cambridge, I love it there. It is so historic. The architecture is beautiful. I spent seemingly endless amounts of time just walking all over the place early in the morning before training. I had a few hours, several hours really, and then I had several hours each evening after training, and I would just walk and check out the cute houses and the teeny little gardens with their plants spilling out over the walkway and the kids playing in these community parks and all the little puppies. I made warm bowls of oatmeal every morning that I was there in this shared kitchen. I had this tiny room in this big historic house where a lot of other people were staying too that I did not know. And I joke, I'm 40, and so the accommodations felt like something set up for a college kid because it was like a twin bed and like very simple furnishings that didn't match, and I did have a shower to myself, which was good. But this whole experience of stepping away from my day-to-day life with my family, being in a completely new space. I'd been to Boston a couple of times and have always loved Boston, but I'd never been to Cambridge. Having to learn everything about what it meant to be there, how to walk to the yoga studio, how to walk to the yoga studio carrying four blankets, a yoga mat, eye pillow, strap, notepad, you know, pin, snacks, water. Like I looked crazy, probably carrying all this stuff 11 minutes to and from the yoga studio every day. But if you don't know about Judith Hansen Lassiter, she is one of the many people who very much popularized restorative yoga. She's probably the most famous of the people who popularized it. And you know how I feel about restorative yoga. There's no such thing as too many props. So I bought brought all the props with me. But what I found when I was in Cambridge, and I had days and days and days to myself, was a completely different version of me. Like the daily routines that I wanted to keep, the way that I

What I learned about myself

SPEAKER_00 6:06

wanted to weave my yoga practice into my day is very different than the version of who I am at home when I'm with my husband and my kids and my puppy and my cats and all the things. It was interesting. I told a couple of dear friends of mine that I feel like I was getting to know what 40-year-old me is like outside of all these roles that I play as mom and wife and business owner and pet, you know, caretaker and householder and all the things that we do. I had this space to just intuitively honor what I felt led to do. I did not multitask hardly at all. So much of my reality is this is constant multitasking. If I'm cooking, the kids are constantly, I've got three, right? So they're like constantly coming up and sharing something or wanting to like show me their cool Lego creation or their beautiful artwork, or my dog's like getting into my kids' toys, or somebody's fighting, or somebody needs their booty wiped. Like there's just constant interruption. And I run this business for you all, which is like I love it. I love it so much. And also it means like I'll be out walking my dog and I'll get an email from one of you wanting something, needing something, or you know, just all the different ways that I'm constantly showing up in real, in my real life. And so I think that it was interesting to figure out who I was outside of these routines and outside of these roles. And what I found was that when I remove myself from my schedule and my family and the mental load that I carry, is that my body wanted to weave yoga practice into my day differently. So, for example, I bef like my natural, I think, inclination is to meditate before I even get out of bed in the morning. I found myself just sitting up in bed once my eyes were open and then meditating. And I found that to be incredibly delightful. I think it might be my favorite time to meditate is just first thing in the morning. I also found that the quality of presence that I'm able to have when I'm just by myself was different. Being able to just eat a meal without needing to get up five different times to take care of things, being able to take a walk without really having a strict schedule that I had to adhere to, or needing to manage the needs of my kids, like fatigue levels or interest or hunger or thirst. And to be able to just sit with the yogic teachings, with Judith's message, and to journal and and just be in it for hours at a time. This full presence that I felt there, I feel a little tender just talking about it. It was such a gift, and I found in some ways an immense amount of relief because sometimes it feels like I have to work really hard at that in my day-to-day life as a mom carrying the load that I carry. And it felt good to see that it was just there, ready, ready to come out, ready to flow, ready to take up space as soon as I had the space for it. And if you're listening to me say that, and you are a woman who lives alone, and you are a woman who has less responsibility than I do, but you identify with still struggling with your practice or your presence or practicing in a way that feels intuitive or regular, or making this space for introspection, then please don't use this up as an opportunity to judge yourself because I am talking about the motherhood experience. But the reality is that whether you're a mom or your kids are left the house, or you chose not to have kids, or you couldn't have kids, or you do have a partner, or you don't have a partner, or you do have a pet, or you don't have a pet, or you are working, or are you not working at like a professional career or not, like none of that matters because what actually matters here is that we all get into these routines in our in our home and in our lives. And when we're in it, it's very hard to see alternative ways to be. And when you go and travel, when you step outside of your normal day-to-day life for an extended period of time, you have an opportunity to explore yourself differently. And and that is what I want you to hear me say, not like, oh, I you know, I did better and you did worse, like blah blah blah. None of that's helpful. What I'm trying to get at is that stepping outside of that routine changed my intuition and my relationship with my practice and the quality of presence that I had. And I think that's possible for you too. And another thing that came up was just the level of multitasking that was not asked of me. Oh my goodness. I told a friend of mine, like, oh my gosh, I'm actually really simple and kind of boring if I'm by myself. Because it it just feels like the reality is there is never a shortage of things to do. And being at this house in Cambridge, like I didn't need to, I didn't wash laundry the whole time I was there. I didn't need to clean like the bathtub. You know, I was just able to be there. I had so much like unrealistic free time that I wouldn't normally have because I was away. And so this idea that we multitask constantly. So one of the things that I've observed, and I feel a little just like I don't want to tell you this, but I'll tell you this. One of the things that I noticed is that I had started to use distraction as a coping strategy in my day-to-day life at home with my family. So let me give you an example of this. If I was going to take a walk with my dog, instead of just being out in nature and like feasting my senses on the trees and the wind, I was playing a podcast or playing some news. And I was doing that same thing if I was, if I'm like going to get my preschooler from preschool, instead of just driving quietly and being with my thoughts, I would play again some kind of audio feedback. Or if I was getting in the bath at night, I would take a book with me rather than a journal or nothing at all. And I was just kind of like, I had gotten into this groove of really filling time where I would have quiet space just to be present with something. And I also noticed that I had really embraced multitasking on a whole level that I did not even know. So I was hardly ever just doing one thing at a time. If I was folding laundry, I was fielding boatloads of questions with the kids. If I was taking the kids and the dog on a walk, I was allowing the kids just to talk to me endlessly the entire walk while I was walking the dog. And interestingly, Judith talked about multitasking in the workshop. And she talked about how, like, this is robbing us of the ability to be present and to have awareness, and how she was encouraging us to have much less of this in our lives, to multitask a lot less. And I really think she's on to something, and this is something that I definitely see in myself and who I was being and who I'm shifting around now that I'm back. But I want to make a really honest share here about what happened when I came home from Cambridge coming off the heels of eating delicious like vegetarian

How it all evaporated when I got home

SPEAKER_00 14:46

lunches with like kale and rice and ginger sauce and like oh my gosh, tofu, like all these delicious meals every day, and coming back into my home space. And so obviously, I'm so happy to see my family and my husband and to like just be in the comfort of home. It felt delightful to be back in our neighborhood. And also, I will will admit, there was a little bit of just like um angst about coming home. I I think on some levels I felt sad that that time was over. But in relationship to my yoga practice, I immediately felt disconnected from it in a way. Like in terms of like formal yoga practice. Obviously, there's formal, there's informal yoga practice, and I found that I was just struggling. I was struggling to meditate. My yoga asana was for much shorter periods of time. I, my pranayama and my yogic philosophical study, like all the things that felt so accessible to me when I was in Cambridge and intuitive when I had that time and space, it just, it's like it evaporated when I got home. And that Cambridge version of me was gone. And it took me, I've been back a week and two days as of the recording of this podcast. And it's taken me some time just to figure that out and to kind of sit with that. And I will admit that I didn't judge myself, which I think is really important. If you're the kind of woman who tends to just slip back in and judge yourself, then I want to wrap you in an extra layer of compassion because judgment and guilt or shame can really get in the way of you just being able to like honestly sit with yourself and embrace where you are. It's like this whole extra layer of trash that you have to sort through before you can actually get to the core of what's going on. But the reality is, like, I came home, y'all, and then so much of what I had access to was really hard for me to have in this environment because the context had changed completely. I suddenly had the multidimensional layering of my kids' needs all of the time. I had the triage of who needs this emotional need met first versus that one, or all the stuff that it comes with being a wife, the kind of wife that I want to be to my husband, where I'm available to listen to what he wants to share without interrupting him, all the things that I need to do for my home and my business, it all just arrived the moment I walked in the door, and my nervous system was different, but also the struggle was real, and just everything came back. And I think that what happened in Cambridge and who I was able to be in Cambridge was largely about all the space that I had and the the like um less load that I was carrying. And that's not real based on my day-to-day life, like that's not my lived experience, and also I want to replicate what I experienced in Cambridge in this real version of my life, and the question of how I do that or how you do that, if you're a woman who who wants to weave more intuition and peace and yoga practice and the nourishment that comes from it, that's what this is about. It's about how do we do that? How do we make the space in our regular lives? How do we weave our yoga practice into our day-to-day routines? How do we ante up our connection with our innermost self in a way that changes everything about how we experience our lives for the better? And so I want to talk about the difference

Bringing the conscious into the unconscious & the daily rituals that help you thrive

SPEAKER_00 19:08

between being unconsciously in a routine and being consciously in a routine. Because I feel like part of what I got from going on this trip was the consciousness around the routines that I had come through. And I was, if you remember me talking about how I was filling empty space with some kind of input, like through a book or a podcast or news or something like that, or a phone call or a text, rather than just being in the moment or even strategizing things to make for you all here. And so being unconsciously in that routine is different than being consciously in that routine, where you actually see yourself doing that thing. You're aware of what's happening, you're noticing yourself without judgment or the need to hyperanalyze. You're just, you're seeing it. You're like, okay, I'm doing that thing and I'm conscious that I'm doing that thing. And so this mindset shift of being unconscious in the routines to conscious of your routines allows you to shift from routines to rituals. Because routines a lot of times are the things that we're just used to doing on autopilot every single day. It's the stuff you need to do, want to do. My dad was an entrepreneur as well, and he always told me like part of being an entrepreneur is being able to pick up a ball and move it forward every single day. And I think we're all doing that in our lives. It's like we're moving the ball forward every single day. Those are our routines. And then ritual is yoga. Like ritual is what we do with intention that brings us back to ourselves, that brings us back to a heightened level of connection, that brings us back to our highest self and spirit and the divine. Ritual can be anything that brings us back into presence. And what is cool is that ritual and routine can actually merge. So those day-to-day things that you're needing to do can become conscious rituals that you do if you shift the kind of presence and purpose and intentionality that you have behind it. And I think that this is something that I feel like so many of us are missing a conversation around. Because it kind of feels like to me, in the conversation that I'm having with women, and even in the way that I like a past version of me has thought, is that your yoga practice is something separate from your day-to-day life and lived experience. That somehow mothering your kids in a difficult moment is not yoga, but getting on a rubber mat and doing downward-facing dog is yoga. Or this idea that sitting for meditation is yoga, but that washing the dishes and being fully present while you do it is not yoga. Do you guys see what I mean here? Like we have somehow fragmented or compartmentalized is a better word, your yoga practice from your lived experience of your night life. And that can change. And so, how it can change is looking at your daily rituals as also your yoga practice because you can infuse the same ideas into it. And it like we see this in the yoga tradition. This is not me extracting from the traditions and then being like, apply it to washing your kid in the bathtub. Like, I'm not trying to extract from this living wisdom tradition that has changed my life for the better and so many of yours. I'm trying to honor it. And I'm also trying to remind you of the full spectrum of what yoga actually just fucking is. Like if we look at bhakti yoga, bhakti yoga is like service, seva, it's how we show up. It's can we show up and wash the dishes from a selfless place where we're really present and we're offering up this beautiful clean dish as being in service to the divine or the greater good or the infinite consciousness or the humans in the home or whatever it is. Like we bring the sacred into the everyday. And bhakti yoga is a wonderful example of that because it allows us to see how are we showing up? Can we show up in this more ritualistic and present way? Can we bring our yoga into our lived experiences? I'm thinking. Of kids, not kids, like young adults in ashrams scrubbing floors, and how in ashrams, like people rotate through the chores and the tidying up that needs to come with running the ashram as part of the service. Like, not because they want to be like their egos involved, it's just frankly like part of the culture. And so I want to talk a little bit about those like informal ways that we can weave these yoga rituals into our day. And I also want to talk about more formal ways that we can weave it into our day. So, informally, I've given you lots of things to work with already, like washing the dishes, how how we like move through a walk. Are you actually present on that walk? Can you feel your awareness in the moment fully? Is your brain dancing all over the place being monkey mind, or can you actually feel that your mind is focused and here in the moment? A walk without headphones. Can you sit with a journaling practice and ask yourself one honest question? And formally, one of the things that I think so many of you need, and I definitely need, so I'm like dishing this back in myself too, is more restorative yoga. Judith Hansen Lasseter was talking about how she is a huge advocate for 20 minutes of shivasana a day. And if you don't know what shivasana is, I want you to think of a yoga class that you've attended online or in person, and how at the very end of the practice, there's this position where you just lay down on your back and you rest for ideally 10 to 12 minutes or longer. And Judith was talking about how we really need culturally at this time to be doing 20 minutes of shavasana a day. So 20 minutes of literal quiet, no one talking to you the whole time, just resting and being still, no music, just quiet, just being with yourself. And I believe that. I've been teaching restorative yoga, I don't even know, my entire career. So 17 years or longer. And I completely believe it. And I also think that this is why meditation is so important as well. This is why pranayama is so important. This is why all of those practices in yoga that invite us to be still and to be focused and to really bring our awareness inward. Pratyahara is the name of it. Pratyahara is about bringing your awareness, your sensory awareness in. It's oftentimes described as the withdrawal of the senses. So you're literally like closing your eyes. A lot of energy is lost through your eyes. So much energy is being consumed by your eyes. So it's like, can you close your eyes? Can you just sit and be still? Can you just draw inward? And my teacher, Harshita Wagner, talks about how pratyahara is not just about turning off the noise and the scene and the sensory input. It's also about being nourished from within. And I resonate with that so deeply. Like when we turn all of that off, what's left is your innermost self and your relationship to that, and you can be nourished by that. And it can also be like more active yoga asana, if that's your jam. Like I love active yoga asana, but can you move through it slower? I think one of the big yoga trends that's actually like kind of dying out right now is this like hot, fast-paced yoga. And we're seeing people return to slower, less exercise-based yoga. If you don't know yoga is not exercise, y'all, it's not exercise. Do you get exercise from some forms of yoga? Yes, but it's not exercise. It's a spiritual practice, it's a philosophical practice. All right, I want to talk specifically to the moms because, oh my gosh.

A note for the moms and caretakers

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Like, I'm still a mom when I'm in Cambridge, but I don't have my kids, I don't have my family. And I know, for example, I told my husband this last night that like I knew for a fact that I was not gonna get a phone call or not gonna have some emergent need come up that I needed to respond to when I was in Cambridge because I was like on the other end of the East Coast. So just like that nervous system holding that we have all the time as a mom, our capacity to be really in tune is a gift. And also, we need as moms, we need rituals, we need routines that work for motherhood, especially if you're a mom and your kids are like on the younger side, whether they're babies and they need you literally every second of the day, or they're toddlers, or they're elementary age, or they're just any age where they need you constantly and they constantly want to be with you. I want to talk to those mamas for a moment because I have always had a yoga practice in my motherhood, and I've talked so many women through it. And if you're a mom right now and you're like, but how? How do I make the time? How do I make the space? You do it in bite-sized pieces, honey. You like two to three minutes. Even if you're not a mom and you're like, oh my gosh, how do I do it? Yeah, I feel the same way. Because sometimes I so in my practice, like my one-to-one practice, I see women across a broad range. And so a lot of my women are like, you know, in the motherhood years, and many of them are in the transition where their kids have left the house. Maybe they've never had kids by choice or by whatever, you know, the circumstance. And many of them are, you know, completely like in menopause. And something that I find is that I feel like even some of my women that are in menopause, they're still holding on to the same nervous system that they had when their kids were young. So like still having a hard time choosing themselves, still understanding that they have time and space to do their yoga practice, still feeling like their nervous system needs to be ready to respond to their kids at any given moment, unconsciously. And so I want to talk about how these windows of time exist, and I want you to find them. And I think that we have to break up with the yoga class model that you've probably been sold and identify more with the what works for me, what lights me up, what makes me feel good. So I was with a one-to-one client the other day. She's also a mom of three. She's a virtual one, and we were having a conversation about her yoga practice, and she has had different routines over the course of us working together where she's practicing more often and less often, but largely it's been a struggle. And so I was telling her the other day, I was like, you know, part of our work together is to figure out what kind of yoga lights you up. Like, what is your favorite yoga practice that you can't wait to do? And so we tried out chanting together, and she, breaking, loved it. She was like giddy and happy and talking about how she couldn't wait to share this chant with her kids and how the meaning behind it and the story behind the chant and all of that just really, really felt like a guess for her. And so that's a yoga practice that she's gonna want to do. And granted, I want you as you as a yoga therapist in your world, I want you to be practicing a wide range of yoga medicine. But like start where you can, honey. And part of it is this shift from the unconscious routines to the conscious rituals, and that's not something that you need to go to Cambridge for, although I highly recommend that all the mamas get some time to themselves, for sure. But can we find ways to break out of the unconscious routines, to break out of the habit of being that we have in our day-to-day life and see new possibilities? And that literally, y'all, like let's make this so simple. That could literally be as simple as you brushing your teeth with more presence. I mean that. Like, just brush your teeth and go slow and notice brushing your teeth. And if you're like, ew, I don't want to be super present when I'm brushing my teeth. That's fine. Some people have like an oral thing. But can you drink a cup of tea and let it be almost like a tea ceremony to make the tea and to drink the tea and to savor the tea? Can anything in your life become a sacred ritual? Can it be small? Can it be doable? Because I promise you, part of how you get that peace and that presence and that lived in, baked in down into your bones feel of yoga is by bringing more consciousness to this stuff. And I have been living it myself because part of how I've been bringing myself back to what I experienced in Cambridge is exactly what I'm sharing with you now. It's last night I had these like therapeutic foot exercises that a chiropractor gave me. And I was doing my foot exercises in the dark of my room because I couldn't like see before bed, and just really being present to the felt sense of that in my body, not analyzing it, just feeling the sensation and counting in my mind and doing the practice. For any woman that feels locked into routine that feels like you eat while you're distracting yourself with scrolling on your phone or watching TV, or any woman who hasn't sat quietly with yourself in a while,

Breaking free from routines and into thriving

SPEAKER_00 34:34

or who feels like emotions are constantly bombarding your brain, or who's pulled in a lot of different directions. I understand that you can't just run off to Cambridge. But I do know, I do know that you can shift in small moments because that's what really counts. One of the teachings that Judith shared in the workshop was that the real yoga starts when we walk out the door of the studio or the class. And she's right. Like it's so easy to go into a yoga practice, whether you're doing one of the videos with me online, or you're going to a studio or a gym, or you're doing like, I don't know, insight timer and you're sitting for meditation. It's so much easier to be in that yoga practice. But the real yoga practice happens in your everyday waking moments of your life. It's in the way that you listen to the people you love talk. It's in the way that you put on your shoes, it's in the way that you pray or don't pray. Like it's everything. It's these little moments. This trip, going to Cambridge, walking those historic streets, eating warm bowls of oatmeal, meditating before I even got out of the bed in the morning, the quiet, was so cool. And also, I want to do it again. But I'm really interested for you and for me, if I'm being really honest, and for any other woman that needs this message, how do we bring that into the day-to-day? And so, as you, as this episode comes to a close, I want to challenge you to bring a ritual into your day-to-day where you pause, you do less, less multitasking, you intuitively let yourself come into the present moment. You're just really immersing yourself in the here and now. And then you let that be your yoga practice. And maybe if like if these little bite-sized practices feel good, like whether it be whatever you're doing in your day-to-day routine, just that thing that you can like, oh my gosh, I'm gonna do this differently. I'm gonna show up with full presence. I am not gonna have a conversation right now while I'm doing this. I'm just gonna be in the moment with this. Let that be something. And then maybe also do a Shabasana today. Just lay down. It doesn't have to be 20 minutes, it could be three minutes. I want you to do what you can that works for you in the life that you have, in the day that you're in, that your intuition calls you towards. And if you're like, but my intuition doesn't call me towards that, then get more structured. I'm giving you the structure. Do it and also trust your intuition while you're doing it. All right, if this episode resonated with you, let me know. Let me know how this brought something up for you, like what you see in yourself, any insight that you gained. And I look forward to seeing you in another episode soon.