Thoughts From Annie

Dear Friends, We recently had a tea for cooperative members of the studio. At that tea I shared the story of how Circle Yoga came to be. The members enjoyed hearing the story so much that they asked me to share it with the wider community. Since March 17, 2014 was our 11 year anniversary,…

Dear Friends, My parents had very different ways of dealing with difficulties. My Dad, a second generation Armenian, born and raised in Harlem and later New Jersey, expressed his thoughts and emotions freely. When he was mad, he yelled and when he was sad, he wept. When we kids were upset, he recognized that and…

I grew up in an average Detroit suburb where no one knew how to ski, mostly because it wasn’t part of the social structure, but also because the entire state was flat. I remember the first time I put on a pair of skis at the age of 35, and how incredibly awkward I felt…

A few days ago I bought some holiday gifts at a street fair. I bought quite a few items, and the artist asked me how many people were on my holiday gift list. I thought about it for a few minutes and tried to calculate in my head, but soon realized that it was a…

My good friend and mindfulness teacher, Mitchell Ratner, likes to say that while modern human beings have been around for some 200,000 years and our great ape ancestors some 5 million years, we have only been using language for about 40,000 years. That means that there were many millennia in which human beings had relationships with each other without words…

Dear Friends, Over the last month, I have traveled quite a bit, visiting old friends and family, and have been on retreat. As a result of my mindfulness practice I have been able to be present quite a bit of the time, often putting aside my computer and my drive to “get things done.” When…

I was out hiking by myself on the Appalachian Trail this afternoon, and as I turned to head home I started up a hill. Right away the voice in my head said, “Ugh, uphill.” My mind sprinted from there to calculating all of the remaining uphills on my path. Before I knew it, I was thinking about the time I missed a hiking trip to the Grand Canyon, which was entirely downhill the first day, and entirely uphill the next… and wouldn’t a Grand Canyon hike be better if it started from inside the canyon?

I had the great fortune of spending a few days at Thich Nhat Hanh’s monastery in France this summer. Because the Buddhist nuns living there have always been very generous with me, and I know that every extra guest means more work for them, I wanted to do something to support them in return. On my first day, I asked if there was any small job that they might want me to work on during the three days I would be visiting. After several tries, the nun who manages the grounds said she had something for me.

Taking a break from writing about mindful eating, I found myself in the kitchen eating from a spoon filled with peanut butter and jelly. I continued to double dip into each jar back and forth, creating a kind of no-bread PB&J eaten standing up. It was several minutes before I noticed the irony of what I was doing.

…It can be an illuminating practice to look at other people with the awareness that they are responding to life as if they were the star in their own movie. Whenever events occur, other people reference them to themselves, even as we reference them to ourselves. If we want to practice understanding other people, we can start right there. It may be shocking to realize that we are not the star in their movie. They are…