heart centre.

“Bring your hands to heart centre. Close your eyes. Inhale. And let it go”.

I love the juxtaposition of the simplicity of these instructions with the complexity of it’s meaning. There’s something so calming about the simple acts of bringing your hands to heart centre, closing your eyes, inhaling, and letting that breath go. Maybe that’s the point; maybe that’s the key to being able to let things go - centre your heart, centre your mind, focus your attention on what you want to let go, and then let it go.

In life, centreing your heart and your mind are difficult things to do. It’s hard to achieve centre. It’s hard to be achieve alignment. It’s hard to achieve balance. Which is likely why it is so difficult to let things go.

I know I struggle with letting things go. I often find myself forcing myself to let things go. But you can’t force it. If you force yourself to do something before you’re ready to do it, it will be harder to come back into your heart centre. It will be harder to come back into your realignment. It will be harder to achieve your balance. And if you have to force yourself to do something before you’re ready to do it, is that really being kind to yourself? Is that really being gentle to yourself? Is that really caring and loving yourself? I don’t know. I just know for me, that I have to stop trying to force myself to do things I’m not ready to do and be kinder to myself and let myself feel, flow, and figure things out on my own time.

Lately, I’ve been disappointed with myself for not progressing as much as I would have liked in this healing process. I’ve been trying to force myself to stop being sad, to get over it, and to let it go. I’ve been trying to force myself to put myself first, to love myself, and to act in a way where I know what I deserve. But the truth of the matter is, I can’t accomplish any of that by forcing it. And I can’t put myself first, love myself, and seek out what I deserve until I figure out what exactly that all means.

While I can’t accomplish any of my personal goals through force, I can work towards accomplishing them through introspection. And through various forms of self-care (i.e. yoga, meditation, therapy, writing) that help me interrogate what I mean when I say I want to put myself first and what I mean when I say that I deserve better. Moreover, these forms of self-care are going to help me figure out what “putting myself first” and what “deserving better” looks like. I need to do a lot of work on myself and I have a lot of figuring out to do, but if I truly want to be in a place where simple yoga instructions mirror the ease of its emotional meaning, then I need to continue to find my heart centre, my re-alignment, and my balance.

little pictures & big pictures.

I think my love for yoga has been infectious. Most of my best friends have fallen in love with the practice (maybe that's why they're my best friends - which, in the words of Mindy Kaling, "is a tier"). A couple of weeks ago, I was hanging out with my favourite Toronto Mommy Blogger and badass BFF #milf, Ferris, her sweet angel baby daughter, and her elementary school BFF talking about high school bullies, sketchy ex-boyfriends, and the struggles of adulting. It's actually kind of insane how a mom, a high-end fashion stylist/photographer, a law student, and an 8 month old baby girl could all sit in a room with bottles (red for us, the house white for baby H) bonding over our boujee tastes in Balenciaga, our bad taste in boys, and best of all, our common love for yoga. 

We talked about the different types of yoga classes we've been to and how it's the instructors that really make a huge difference in terms of the impact of how we all feel post-yoga class. Both Ferris and Gianna mentioned that some of their favourite instructors encourage their students to adopt a mantra at the beginning of class (something most of the amazing instructors at MYM also do). As I was one sad/depressed loser that night, Gianna offered me one of her mantras - "hurt people hurt people" and Ferris offered me hers - "attitude of gratitude". And I loved both of them. Absolutely loved them. I loved them both so much that they inspired tonight's blog entry because recent events have allowed me to arrive at a place where I'm finally able to internalize those words and that's a beautiful thing.

All first year law students are required to take foundational, mandatory courses as part of the LSUC curriculum. Property law is one of those courses. With the utmost candour, I can honestly say that I never expected to find so many potential LLM research questions in my first year property law class. My prof was very engaging, clearly passionate, and extremely challenging - we were required to read the textbook that he wrote, which, he obviously knew backward and forward, making our level of comprehension of the material seem elementary at best. It was confusing. It seemed to bounce around all over the place. We kept coming back to this case called Yanner v. Eaton and I never understood why or how it connected to basically everything we learned in that class. Needless to say, studying for that exam was stressful. During the lectures, my prof would continuously and explicitly make connections between foreign case law that, at it's surface, had no tangible relation to one another. I had those connections in my summary, but I never fully understood why or how they were connected throughout the semester. Truthfully, it wasn't until the day before the exam that I had given up studying at the library and left to go home and nap, that it finally all clicked in my head. I was on the footbridge on the way home and I had some sort of epiphany where I realized that the nature of property or the ontology of property was not something "object-like"; instead, the nature of property ought to be re-conceptualized as something "processual". It's fluid. It's changing. It's dynamic. And that's why it was previously so difficult for me to fully comprehend - I was thinking about it all wrong. In my Anthropological Theory course in grad school, we learned about how anthropological objects of study had evolved from "thing-like" to "processual" due to our shifting paradigms in various theoretical frameworks. Our anthropological objects of study embody a type of agency that enables them to actually participate in our research in a meaningful way. Property is the same thing. Once I started thinking like an anthropologist again, the doctrinal law stuff associated with the ideas of property law naturally followed. I was able to make sense of the connections myself and even make nuanced connections between the case law. 

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What on earth does this have to do with yoga and with my sad depression on an otherwise fantastic impromptu girls night? Relax, I'm getting there - as I said in my About section, my postings often intentionally overlap because everything is always interconnected. Experiences cannot be classified in distinct silos. 

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The lessons I learned in my first year Property Law class were twofold: (1) The law needs anthropology; and more importantly in the context of this post (2) I don't like being spoon fed. I don't like being told or showed what the big picture looks like - I need to figure it out on my own in order to fully appreciate it. If I can't arrive at the big picture on my own or can't get there in my own time, I'll never have a complete understanding of what happened. 

Anthropology is a unique discipline that teaches students to see the big picture, by looking at small, fragmented lived experiences of different people. The job of anthropologists is to make sense of these fragments and see how they ultimately come together to create meaning. Deciphering the broader meaning of fragmented events is a practice that has helped me delve deeper into my yoga practice in that it connects minute movements/transitions in postures with breath to ultimately arrive at a place of balance, inner peace, and gratitude. Moreover, this practice of deciphering meaning - among and within fragmented events - is something that I hope will translate into my eventual legal practice and subsequent LLM studies, in order to make greater sense of how the law necessarily affects people. Finally, this practice of deciphering meaning - among and within - fragmented experiences is something that I've come to employ in my everyday life because it forces me to connect confusing, frustrating, and messy experiences with the things I've learned in yoga by broadening my perspectives on things, accepting Gianna's mantra that "hurt people hurt people", and ultimately arriving at a genuine "attitude of gratitude".

My Property Law prof, as brilliant as he was, spoon-fed me the connections between case law, which is why I never fully understood it during lectures. My beautiful friends, as wise as they are, also spoon-fed me the bigger picture, which is why I never fully heard them when they told me their mantras. I needed to get there on my own. I needed to stop forcing gratitude. I needed to stop trying to control my emotions. I needed to stop resisting. And I did. And it sucked for a while. It hurt. It was awkward. It was confusing. And It was uncomfortable (still is) - but, that's just growing pains. I realize that now. Things are starting to make sense in my head again after all of my best friends (again, it's a tier!) tried to show me the bigger picture. I knew I'd get there, I just needed some time.

Feelings are messy. Emotions are messy. But, allowing myself the time to experience them, as opposed to avoiding them, is enabling me to learn from them; and, growth often hurts. Like the first law of thermodynamics, energy can neither be created, nor destroyed; rather, the total amount of energy in the universe stays the same. Feelings are similar (if not the equatable) to energy; they too can neither be created, nor destroyed - and thus, they never really disappear. But, they can transform into different emotions and that's where I'm at right now. 

I just finished my first week at my new job in Yorkville (which is somewhere I've wanted to either work or live in since high school) and I can't help but smile every time I walk to my office. I am literally living almost all of my dreams and sometimes I catch myself smiling for no reason (something I often did on my couch back in Ottawa). And I'm pretty sure that means I'm happy. And I'm 100% sure that means I'm healing. 

breathe, stretch, shake —let it go.

I'm a HUGE Mase fan - in fact, this song is playing in the background as I type (which is why the title of this post is aptly named). "Breathe, stretch, shake - let it go" is exactly what I do in yoga and coincidentally, what I do strive to do in life. But in life, it's not as easy to shake shit off and let it go. It's tough to adopt the "5 year rule" - where if it won't matter in 5 years, then we ought to just let it go. How will we know what will and what will not matter in 5 years? How do we decipher the significance of events in the present? How can we just "let shit go" in our lives as easily as we can "let shit go" in our yoga practice? 

I've thought long and hard about this and while I do think there's some value in the "5 year rule", I don't think that I'm laissez-faire enough to wholly embrace it. I'm a Type-A personality. I ask a lot of questions. I need to know where I'm going, when I'm going to get there, how I'm going to get there, and I hate not being in control of my life. I'm very ambitious, very self-critical, very much in a race against the clock, and before I started my yoga journey, I'd be the type to overreact at every little thing and had maaad anger issues (I was a treat to be around). While my yoga practice has calmed me down a lot and has taught me that I cannot always be in control of every single situation that I find myself in, I still struggle with my ability to let things go. 

Some things are easier to let go of than others, of course; whereas, other things (and/or people) tend to be a bit more difficult, especially when you have attachment issues to ideas and pictures of how things were supposed to be, etched in your brain. This is a story of how I knew that I completely let go of my first (and only) big relationship. Unsurprisingly, yoga played a big role in that letting go process.

It's a little ironic that I came to fall in love with yoga to fall out of love with him. See, he worked for Lululemon, which is the brand one automatically associates with yoga. I didn't regularly practice yoga when I was living in BC, though I'm sure everyone thought I did because I was always decked out in all lulu everything (which I still kinda am and am in desperate need of work clothes). I always had the latest and most exclusive lulu tights, bags, jackets - you name it. I think back now and like, what a waste that was - I lived in yoga clothes and I lived in BC - the biggest freaking yoga obsessed province in Canada and I hardly ever practiced. But whatever, shit happens for a reason and you just gotta trust the timing of your life - the irony of it all is just kind of ridiculous (as are most things that happen to me, tbqh).

Anyway, throughout my year of self-discovery, self-renewal, and I guess, self-awareness, I reset my priorities. In resetting my priorities, my Type-A personality ensured that I showed up on my mat very regularly, which again, allowed me to carve out the time to show up for myself. I did whatever made me happy (yoga) and whatever brought me joy (yoga). In learning to let go in uncomfortable poses in the Moksha sequence (hands down Warrior 2) after holding them for longer than I'd like (i.e. stop resisting and start softening), I was somehow subconsciously letting go of all the pain, heartache, and hurt caused by the severance of my relationship. I didn't know it at the time, but of course, hindsight is 20/20. Every single time I arrived on my mat, I quieted my thoughts and focused my attention with magnificent precision on stretching my body into positions that permitted and encouraged growth. Every deep breath I took was an opportunity to inhale the good I created and exhale the bad that had continued to linger. Every time I'd physically shake off a pose, I'd mentally shake off painful memories. And in time, I eventually came to let all that shit go.

There have been a couple of moments earlier this year when I knew that I had completely let that relationship go - being open to the idea of pursuing a new one was a big-time realization. But I think the biggest moment that confirmed those earlier realizations was last week. I had just come back from Ottawa and my summer plans went awry. I was on Instagram following positive vibe accounts (so lame and so basic, but I like reading the positive affirmations so leave me alone) and his girlfriend or whoever she is to him somehow popped up in "accounts you may know" or whatever tf it actually says (gotta love social media). So, I clicked on her profile and she had a private account (lame), but saw the words "Mommy to be💞" in her bio. And I immediately burst into a fit of giggles and screenshotted (another word I made up, haay Shakespeare) that shit and immediately sent it to my BFF extraordinaire, MB.

Lol. I could not believe my life. Honestly, if it wasn't such a freaking tragedy at that moment with everything else going wrong, I would have found that situation even funnier. Like here I am, just getting home from finishing my first year of law school, supposed to be in a happy and celebratory and triumphant mood, but am instead all upset and heartbroken because my summer wasn't going as planned - AND THEN finding out that my ex and the girl he left me for are having a freaking baby together, like whatttttt?! Are you fucking kidding me right now!? Like what else could possibly go wrong to further sour this moment of supposed bliss from finishing 1L? Lol anyway, upon receiving that screenshot, MB called me and verbalized my initial "wtf" reaction and quickly asked me if I was okay. I started laughing even more, which confused her, but then she started laughing because when one of us giggles, the other one automatically has to start giggling too (that's what real best friends do, btw) and asked why we were laughing. I told her that we're laughing because this entire freaking situation was just so fucking stupid! Literally, everything about the series of events of my life until that moment was just so ridiculous that it was straight up comical. Neither of us could believe how unfortunate my love life was at that time. And also, I'm sorry, but who tf puts "Mommy to be" in their IG bio? Like, whattt? Come on Eileen, that's insane and also, I hate private IG accounts. Like don't put that in your bio if I can't see your baby bump progress. Lol. Jk. Sort of/not really. 

K, after that, we had a real discussion about how I felt about this news. And truthfully, I really didn't care. She told me to call her if I decided that I did care later on that night or tomorrow because she (and everyone else I later sent that screenshot to) had thought that the news hadn't really hit me. Everyone assumed that I'd be super upset about learning that my ex and his whatever person was having a baby and all told me, "you're so much better off" ..............

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Well, like, duhh!!! No shit I'm better off!!!! That could have been/would have been me if things hadn't ended when they did. I would have been 26 (or younger) and pregnant and what the hell would I even do with a baby? I sure as hell wouldn't have pursued my dream of law school and even if I had, wtf am I going to do with a baby in law school?! I can barely look after my tiny ass succulent (which I'm sure is dead by now) and my own affairs in law school, let alone an infant - that's just insane. I mean, one of my best friends is my age and has a beautiful baby girl named Harper (all of you should check our her dope mommy blog here) and is the absolute best mother, ever. So, obviously, you can be a young mom and still kill it at life. I just know that I would never be able to balance a baby and my dream of becoming a lawyer at the same time. Like what would I even do with the baby - not just while I'm in class, but also at home? Like could I use it as a book-end? Or like, a paper weight? What does it do when I'm reading or doing work or having a scotch at the end of a long day? So many questions that need not be answered and also clearly demonstrate that I am not at all prepared to have a child in the near future. Or honestly, even in the distant future, who knows.

So yeah, seeing "Mommy to be" solidified and confirmed my earlier realizations that I had hundo p, without any uncertainty, let go of that relationship. As surprised as I was to see that, I was (and am) actually extremely happy for the two them. Good for them for finding each other (though at a questionable, overlapping time involving me), for figuring out their shit together, and for having a baby together. That's huge and that's something that should absolutely be celebrated!!! I feel like me being able to be this genuinely happy for them is my sign of clarity that I had been able to forgive them and let them go, which is unquestionably something that would not have happened, had it not been for yoga.

Yoga taught me how to let shit go and showed me all of the good that can happen when I let shit go. I became content, lighter, less type-A and that allowed me to literally transform my hurt into happiness. By breathing, stretching, and shaking, I was able to let all of it go and that's the story of how yoga (and Mase) facilitated my personal triumph of "getting over" that big relationship. 

P.S. If either of you are reading this blog, congratulations on your baby!! I'm thankful it's not me!!