Update on the Life:

Super ramble:

I got pregnant during my RYT with Buti Yoga....it was crazy, and I totally freaked out the last weekend. I did awesome on my demos, but failed the musculature system portion of the test. At the time, I was also living at a CAMPSITE in Massachusetts with my 3 year old, 1 year old, a few months after moving from Hawaii to Maine, and then Maine to Masschusetts!! Damn, I guess something had to give. I didn't do any more Buti after that, what with the morning sickness and basically preoccupied with traveling and moving. I was even in Texas for a month and a half! I think we're in our more permanent home now, though, in western Washington. Anyway, I miss Buti Yoga - at first I was missing the movements, and the surrender, but now I am missing the fucking badass female empowerment that I felt. I feel like pregnancy has a tendency to take me down a few pegs and challenge my self-image to the extreme - I become vulnerable. But in that vulnerability, I see strength too...the strength to get through. The strength to let go. In my reflections, I find myself thinking A LOT about the Ring of Fire that you go through with birth...you literally have to go through it, as though into it, whole-heartedly, so that your baby can come out. That moment is so extreme. All of life strains to deliver life. I haven't forgotten how extreme it felt...that Ring of Fire, that opening, that yearning to push a human life into the world. The wild frantic pain of it...crazy crazy crazy pain. Everything stops as the Ring approaches. You can't avoid it anymore. You have to go through the pain, into the fire...into the churning heat of a primordial soup. The lava of human existence, gushing through your veins, drowning you in agony, in search of release, the burning, burning, burning. You're dissolved in the desperate fire of a raging portal to the Life Beyond, and you know you probably won't ever come back the same. .

I remember giving birth, and I think about it...and it helps prepare me. I am entering the stage of pregnancy where you start to feel a bit more isolated. I'm turning to a spiritual practice of ritual to help me through. There is strength in being vulnerable, in releasing yourself, to keep focusing on that release...in daily behavior and practice. I can keep evolving and keep changing to honor the needs of my soul. It's been a wild year. In fact the past 2 years, starting with Seraphina's birth, have been a series of RAPID changes in our lives. But I think we have flowed with it all pretty well, all things considered. And we've learned A LOT along the way...