I am still tired.

I've been tired since I was nine months pregnant with my now two-year-old. I was still teaching at Arts High in Newark, struggling to keep comfortable in a school with no air conditioning and an elevator that required a key (that I didn't have). I walked laps in the hallway on my preps to stay active. That seems like it was a very long time ago. Since then, I've become a mom for the first time, found out I was pregnant again when I had a three-and-a-half month old, become a mom for the second time, and juggled a toddler and an infant for over a year. Okay, so I guess I should be tired.

For me, this has been the downside of having children later in life. No regrets, for sure, but I wish I had my twenty-nine year old energy right about now. I just can't catch up. As soon as we have a night or two of everyone sleeping through the night, we have three of no one sleeping through the night -- of everyone sleeping somewhere other than where they originally went to bed. Of sleeping in the armchair. (Which, by the way, I find almost as comfortable as our Tempurpedic.) I am pretty good at waking up quickly and jumping into action, but you can only do that so many times before you start just spacing out during the day...

Yes, yes. This too, shall pass, and then I'll long for when the girls were little and wanted to cuddle and sleep with me.

Yoga meets you where you are

is my mantra. And really, I keep saying it over and over to myself. I'm trying to believe it. In just a couple of weeks, I'm starting the yoga teacher training program at Shakti Yoga. I'm really excited about deepening my practice and learning how to share it with others. I see lots of potential applications for it: teaching bigger people (you know -- folks (like me) who are intimidated or turned off or not accommodated by the perfect-body yogis), teaching people with chronic pain, teaching inner city kids who need a stress relief tool to help them succeed in school and the life beyond, working with moms-to-be. A lot of people feel like they aren't welcome in yoga or don't know how to approach it, and I'd like to change that.

But here I am, having trouble believing my own mantra. My body hurts from my rheumatoid arthritis, and I can't quite see how I will be able to practice or teach since I can't bend my knees or move my ankles or flex my wrists. I wonder what the others will think of me and my big, stiff, inflexible body. I don't want to be a curiosity or that poor woman who can't move. Yak. It isn't a competitive thing; I just wonder what it would be like to be another kind. It's the point -- I know. Yoga will meet me where I am when I move with the breath, when I breathe in and let my om join the sound of the universe. Maybe I should shut up and roll out my mat.