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Excerpted from Good Night Yoga. Written by Mariam Gates and illustrated by Sarah Jane Hinder.
Mariam Gates holds a master’s in education from Harvard University and has more than 20 years’ experience working with children. Her renowned Kid Power Yoga™ program combines her love of yoga with teaching to help children access their inner gifts. See kidpoweryoga.com.
Illustrator Sarah Jane Hinder creates acrylic artwork for a variety of children’s book, including Good Night Yoga, Good Morning Yoga, The Three Little Pigs, and The Elves and the Shoemaker. She lives in Manchester, England, with her husband and two chihuahuas. See sarahjanehinder.com.
Hey, far be it from me to offer instructions on how to host a stress-free holiday party, since I can’t remember the last time I even hosted a holiday party, let alone stress-free. Still, as someone who has spent decades in the kitchen, what I do know is that people spend way too much time and effort trying to follow recipes rather than enjoying themselves and making food for one another. So if I was to host a gathering this season, here’s what I would aim to keep in mind.
First things first, lower your standards enough to have a good time. The best story about this is one that Robert Bly tells at his readings about his friend William Stafford, who was confirming to an interviewer that he had a practice of writing a poem each day. “How,” the interviewer wondered, “can you do that day in and day out? How can you be that creative?” To which Stafford replied, “I lower my standards.”
This is a brilliant piece of advice that requires a sleight of hand: Lowering your standards for making sure that others think highly of you. To engage in trying to control what others think of you is stressful, exactly because it is impossible. To lower your standards, you let them think whatever they do. And they will! At least it’s not going out on Yelp! (unless it is..)
So instead of trying to be impressively masterful, you could aim to enjoy yourself alongside your family and friends. Enjoyment in this case is a choice to rest easy doing what you are capable of doing, and letting go of the rest. And tuning into warmth, gratitude, and well-being.
Sure, make some plans, consult some culinary bibles or online cooking sites, but leave room for your plans to change as the holly hour approaches. If things are getting stressful, reassess what to do and what not to do. Decide to do less! Perhaps if people are not too busy with being impressed with the spread, they will have more energy for happily engaging with one another.
Be entirely willing to ask for help. When I’ve wanted to appear masterful, I have hesitated to do this, as then others might see me as being needy and helpless, and my project to appear capable and competent would be a disaster. Then nobody helps. But they do tell you to calm down, which doesn’t help.
So ask for help, whether it’s for food dishes from others, drinks to bring, people to serve, help with cleaning up. Inspiration, assistance, guidance, support—the more you ask for it, the more it appears.
Again, it’s not up to you to make sure that everyone has a good time. That’s their job. After all most of them are probably adults now, and they may choose to enjoy themselves. It’s your job to offer what you have to offer, sincerely and wholeheartedly. Letting go of the results.
And when you let go of assessing the results, you may be pleasantly surprised that you are smiling. You discover what’s in front of you can be sweetly beyond compare.
Happy hosting!
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Edward Espe Brown was the first head cook at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center and later helped found Greens Restaurant in San Francisco. He is the author of several bestselling cookbooks, including The Tassajara Bread Book (Shambhala, 1970) and the subject of the 2007 film How to Cook Your Life. His newest book, No Recipe, is being published by Sounds True and will be on sale on May 1, 2018.
Over the last few years, I’ve been collecting, evolving, and refining over 2
0 years of my poetry, which includes 217 poems collected in this book. These poems cover much of the ground in which I’ve been learning and growing with regards to the inner life.
One poem that is fundamental to the book is “Being Here.” When I was young, I found it hard to be here and to move through the world. Like many romantics, I wanted to transcend out of here. Of course, experience only landed me deeper into life. After my cancer journey, it became clear that there is nowhere to go, nowhere to transcend to but here. The image of sweeping a path though there is always more to sweep became a great teacher for me. That image led to this poem, which helps me stay on the path of living the one life I have to live.
BEING HERE
Transcending down into
the ground of things is akin
to sweeping the leaves that
cover a path. There will always
be more leaves. And the heart
of the journey, the heart of our
own awakening, is to discover for
ourselves that the leaves are not
the ground, and that sweeping
them aside will reveal a path,
and finally, that to fully live,
we must take the path and
keep sweeping it.
For me, the poems are the teachers. They arrive with their wisdom and become my guides. What they surface becomes my inner curriculum and by staying in conversation with them, I grow. We’re all drawn to what we need to learn, which if engaged with honesty reveals insights common to us all.
My hope is that the arc of these poems will be aids in living, listening, and beholding each other. I offer them as small wonders found and cared for through the years. I hope you might find one that, held close to your heart, will serve as a guide.
By Mark Nepo
I have spent most of my life trying to hide the extent of my disability. By sharing my story in Defiant, at long last, it feels like I have ‘come out’ as a spinal patient and it is liberating. I now embrace the word ‘disability’ with pride as I consider how far I have come and what I have achieved since my accident.
I spent almost six months in the spinal ward after a near fatal accident in 1986 left me with life-threatening injuries, including multiple fractures to my neck and back. I still remember the day my father drove me out of the hospital gates, my wheelchair in the back of the car, my emaciated body wrapped in a full plaster body cast to protect my newly repaired back. Life as I knew it would never be the same. In many ways I was fortunate, and in other ways, not so.
Although I was initially told that it was unlikely I would walk again, or have children, or do the things I had done before in my days as an elite athlete, I was determined to defy the grim prognosis. I would eventually go on to learn to walk again, albeit with a limping gait that would lead to many other complications.
My remarkable recovery from wheelchair bound to walking paraplegic was a combined effort on the part of many caregivers. And the great lesson I’m privileged to share with you, in my new memoir, is that I’ve learned that I’m not my body and you, dear reader, aren’t yours.
We are quite sure that tomorrow will come, that the most sacred breath will be there, that grace will take shape as the sun falling into the ocean, as the moon in the sky, and as the crystals in the newly fallen snow. That the particles of love will continue to configure as the precious deer that we run into on our morning walk. It is so easy to take for granted that we will be given one more opportunity to touch and hold another, and fill them with our love.
But another part of us knows it is so fragile here, so precarious, so extraordinary – that something is happening that is so very precious, rare, and outrageous – and that it will not be here for much longer. Recognizing this, let us give thanks on this new day by doing whatever we can to help others, by being willing to burn for love, never apologizing for our uniqueness, sensitivity, and vulnerability.
At the end of this life – which is sure to come much, much sooner than we’d like – it is quite unlikely we’ll be asking if we accomplished the tasks on our to-do lists, if we completed some mythical spiritual journey, perfected ourselves, played it safe, or achieved all of our goals. Inside these hearts there may be only one burning question: how well did I love?
Did I pause each day to behold the movement of grace as it has unfolded in each and every radiant here and now moment? Did I look with awe into the miracle sunset and the glory of the stars and give my raw beating heart to this world? Did I risk everything to know the preciousness of what is truly happening here? Was I willing to feel more, care so deeply, let everyone matter, and be utterly devastated at even the possibility of one more sunrise? Was I willing to fall in love, to truly fall in love?
Did I spend my time here in this star of love wisely, with my heart open and available, knowing it could be broken in any moment? Did I dance with the beloved around the moon, wander with her into the desert and into the darkness, play with her in the depths of the oceans, and give everything for just one glimpse of the mysteries of separation and union?
I hope I make it all the way through this sweetest of ever thanksgiving days, but if for some reason I do not, this would have been enough. I have been given so much more than enough.
Photographer unknown
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