There is no glory in getting it right. It’s all about taking on the challenge and stepping up to the yeah, I’m ready to shift stuff and it’s kind of going to suck for a while point.
- Havi Brooks

So on the topic of blocks standing between me and Shiva Nata for the past few months: there have been some. As in, the understatement of the year. The process of becoming aware of those blocks is still pretty much under way, so I’ll try to nudge out some understanding – and maybe some attempt at letting me be exactly where I am with the blocks. So here goes.

The whole concept of doing it right

This block has two sides to it in my head.

During the past few months, there have been quite a lot of changes going on with my life. What with finishing my teacher training, moving to a new house, my parents moving to a new house, getting married and changing my name, as well as starting a new job…

Suffice to say there has been a lot of what-the-heck-is-happening -ness in my life. In those moments, I crave security and comfort. I don’t necessarily crave to be challenged even further. And I don’t need extra helpings of getting something wrong again and again.

Which is a bummer, since that’s pretty much Shiva Nata, right there. My brain knows doing the Dance would help me cope with the insecurity. It would help me to be present in the moment and to accept not being in control all the time. My gut, though, won’t have any of it.

So now, if I do Shiva Nata, I do the familiar levels to de-fuzz my brain or to reinvigorate my shoulders. I’m not even looking towards advancing along level 4, because I get an instant reaction of “auugh, I don’t wanna!!!” when I think of pushing myself in that direction.

And that’s the other side of the block.

I feel I’m totally not doing the concept of Shiva Nata justice by “just” doing what I know. There’s this big sign hanging on top of my head:

You’re doing Shiva Nata for the wrong reasons!!

(warning: the following paragraph will contain several instances of the sh-word.)

I mean, I should be after all those juicy, delicious epiphanies and hot buttered insights, shouldn’t I? I should have the drive to advance onwards, to get deliciously mixed up, to crave being in the zone? Shiva Nata should be my secret weapon in getting through the daily grind of always having to think, create, come up with solutions, right?

It’s just that now, in this stage of my existence, all that just gives me the aforementioned “auuugh” -reaction. That used to be the reality of my relationship with Shiva Nata. That reality has shifted, and I’ll have to create a new relationship with the Dance.

Replacing old patterns with new ones, sort of.

(I’m having difficulty figuring out what to write after coming up with that.

Like, I don’t even want to go into detail about how pattern reconfiguration is exactly the point of Shiva Nata, and  how that thought just popped in my mind after doing a few starting positions of level 3 and then starting to write this post.

In short, it was one of those “whoah/duh!” -moments that are so plentiful when doing the Dance.)

I can see something ahead

The quote at the beginning of this post is from Havi, again. It’s sort of exhausting, at first, but the post continues in the most reassuring way possible for my current state.

There is no glory in getting it right. It’s all about taking on the challenge and stepping up to the yeah, I’m ready to shift stuff and it’s kind of going to suck for a while point.

Not that you can’t rest into the dance sometimes. Because you can.

Because the practice will carry you. It’s strong enough to hold you in complete safety while you do this wacky, hard, frustrating transformational work.

But ultimately you’re going to have to invite yourself to find the next challenge.

Ultimately. As in, not right away. For now, I feel ready to be carried. And that’s where I am now.

Thank you so much for stopping by and reading these thoughts. If it sparked any insightings at your end, I’d love for you to share them. And, as always, keep catching your own insightings!

Love,

Sari

Plateaus happen. When you’re ready for the practice it will call to you.
Havi Brooks, Dance of Shiva Special Report #1

After a long silence in Insightings-ville, I received a comment on the I Heart Shiva Nata post. Kat wanted to hear my thoughts on Shiva Nata after doing it for more than nine months now. In fact, this was something I’d been meaning to post about, but there were some obstacles in the way. I’ll dedicate this post to answering Kat’s question, and then address the obstacles in a future post – there are some interesting threads to untangle there, too.

A year’s worth of Shiva Nata

I first tried Shiva Nata in June, 2008. From the first moment, I was hooked. I managed to establish a morning routine of Shiva Nata, yoga and meditation, and I felt awesome. Once or twice I taught the basics to a few people, and they were psyched as well. I was doing level 3 with movements in space, slowly moving on to level 4.

The morning routine carried as far as last spring. Then, for reasons I’ll get back to, I fell of the proverbial Shiva Nata wagon, and did maybe one or two practices a month for a good while. I’d do a few starting positions of level 4 arms to get my brain going in the middle of a work day, or a few level 4 arms-and-legs if I managed to get up early enough in the morning. Nothing as habitual as the routine I used to have, though.

What surprised me about that was how okay I was with that. In the Starter Kit (that I devoured right in the beginning as I was waiting for the DVD to hit my mailbox), Havi makes several fabulous points about the practice, but one of them was especially important to a recovering perfectionist like myself.

Plateaus happen.

Maybe this was one thing Shiva Nata had managed to drill into my unconscious. Not doing the practice is no reason to feel guilty. Not doing the practice is just something that works for you right now. When doing the practice starts working for you again, it will feel more natural and less guilt-inducing.

And it will start calling to you. Within two days, I received an email from Havi telling me the access information to the Starter Kit (which I’d incidentally lost as my hard drive crashed in the spring) and Kat’s comment asking me about Shiva Nata. If that’s not the universe nudging me, I don’t know what is.

So currently, I’m feeling a growing warmth towards Shiva Nata again. There’s no need for me to rush things with the practice – there will still be a lot of brain-pudding-inducing hardness in the future levels, and I don’t need to catch up with the time I’ve “lost” not doing the practice. I’m still working on level 4 with legs, and hope to move to level 4 with movements in space sometime. And after that? I’ll figure it out when I get there.

I’m still convinced by the fabulousness that is Shiva Nata, and consider myself a Shivanaut. Maybe one on an orbit?

Thank you so much for stopping by and reading my thoughts on this, and feel free to share your own thoughts in the comments! And as always – keep catching your own insightings!

Love,

Sari

Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.
William Arthur Ward

It’s easy to get stuck feeling wretched about things you don’t have. It’s even easier to take things you do have for granted. So I’ll try to do a gratitude exercise here, out loud, to get things flowing again.

A New Home

I’m grateful that we have a new, beautiful home. There’s still some arranging left, but we’ve been living here for a bit more than a month, and it’s slowly starting to feel like home.

I’m grateful that we’ve been able to have friends over even though the place is not yet ready. We were able to welcome an overseas friend for three nights at fifteen minutes’ notice. My fiancé has been loving the chance to cook for our guests.

My Friends

I’m so grateful for my friends who threw me a fabulous surprise bachelorette party last weekend. The greatest thing about the party was the fact that they’d thought of what I’d enjoy and then made it happen. I’m also grateful for the chance to tell them how much I enjoyed their company and all their efforts.

I’m grateful that I have so many friends who want to be a part of my life, even though I don’t get to spend as much time with them as I would in a perfect world. I’m grateful that I can be there for them when they need me, and that they appreciate my friendship.

Love

I’m grateful that I’m marrying the man I love in three weeks. I’m grateful that we’ve found each other and that we have a connection unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. I’m grateful that my parents adore him, his parents like me, and our mothers have become good friends.

I’m grateful that we’ll have the chance to throw our loved ones a party to celebrate our marriage. I’m grateful that we’ll get to see our friends and family and share our wedding joy with them. I’m grateful that I’ve had the opportunity to plan a wedding.

You

I’m grateful that you’re reading this. It means you might be resonating with me on some level. I hope my gratitude is contagious, and that you find things in your life to be grateful for. I’m grateful for the fact that here, in this blog space, I don’t have to try to be anything other than who I am.

Thank you.

I’d love it if you shared your own sources of gratitude or other associated ideas in the comments – and until next time, keep catching your insightings!

Love,

Sari

All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.
Havelock Ellis

A huge part of moving house – especially moving into a smaller apartment – is decluttering. Well, at least for anyone who doesn’t follow the “take out an equal amount that you bring in” mantra religiously. Suffice to say we hadn’t. Add to that the fact that we had a very sloppily planned move (with little to no effort put in pre-move decluttering), and you get the end result of too much stuff cramped in too little space.

When decluttering, we’ve tried to follow Flylady’s rule: if you don’t love it, don’t use it, and don’t have a place for it, you need to chuck it. Emphasis on tried, because it’s all too easy to get stuck with the golden oldies, “I might need this someday” or “I paid good money for this”.

Interestingly enough, while we’ve been moving, I’ve also been dipping my toe into The Sedona Method, a self-help system where the key focus is letting go of limiting beliefs, emotions and thoughts. I have yet to invest a cent in it, but I’ve gone a long way with the free resources available on the main site (mostly audio releases in the articles section) and elsewhere.

In a way, the whole Sedona thing is kin to decluttering the mind. You constantly get a stream of messages coming in to your consciousness about the world and yourself in the world. Pretty soon, all your mental cabinets are full of junk (“I’m useless and ugly”, “Everyone is out to get me”, “I can’t do sports”, “My friends are so much more awesome than me”) that you can’t fit anything else in.

You could try moving to a bigger place – but unless you learn how to declutter, pretty soon the new place will be as cramped as the old one was.

Your mind is trying to squeeze through between boxes and piles of age-old stuff that you “might need someday” (if you find yourself at the playground age four one day, the plastic tractor self defence tactics might come in handy) or you’ve “paid good money for” (in the form of energy spent trying to work through the problem or hide it from others and yourself).

I might need this one day

With physical stuff, you get the “but it’s perfectly good” resistance. For that, I love Flylady’s notion that the stuff is still at Goodwill, and you can go visit it there if you miss it. If you really need it back, you can buy it back at the Goodwill or at the store, or maybe borrow it from someone else.

For me, there’s an added layer of “if I throw this away and have to buy a new one, I’ve contributed to drowning the planet in garbage”. True, there are some items even the Goodwill won’t take. But then again, if the Goodwill won’t take it, is it still perfectly good? And if you’ve used it threadbare, could you just recycle the materials?

With mental clutter, though, it’s easier. There’s a back door. If you let go of a thought or belief, and notice you were actually better off with that belief, you can always start thinking that again. It’s like having an endless shelf at the Goodwill where you can go and reclaim any beliefs you once had, if you find yourself missing them.

Chances are, though, that with both physical and mental clutter you won’t even remember them once you’ve chucked them. All you’ll notice is the empty space.

I’ve invested so much in it

The dress is fabulous. I bought it for a friend’s wedding, and wore it once. Maybe twice. Haven’t worn it since, but I’m still holding on to it. I bought it at a boutique that I used to really admire as a teenager. “One day, I’ll be a woman who shops there.” The truth is, though, that I grew up to be someone who doesn’t shop there, or wear the styles that they offer.

I know I should maybe give up the dress. Donate it to someone.

But I remember how I searched for the perfect dress. How I pondered whether or not I’d have enough money to splurge in the dress. How I marched into the store, tried it on one more time, and pulled out my wallet.

As you can see, I’m still in the process. The story of the dress is stopping me from decluttering it.

For beliefs, thoughts and emotions, the process is no easier. While on the surface it might seem like a no-brainer – would I rather keep this feeling, or would I rather be free – the truth is that it’s scary to let go of some of it.

Someone I know has a chronic illness. They’ve had it for years, and whenever I meet them, the first thing they talk about is the illness, and how it’s making their life miserable. They’ve had several different suggestions on how changing their habits and lifestyle might help ease the situation. For some reason or another, though, they maintain their old ways and keep complaining.

Say they woke up one morning and the illness was gone. What then?

Who would they be? What would they talk about? What would their identity be constructed around?

They’ve invested a lot of time, money and effort into the identity of “being the person with X”. For all they know, there might be nothing else underneath – just the illness and their reactions to it.

No wonder it’s scary to consider letting go of that.

For beliefs and thoughts, however, there’s always the endless Goodwill shelf. If I let go of a belief and notice I’ve lost all that time and energy, I can always get the belief back. What I’ve noticed, though, is that more often than not it’s actually a replenishing experience – like the energy was bottled up inside the belief and is now at my disposal again.

With the dress, I guess I’d have the empty space (and the empty coat hanger) at my disposal if I let it go. Plus I wouldn’t have to give up the story. I’ve got the photos, and now I’ve got the emotions documented on my blog. I can always come back here to visit them if I really really need to.

Thank you for stopping by! Feel free to comment on anything that you found intriguing, in one way or another, and until we meet again – keep catching your own insightings!

Love,

Sari

Long stormy spring-time, wet contentious April, winter chilling the lap of very May; but at length the season of summer does come.
Thomas Carlyle

Summer has come, at last. So far, it’s been a few days of sunshine and heat wave followed by four days of rain. On the bright side, the plants on our yard have flourished.

Learning a new home

A week ago, we gave back the keys to our previous apartment, and officially transported the last load of boxes to our new home. To our home. We’ve made progress on several fronts, and it’s slowly starting to feel like home.

Slowly.

A few days ago, I noticed there’s a lilac tree outside our bedroom window.

On our yard, there’s a patch where we apparently have some kind of a lily growing. Because it hasn’t bloomed yet, we don’t know which one.

There are several items (both in and outside cardboard boxes) that still don’t have a place.

I don’t know which buses stop at the nearest bus stop, because I’ve always walked to the metro station.

Bit by bit, we’re learning the ways of our new home. As we get more and more things put where they belong, we know more and more about our home.

So far, it’s a half-filled puzzle that we need to complete. A Scrabble game midway through, and our team still has half a bag of letters to place – aiming to get the Q on a triple word score square.

Fairytales

We visited a friend’s family a few nights ago. I’m one of the godparents of their daughter, 5, so we spent some quality time one on one. We played hide and seek, and then we made a fairytale drawing. I took a piece of paper and a pencil, and told her we were going to create a fairytale, and I was going to draw as we made it up. “But I can’t make up a fairytale!” Don’t worry, I said, we’re going to make it up together.

I asked her what she wanted the fairytale to be about. “Could it be about a witch?” Yes, it could. Was it a good witch or an evil one? “An evil witch who flies around on a broomstick.” And I started drawing.

For the record, I can’t draw my way out of a paper bag on any artistic standards. It didn’t matter. By picture three, I didn’t even have to ask her questions or suggest plot twists anymore – she was on such a roll I hardly had time to sketch the major plot twists.

After we finished the story (one that involved a magic potion, turning people into frogs, a burning village, a gingerbread house and a girl who first shrunk the witch and then hoovered him/her with a vacuum cleaner), we had filled both sides of a letter-sized paper with drawings. She then wanted to tell the story to both of her parents separately.

Well, first she wanted them to guess what the fairytale was about, but when the witch was mistaken for a giant mosquito and the knight in shining armor for a bunny rabbit (I mentioned my drawing is liberal, didn’t I?), she decided it was better to explain the story.

It took the five-year-old about three minutes to get over the “I’m not sure I can” hurdle. Once we got in the flow, she didn’t care if she was good at telling stories or not. She was doing it.

Grades, perceptions and voodoo dolls.

For a final tidbit, I went to see my study register online for the first time in a few weeks. I had received the credits and the final grade for the study module. I got a five out of a maximum of five! Hooray! I know I worked really hard all spring, and it’s fabulous to see that all the work really paid off. More specifically, I’m glad that I was able to process the trillion things I learned into a format where the mentors could also see I’d learned something.

I have a slightly ambivalent relationship with grades in general. On the other hand, I’ve always had a high GPA as a kid and a teenager, and considered it a kind of a badge of honor. That means I’ve taken good grades somewhat for granted – until my matriculation exam (the Finnish high school finishing exam).

I’d been a good student, especially in languages, and I thought the Finnish exam would be a piece of cake. At the time, the Finnish exam was divided into two different exams on two separate days.

In the first exam, I had a splitting migraine throughout the exam. At one point I couldn’t see what I’d written, because the words were spinning on the page. In the second exam, I had stomach flu and had spent the previous night getting repeatedly sick and thus not really getting enough sleep. Suffice to say I didn’t really perform at my usual level on either occasion.

Since then, I’ve tried to view grades not as an indicator of my knowledge, but as an indicator of what I’ve been able to communicate to the examiner or teacher. The two go hand in hand, of course, but I know that the grade doesn’t necessarily reflect my knowledge or level of learning at all. It doesn’t describe me – it describes the examiner’s perception of me.

This reminds me of a chapter in The Usual Error book (read my review). If the other person has a voodoo doll that vaguely resembles me, I don’t have to react when they stick pins in it. If they talk to me like I don’t understand something, it doesn’t erase my understanding of the topic – it’s their perception that they’re talking to.

In the same way, when I get a rave review or a fabulous grade, I do get really happy, but I don’t have to cling on to it for dear life. I don’t have to fear the day when the compliments end, and I don’t have to keep reminding everyone I meet that I was indeed called this and awarded that ten years ago.

The essence of me doesn’t fluctuate depending on whether I get compliments or criticism. All the compliments and criticism are, in fact, representations of other people’s perceptions of me. And whatever they say, I’m still the one who knows what I can do, what I’ve learned, where I’ve made mistakes and what I should do differently.

And that’s pretty cool.

Have a lovely, sunny/rainy (whichever you’re needing most right now) summer weekend, and keep catching your insightings!

Love,

Sari

Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.
W. H. Auden

Yesterday, I got to witness a meeting unlike anything I’ve ever seen. An actual, official meeting, where the chair walked out midway through. There was a lot of antagonism in the air, and a lot of it took place between two people – the rest of us were more or less indifferent. As it was my first time seeing the group and watching them interact, I had a blast observing the way the situations developed.

The situation was essentially that a smaller group of people had been in charge, and some group members from outside that inner circle had expressed their criticism a few days before the meeting. In writing. With a few derogatory adjectives thrown in for good measure.

The content of the text was partly accurate, partly inaccurate, but a part of it was clearly about the kinds of people these inner circle members were – according to the writers’ opinion. Understandably, these members were quite irate after being personally attacked.

All this became apparent through the status battle between the two main figures. There was only one member of the inner circle present at the meeting, although he did have some support from the sidelines. It was one of those “Ooh, you didn’t just say that to him, did you?” kinds of conversations that was painful yet fascinating to listen to.

“This is just my opinion”

Both sides did have their justifications, but both of them made crucial communication errors that ultimately escalated into one of them, the chair, leaving the meeting midway through.

Both of them expressed their own opinions as factual information, backing it up with anecdotes of experience. Furthermore, when the attacked party mentioned that they were quite insulted by the writing, the writer expressed his right to have an opinion, and that the recipients should not be provoked by it.

Wait, what?

Yes, you’re entitled to your opinion. If you think the other person is incapable of doing their duties as well as an annoying, stuck-up elitist, it’s perfectly all right to think so.

But come on, writing a memo for an official meeting and expressing your opinion about the person – not their actions or accomplishments – in no uncertain terms? When it has absolutely no bearing whatsoever to the agenda of the meeting? Oh please.

And then, when confronted with the hurt you’ve caused, defending yourself by saying that others shouldn’t be provoked by your opinion, and that it’s not about the people, it’s about the topics?

Having a strong opinion doesn’t justify being obnoxious.There are ways to criticize people’s behavior without criticizing the people themselves. And if you have insulted and hurt someone by expressing your opinion, the grown-up thing to do is to acknowledge the hurt and be sure to rephrase your opinion. Unless your original goal was indeed to create dissonance and hurt people.

Everyone’s got one, and they tend to stink

Truth be told, the person in the receiving end didn’t come through with flying colors, either. From the very beginning, he discarded the memo as rubbish, even the valid points made in it, because the ending was so obnoxious. He also categorically trumped every suggestion made by the writer during the meeting. Furthermore, he repeatedly expressed his dislike of the writer – who was present – in front of the rest of the group, calling him replaceable, stupid and incompetent.

Even when his “side” tried to get us onwards in the agenda by telling him to discard the insults, he persisted in talking about the hurtful things the writer had said. In front of more than a dozen people, who had been patiently listening to the charade for almost two hours at that point.

Sure, he was hurt. Some of the other participants of the meeting did acknowledge the fact that he was hurt. But by fighting fire with fire, he ended up making a mountain out of what could have been a molehill.

From what I gathered, these people had had some antagonism before. In that case, in my opinion, it’s even more important to settle things face to face, without an audience.

Maybe that was the point, though. The audience. If people agree with me, my opinion is more valid than the other person’s opinion. In a private situation, I have no-one else to support me, and I might even have to admit I’m wrong in something. It’s easier to keep up a tough image when there’s the pressure of other people.

Thank you for stopping by, feel free to share your opinion in the comments – and keep catching those insightings!

Love,

Sari

Unless you move, the place where you are is the place where you will always be.
Ashleigh Brilliant

It’s Day Three of the Great Move. So far, we’ve managed to get most of the essentials to the new place, but there’s still a lot left to pack at the old apartment.

Even though a move only counts for about 20 points on the Holmes Stress Scale (here and here), it does provide suitable conditions for a makeshift life laboratory.

It’s just round the corner.

Our old place and our new place are no more than a few kilometers apart. In other words, it’s no trouble driving between the two to get a few boxes, right? Especially since we don’t have to give up the old place until next Friday, right?

Right this moment, I’m sitting on the living room floor at our old apartment, and looking around at the stuff that still needs to be packed. In all honesty, we would’ve had to start packing three weeks ago if we’d wanted to get things wrapped up before last Friday. We didn’t. Sure, there were work deadlines, renovations at the new place and other pressing matters, but I think the biggest thing stopping us from packing was the perceived convenience of “Oh, we’ll just get the stuff over one car load at a time.”

If, on the other hand, we had moved across the country, or even across the city, we’d have been forced to get the stuff shifted in one day. No matter how tired, no matter how busy, we’d have found a way to get everything set.

I’m sure that if we’d taken the “get it all packed now” route, we would be just as exhausted at this point as we are now. We would, however, have everything in one place. We’d still have 150 boxes marked ‘miscellaneous’, but the effort would be contained within the walls of one apartment, not in two places.

And I won’t even mention the fact that we wouldn’t have to drive tired.

Ah well, you live and you learn, right?

Basic maintenance

Eat. Drink water. Sleep. Sit down and stare into nothingness.

With so much to do, it’s easy to slip into a frenzy of “I have to finish one more thing, and one more thing, and one more…” Before you know it, you’ve been awake for eight hours and haven’t had breakfast yet.

All through this moving process, I’ve tried to be deliberately selfish in getting enough sleep. With no days off between my latest work deadline and the move, however, I’ve managed to morph into a nagging, irritable witch. After listening to me all morning, my fiancé gently told me that maybe I should take a break.

After my break – watching Shrek the Third – I had a bunch of energy to start working on the apartment again. In hindsight, it was obvious that I needed the break, but I couldn’t see it until someone else pointed it out.

A few hours later we’d taken a nap and were drinking coffee, and I realized my fiancé hadn’t taken a proper break all day. Then and there, I advised him to sit down on the couch and spend the next hour watching sports. It was like someone had switched on a lightbulb in his eyes – “oh, right, I must be pretty tired.”

My brain knows I have to sleep, eat, drink water and slack off every now and then. When it’s tired, hungry, dehydrated or super-stressed, though, it doesn’t remember. It needs reminders.

Everyone’s not moving

Whenever there’s a huge life change going on, you’re naturally immersed in it. A big percentage of your thought processes revolve around it – a death, a wedding, a move, a trip, a fight with a loved one.

Up until last summer, I worked as a church camp teacher every summer. The camps were seven nights long, and we’d have between twenty and thirty fifteen-year-olds, a handful of sixteen-year-olds, and a few older teenagers as well as the teachers. During the eight days, the days were packed with activity from eight in the morning to eleven at night – and sometimes after that, too, if the kids decided to break the rules and seek each other’s company after bedtime.

After we’d said goodnight to the kids, I’d often call home to chat about the day. Every time, it was a surprise that there was life outside the camp bubble as well. The things that were huge in the bubble were not that interesting to people outside, and vice versa.

During this move, I’m noticing a similar phenomenon. The days have been so intense that I have little mental capacity for anything else. Talking to my friends, though, I get a few questions and the eventual polite “uhhuh, really?”.

On the one hand, it’s refreshing – there’s life outside, there really is! On the other hand, though, it feels easier to just communicate within the same frame of reference, and at the moment the only person sharing my frame is my fiancé. After the stress wears down, I’ll have more energy to focus outside the bubble as well.

Lovely of you to stop by again – feel free to share your insightings, moving-related or otherwise, in the comments!

Love,

Sari

Home is a place you grow up wanting to leave, and grow old wanting to get back to.
John Ed Pearce

Somehow, it seems, there is a transition underway. One of the things that reflects that transition is the recurring theme of moving house.

A few months ago, my parents sold my childhood home and moved to a new apartment. A few weeks after their move, I and my fiancé bought our very own apartment. Well, technically it still belongs to the bank, but we’re paying them back bit by bit. In the following two weeks, we should get the floors and walls done at the new place and then transport every single one of our earthly possessions from the old apartment to the new one.

And we haven’t even started packing.

When is home really home?

Last night, a group of relatives were visiting my parents in their new place, and I stopped by to say hi. One of the things they asked me, in jest, was how I felt about my parents giving up my home. I laughed and answered that it hadn’t been my home for years, and so I really didn’t mind.

But there is a slight change in tone between their old place and the new one. The old place was, as I mentioned, my childhood home. We moved there when I was four, and I first moved out at the age of nineteen. I returned a couple of years later to live there for a few months as I started university and was looking for a place of my own. When I moved out, I still lived in the same city, so I visited every few weeks, and I never gave up the keys.

This was the place where I started school, and where I celebrated my confirmation. This was where I stressed about my Finnish matriculation exam so much I spent the previous night vomiting, and where I returned at eight in the morning after a long graduation day-turned-night party. This was where my sister spent the last months of her life and where she passed away. Decades and decades of memories.

The new place, on the other hand, is clearly my parents’ home. I’m welcome, of course, but it’s different. When I go visit, I’m a guest. In a way, it’s refreshing, too – imagine the 22 years of emotional baggage that had proverbially piled up in the corners of the old place. There’s something very promising about a new home – even if it’s not my home anymore.

Settling down

If my parents didn’t move house for 22 years, I sure have done my best to balance the stakes. I know that in the grand scheme of things, moving house six times in the past seven years is not exactly a world record. It does make me ponder, though, whether I’ve really felt at home where I’ve been staying.

During the time I’ve been with my fiancé, we’ve had a total of four moves between us, three of them together from one shared apartment to another. The upcoming one will be our fourth one.

What has made each of those apartments a home? Since we both lead unnecessarily busy lives, our home does sometimes feel like a depot for quick pit stops. Our home feels most like a home when both of us have enough time to take care of the home – doing the dishes, folding the laundry, the regular stuff. I feel most at home when I’m folding laundry in a relatively tidy bedroom, or I’m doing the dishes after cleaning up the entire kitchen.

Our home feels like a home when we put in the effort of taking care of it so it can take care of us in return.

I guess that might be one of the secrets to settling down and having a great home that feels like a home. When you routinely maintain a tidy, pretty home, you feel appreciated – even though the appreciation really only reflects your own actions. If you ignore your home, it will reflect back on to you as well. Settling down means taking the whole “having a home” thing seriously, I guess.

How lovely of you to stop by again – keep catching your own insightings and feel free to share them in the comments!

Love,

Sari

Never ruin an apology with an excuse.
Kimberly Johnson

Apologies and excuses

A few days back, I and my fiancé had a conversation where I said something abrupt. He was offended, but I felt I had not been out of line, because, you know, something and something else. I forget the exact phrasing, but the bottom line was that I was making excuses. The situation started to escalate, in other words we started to dig deeper into what I said and what he said and what happened and why.

The thing that defused the situation? He asked me why I didn’t say “that sounds like…” instead of the “I thought you…”, and I answered that  I didn’t realize it was that specific thing that bothered me. I managed to dig out an “I’m sorry that I was so abrupt.” His response? “You’re forgiven.” And that was that.

When I think of a similar situation with the roles reversed – i.e. I’m the one who’s offended by my fiancé’s abrupt words – it makes perfect sense that the apology would do the trick. If I’m offended, I don’t want to hear how I’m in the wrong getting offended in the first place.

Instead, I want to hear that the other person did not want to hurt me, that they know what ticked me off, and that they feel bad about making me feel bad. A good way to accomplish that is a sincere apology.

Why was it so difficult, then, to apologise?

One, I didn’t want to admit that I had communicated in a non-constructive way. I was tired and hungry, and we were talking about something very personal where a lot was at stake. I didn’t have it in me to admit that I was wrong.

Two,  from my point of view my argumentation was logical. However, while I was concentrating on my logical argumentation, I failed to listen to my fiancé’s emotions. He was offended, and he had every right to be offended. He had to say it very explicitly before I noticed it. I was focusing on myself, not on the other person.

In other words, I was on my “me me me” -horse and forgot the central rule of impro (that also goes brilliantly with any other communication): help the other person as much as possible. Listen to her, focus on what she’s saying and how, and the rest of the communication takes care of itself.

Shiva Nata workshop!

Last week, I taught my very first ever Shiva Nata workshop. The crowd was massive – two people and myself. However, we managed to look at spirals, both horizontal and vertical, and go through the logic of level 1 sequences.

We also did a few mirror images and transquarters, so the participants would have an idea of how Shiva Nata eventually links every hand position with every other hand position.

I realized that in a thirty minute session, we would barely manage to scrape the surface, so I prepared a handout. True teacher style there. As far as I know, that handout is currently the only existing Finnish material on Shiva Nata. If you want me to email the .jpeg to you, pop me a comment! (You probably don’t want me to publish your email, so I’ll edit it out before I approve your comment…)

The fun part about drawing up the handout was that I really had to think about what’s fundamental. What do I want to convey in the thirty minutes we have? What do I want to include so the participants don’t run screaming at the sight of Frankenstein’s Handout? What do I have to include so the participants can continue on their own after the session?

Teaching the workshop was fun! I had slight difficulties in reading the numbers from right to left. What helped, though, was that I had originally slacked off with reading the numbers out loud, so I wasn’t really used to reading them one way or the other anyway. Neil’s advice about reading the numbers helped, too.

I had to think of a beam of light going from right to left to really visualize the position of my hands and to be able to read them out, but I didn’t screw up as many times as I expected to. In the context of Shiva Nata, I should probably be disappointed with this.

I’m fairly enthusiastic about teaching another workshop. Even more so since there were several people who told me they really wanted to come to the workshop but had to attend meetings and lectures and such instead.

It’s spring in Helsinki. I wore my spring coat and summer heels today. Life could be worse, all things considered.

Thank you so much for stopping by, feel free to hang out in the comments and share your own tidbits!

Love,

Sari

He who knows that enough is enough will always have enough.
Lao-Tzu.

When I was little, and had only learned a bit of English, I wrote a story. In English. I don’t remember what it was about,but I remember writing a sentence “She cried and cried until she had cried anaff enuf e n o u g h.” I tried and tried my best, and eventually had to go and ask my sister how the word was spelled. I found the story a few years ago, and as I read it, I could still remember the frustration I felt trying to get it right.

Coincidentally, it wasn’t the last time I had problems with enough.

Last Christmas, we got a total of eight chocolate boxes as presents. I love chocolate. In early January, I also became intimately reacquainted with the “eurgh” feeling you get after eating a bit too much chocolate a bit too fast. Somewhere in between removing the plastic wrap and not wanting to see another piece of chocolate that week was, again, the “enough chocolate” zone.

Every year, I promise myself I won’t drown myself in duties and activities. Every November and every April I notice I’ve wound myself too tight and bitten off more than I can comfortably chew. Somewhere in between I’ve passed the “enough duties” zone.

This spring, I’ve been doing my teacher training, and as a part of that I’ve had to teach sample lessons. The procedure is that first the trainee and the instructor go through the general topics and contents of the entire stretch of sample lessons. Then the trainee writes a lesson plan proposal, and the instructor gives comments. Based on those comments, the trainee revises the lesson plan and submits it to the instructor before the actual lesson.

Since a trainee only teaches between three to five lessons per group, and a maximum of two groups at a time, there’s theoretically plenty of time to write and revise the plans. If, however, the trainee has little or no experience in teaching that specific topic (which is often the case), writing one plan can take two hours, especially when you need to explicate your goals, timing, and different stages of instruction for each activity.

There is a point where little else can be done to improve the plan. That is the “good enough” stage. Knowing when to stop planning and move on is, I think, at the heart of becoming a teacher who won’t burn herself out three years into the profession.

The difficulty with good enough

For me, the only areas of life where I can honestly trust my judgment of “good enough” are those where I’m honestly pretty skilled. I can evaluate whether a situation requires my all-out effort – if I take an example from my singing context, this would be a situation where we’re recording the vocals for an album.

If it doesn’t require my one hundred per cent commitment and effort – like singing with a friend at a karaoke bar or at a relaxed band practice – I can go with “good enough” and focus more on the social situation or just having fun with the song.

If it was this simple with every area of my life, I would never have problems with “enough”. However, if I’m still learning something, like teaching grammar or organising a theater-in-education workshop, I don’t have the good-enough-meter calibrated properly. I need to put extra effort into consciously evaluating whether or not my actions meet the basic quality criteria.

In the learning stage, the best performance I can possibly muster might reach the general “good enough” standard – if I get lucky. However, the perfectionist in me doesn’t understand I’m in the learning stage, and only sees the shortcomings compared to the perfect standard. Even though I’m way beyond my personal “good enough” stage (and past the point where I could possibly improve it on my own), the little perfectionist urges me to work more, because we’re not quite there yet.

When this happens with about seven different activities – a few different school and work projects, social life, student organization duties, et cetera – it’s no wonder I’m pushed way past my enough zone into the zone of coping and survival. No more energy to spend on having fun or getting creative.

In terms of flow, this is the situation you get when the challenge of the situation exceeds your skills. Instead of a flow experience, you encounter anxiety and stress.

“I’m still learning”

It’s super difficult to admit to yourself that you’re incomplete. It’s even more difficult to admit it to others. Still, it’s the only way (that I know of) to avoid the perfectionist’s trap of being pushed off your enough zone in every single area of your life.

I’ve tried to remind myself of it by repeating “I’m still learning” to myself in stressful, way-past-enough-zone situations, and somehow it seems to help. It gets my focus off the fact that I’m not perfect, and onto the fact that I can calibrate my own “good enough” to my skill level. If I’m doing the best I can with the resources I’ve got, then it’s good enough – be it a lesson plan, a translation, a theater workshop, or something else.

And the fact that I’m still learning doesn’t mean my “good enough” won’t be someone else’s “fabulous”. That is the ultimate goal, isn’t it? To have such a high performance standard in your field of expertise that your “good enough” will knock the socks off everyone? Even when you’re ridiculously skilled, there’s still room for learning.

Enough for now. Thanks for stopping by, and if any thoughts came up, I’d love it if you shared them in the comments. Until next time – keep catching your own insightings!

Love,

Sari