The Sraddha Well

The sraddha well is all dried up. Bone dry. Nothing at the bottom. That's what happens when I have many things to do, none of which I've done before, and none of which offer any immediate results.

Sraddha is faith, hope, belief, self-confidence, optimism. Most of which are impossible to marshall when you feel stuck at the bottom of that empty well with no rope to climb up.

An anatomy quiz on reading that I haven't done, or some that I did, but didn't retain. A homework sheet from the yoga therapy course, complete with incomprehensible instructions and requests for knowledge that I do not have in my very crowded brain. If you'd seen me in the public library, trying to surreptitiously inhale and then exhale while placing a thumb over one nostril and then the other and then inhaling with nostril regulation and exhaling free, you would understand the depth of my frustrations.

And marketing yourself is about as close to the lowest circle of Hell as one might find on earth. At least for me. This morning I talked up yoga therapy to a student who works for a retail company that supports yoga-related enterprises. Then I returned a mysterious phone call from a woman looking for a yoga teacher willing to travel to a corporate site to teach a class. When I asked her what corporation she worked for, there was a long pause, then she offered up the name, but only with the caveat that she preferred not to mention it. I was standing in the outside room of the yoga center, trying to describe what yoga is - an effort that can bring even the most articulate teachers to their knees - as well as my training and the style of yoga I teach, and I had to flee to the stairwell for privacy because it is very hard to Sell yourself with witnesses about.

I need to find some good, solid, tactile results for all of this amorphous effort. My thought today was to write things-to-do on my calendar, keep the goals manageable - as in "return phone calls this morning" or "read anatomy homework," and find some satisfaction in crossing things off the list. Does that sound as sad to you as it does to me?

In the meantime, here's my progress on warping the loom:

I've threaded the warp ends through the heddles and am starting to draw the ends through the reed at the front of the loom. Tonight, I'm working on my Jitterbug socks and watching the end of Bye Bye Birdie.