Cartography for Beginners
by Emily Hasler (an excerpt) -
Take a little license with rivers, especially their curves and estuaries. Add an oxbow lake if at all possible. If the area you are mapping has no seas/lakes/rivers/streams, I have to question why you are bothering.
I went to Agadir, Morocco and all I got was food poisoning. I didn’t even take this picture. (Thanks Caroline Gautier.)
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I who have never known men - Jacqueline Harpmen
As long as the sheets of paper covered in my handwriting lie on this table, I can become a reality in someone’s mind.
Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall
With huge Book Club buzz and rave reviews, I really wanted to love this. While the pacing lagged and the characters didn’t fully land for me, its devoted fanbase suggests it may hit differently for you.
Despite the Reece's Book Club buzz, I found this to be just meh.
I picked it up because it’s described as having the pace of a thriller and the emotional depth of a romance…. But I think the thriller description is a bit of a stretch. The plot/pacing doesn’t really pick up until the last 1/4 of the book.
And as far as the emotional depth of the romance? I didn’t really connect with the main character and found her husband to be one-dimensional.
But hey! Over 200K people have given it 5 stars! So you might love it. You do you.
Learning to Speak Yoga: Cueing, Transitions and Finding my Yoga Voice
I know what good yoga teaching sounds like—I just can’t do it yet. From cueing chaos to awkward transitions and the search for my own yoga voice, this post is about learning to teach while still very much learning.
Just a few sun salutations. xo
🙊 Cueing
Cueing is the language used to tell your students what to do. i.e. Step to the top of your mat. That sounds easy enough, right? Now try cueing a beginning level yoga student through a chaturanga sequence. You have one breath per movement - GO!
It’s so hard!!! If time stood still between poses, I could teach a halfway decent 90 minute class tomorrow. But to teach the postures at speed and with the breath? Let’s just say I’m on the struggle bus.
To make it even more overwhelming, there are also different types of cues:
Directional cues – where to move - “Step your right foot forward between your hands.”
Action cues – how the body organizes - “Press through the back heel.”
Breath cues – pacing and rhythm -“Inhale to lengthen the spine.”
Energetic cues – felt sense or imagery - “Imagine lifting up and out of the waist.”
Awareness cues – attention and presence -“Notice the weight of your feet on the mat.”
Obviously teachers can’t use all of these cues all of the time. We have to choose the one or two that matter most in the moment, depending on the student. This is what I’m working on:
Giving clear, simple directions (Less than 5 words)
NOT narrating every tiny action
NOT filling every second of silence with chatter.
🙈 Transitions
Transitions are how we get from one posture to another. In other words - good transitions are mostly good cueing.
As a beginning yoga teacher, this is especially hard because I’m still learning the sequence myself. But to keep the class moving, I need to anticipate what’s coming next, and speak it clearly without over-explaining.
⏰ Experience
I recognise that all this comes with time and experience. But it’s so frustrating because I know what good looks like, i just can’t do it yet. I did a classroom observation this weekend and noticed every single thing the teacher did “wrong” - but there is no way I could’ve done better.
It reminded me of Ira Glass talking about The Gap—that space where your taste is far more developed than your ability.
☺️ Finding my yoga voice
I don’t want to “sound like a yoga teacher.” I want to sound like myself, but slower, calmer and filtered for clarity.
Anne Lamott suggests that you find your writer voice by removing fear and limitation. I think the same must go for finding your yoga voice. You don’t find it or create it — so much as shed everything that isn’t it. That takes time, trial and error.
I don’t want to perform calm. I want to be present and relaxed. I don’t want to sound smart, I want to be comfortable in my skills and experience. Which I guess will only come with time and experience…
Do you want to be one of my first students? Email me for a free 30-minute session!
LaurieMucha@gmail.com
Arundhati Roy - Mother Mary Comes to Me
I sold a ring, the only piece of jewellery I owned to a man at a fruit juice stall. He gave me a few hundred rupees and a banana shake. Enough for my passage to Delhi.
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I think I had a cool seraphy watching over me. Especially each time I was at a crossroads and had to make a decision. My education, the class I came from, and, above all, the fact that I spoke English protected me and gave me options that millions of others did not have.
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It was not any great strength of character or steely artistic ambition that saved me from prison or serious harm. It was just happenstance, and a series of small impulsive decisions, taken on the fly.