I just got back from a week in Aruba with my husband and five kids, ages 13 to 1.  Sun, sand, fun, crystal blue water, and no computer.  Ya, I was unplugged for an entire week.  And oh did it feel good.  I hadn’t planned on unplugging.  We brought our Mac laptop and our iPhones, but my Spirit didn’t wanna turn ‘em on.  So I didn’t.  My daily yoga practice helps me to always listen to my Spirit and ignore my mind.

I did bring my book manuscript with me, but only worked on it on the flight out, the flight back, and in the airport, with Dakota (age 1) strapped to me in the ergo carrier.  I finished writing my book four days before the twins were born––over a year ago––but the process of getting it ready to publish has taken much longer than it took to write the entire book.  I wrote it in seven weeks and it’s been about seven times that long to get it ready to go to print.

My graphic designer sent me a hard copy of the manuscript a few weeks ago with a bunch of pink, green, and purple flags noting where photos needed to change, edits needed to happen, and so on, and so I brought it to bang out the changes while we traveled.  The flight is about five hours each way and with waiting around in the airport, I worked on it for about 12 hours.

This morning during my practice in the 7:45 am hour of power at Prana Newton, I had an eerie feeling.  “Where’s my manuscript?” I thought to myself while breathing in down dog.  “OMG, I left it at the airport.”

When I got home, Philippe and I combed the house and the car.  No manuscript.  We called Logan Airport and reported it lost on the Logan lost and found website.  I sat there for a moment, stunned, my mind rushing with all of the suffering—“I spent twelve hours editing while we traveled!  I could’ve been watching that Reese Witherspoon movie!  My poor graphic designer spent countless hours writing notes in it and putting colored flags here and there.  Why did I create this?”

Then it came over me.  A calm like no calm I’ve felt before.  I felt almost out-of-body.  Then the words came…”I have a choice.  Focusing on this is going to make me miserable, and so I choose to focus on something else.”

And I did.  Many, many yoga practices has taught me to let go and refocus my mind.  It’s all about the power of the focus of your mind.

There’s a lot to focus on when you return home from a week away with five kids unplugged.  Unpacking, settling in, laundry, hundreds of emails, organizing, writing blog posts, restocking the fridge, putting in the edits of my manuscript—oops!  Refocus. 

It’s just like the breath in your yoga practice.  You breathe in and you breathe out, you breathe in and you breathe out, and then you forget to breathe…you start thinking, you start suffering, you lose your breath and your intention.

Then you remember, and you begin again.