Marcia's Musings: A Blow to the Gut

Marcia's Musings: A Blow to the Gut

I sat in my car on the side of the road. Cars, vans, motorcycles, and trucks whizzed past me as I sat stuck in place. In my fog, I finally picked up my cell phone and called the friend who knows me best. “I’m sitting on the side of the Crosstown unable to move,” I managed to say through choked tears. “I’ll be right there,” she said. 

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Blessed Be the Dog That Takes You for a Fall Walk

Blessed Be the Dog That Takes You for a Fall Walk

What is your favorite part of fall? Marcia takes you on a crisp fall walk with her beloved pup...

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Marcia's Musings: Heart Zings

Marcia's Musings: Heart Zings

The best gift you can give yourself when traveling with a group is time on your own. It is when you take yourself on a stroll – wandering, chatting, daring to get lost – that insight and momentary friendships sometimes appear. Zing goes your heart when you do. 

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Marcia's Musings: The Curious Case of Mrs. DeBoer

Marcia's Musings: The Curious Case of Mrs. DeBoer

I loved Anna DeBoer with all my heart. She taught me amazing things, and when she died, she left me her cherished cuckoo clock. Now I wonder if Anna DeBoer would have been vilified for some of her ways. When we start to see “the other”, sit in fear, hide in darkness, and forget that we all bleed red, we all lose. 

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Marcia's Musings: Is This How It Ends?

Marcia's Musings: Is This How It Ends?

Joy is often effervescent - like champagne or soap bubbles. Contentment is grounded, solid, steady. It is beyond loneliness and fear, beyond even old age…

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Marcia's Musings: A Love Affair

Marcia's Musings: A Love Affair

The minute I walked through the glass double doors, I felt a current of connection flow through my body.

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Marcia's Musings: Revelations – Part One

Marcia's Musings: Revelations – Part One

What happens if the ones you love don’t connect with self and with another as deeply as you do or as you hoped they would? How do you love the one(s) you’re with then?  

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Marcia's Musings: My Life in Segments

Marcia's Musings: My Life in Segments

I carefully peeled the orange, and as I placed the segments on a plate, a revelation hit me: “Ahh, this is how my life is - a whole lived in segments…”

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Marcia's Musings: Bone-Deep Disappointment

Marcia's Musings: Bone-Deep Disappointment

Lately, I’ve been fighting off feelings of disappointment. It’s the one emotion most difficult for me to process. How about you? 

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Marcia’s Musings: Be Brave. Be Creative. Be.

Earlier this month, I led a training in Yoga Nidra. My heart cracked open. Emotions and feelings flowed. What a gift for us all, students and teachers alike. In sharing our inner life and our hearts’ deepest longings, we find equality.

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Marcia’s Musings: It’s Me, Marcia

Hey, God, are you there? It’s me, Marcia. Usually, as I sit on my cushion, I listen for and to you. As you know, sometimes, I call you God, other times Universe. Other times, Goddess. In a long life with you, I learned you hear and answer to many names. I know you’re there.

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Marcia's Musings: Tenderness Isn’t a Season

At this time of the year, we often feel tender: tender toward other people, tender toward the natural world and all its creatures, tender toward life itself, tender perhaps even toward ourselves.  Images both sweet, like a dog and cat sleeping together, and horrifying, like the pain and suffering borne by innocent civilians on both sides of a war, elicit tender thoughts.

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Marcia’s Musings: Regime Change – A New Era

Marcia’s Musings: Regime Change – A New Era

The headline for this soul-baring sounds faintly geopolitical and sinister. It’s as though Hercule Poirot stands on deck to solve a great mystery. This situation requires no famous investigator, however. What is unfolding is the normal flow of the sweet river of life and a happy, joyous bend in it.  I can’t wait to tell you this long-held secret.

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Marcia’s Musings: Meg Ryan Was Right

This thought plagues me in a time of impersonality. We sit in offices in our private homes, alone or on endless Zoom meetings that I overhear from my home’s lower level when my children or friends stay over. Oh, yes, they see faces. The sharing, though, is all business…

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Marcia's Musings: Barbie Land

Marcia's Musings: Barbie Land

With Barbie, there emerged a more complicated relationship. She didn’t look like anything I witnessed in the strong flesh-and-blood women around me, and it’s only by some miracle that I didn’t start to body-shame myself. I know many others did in the years before we talked about concepts like the male gaze and how it distorts the way women view themselves. This sets impossible standards that maim and warp and cause real illnesses in both men and women and their relationships, however they come together. Especially in the first decade of Barbie’s existence, her white, white world left out everyone else, which matched reality, until the great movements of the late ‘60s and ‘70s caused Mattel, Barbie’s corporate owner, to succumb to the pressure to “show dolls more like me and my daughter”.  I’ll get back to that in a minute.

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