Shrutee Sharma
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Of Coconuts & Dreams

2/25/2019

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This blogpost comes to you from Antigua!

Aayansh loves coconuts. He always has. Since we landed in Antigua, he's been wanting to pick his own coconut from a tree. His physicality of 3.5 feet doesn't limit him in his mind. 
 
The intensity of his belief made me consider my response. Instead of grounding him to practical reality like we often do as parents, I decided to play along with his curiosity. I asked him questions about how he might get to have his dream.
 
I was amazed at his imagination and the emergence of possible solutions. 
 
Solution 1: He thought he just needed some throwing practice. So he practiced aiming empty coconut shells at smaller trees, before aiming for the tall one. After about 15 minutes of serious practice, he figured throwing wasn't going to work.
 
Solution 2: Learning how to climb. While he was working through his dream, we settled for quenching our thirst at a local shack.
 
He asked the guy, ‘Junior’, if he had picked the coconuts, from a tree! He found out that his dad Como picks them in the mornings. He asked if Como would show him how to climb.  
 
Como got called out of his cot. He made a date with Aayansh late afternoon of the following day. You can count on it that we showed up at the designated spot and time. J We watched in amazement as Como climbed up a 70-foot tree and got us a coconut each.  
 
Solution 3: Looking out for a short tree he could reach. So now, he started looking out for short coconut trees on our drives. He had to learn to find short trees that weren't in someone's yard and had coconuts that looked ripe. 

It became our favorite activity and we all were scouting for a tree that fit the bill. We found one outside Mt. Obama peak. He climbed up on my shoulders and tugged and twisted but couldn't get it. :O Perhaps it wasn’t ripe enough or we needed a special tool?
 
In the not living of this dream (yet), he (and we all) had some rich experiences and made some native friends. Aayansh shares a special connection with Junior and Como at the shack.
 
By not limiting Aayansh, we hope to have nurtured his belief that he can do what he wants. That he doesn’t have to limit himself by the reality of the moment. We hope that he got to explore his dream and learn more about it than he could have had I clipped his wings with my adult mindset.  
 
Our children’s dreams are often larger than their physical abilities and realities. In contrast to children, most of us adults limit ourselves in our mind, don’t we? We limit ourselves in the mind even more than our physical abilities allow it.
 
Where does it come from? This limitation mindset? Our Parents? Teachers? Culture? 
 
I’ve definitely had my moments of nurturing the limitation mindset as a protective parent. Are we being too protective? What is the trade-off for being practical? Are we clipping our children’s wings a bit too early?
 
What are ways that we clip our own wings every single day? Can we give ourselves the benefit of exploring our dreams in our minds so that perhaps we might explore the journey of having them in reality? And not be defeated before even starting?
 
What questions does this raise about the kind of children we want for the future? What will serve them long after we’re gone? Will they benefit from asking questions that haven’t been asked, pursuing dreams that haven’t been dreamed up yet?
 
These are definitely questions that I don’t pretend to know the answers to. I definitely find them worth introspecting and I hope you do too. 

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The Sweetest Valentine!

2/21/2019

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The Giving In Receiving!

School opened after ten days of snow closures. When I made it to school, I met a friend that lives a mile away from our home. They hadn't had electricity for 3 days!!! 

Their house was a freezing. They had been huddling by the fire to keep warm. On the second night, they had found a hotel for a night. I was surprised and couldn't comprehend why they hadn't reached out. 

They came over to our house later that day. Our children are the same age and they had the best time playing around, giggling, snuggling up together for bedtime. Our friends and us finally found the space to connect with each other and had some heartwarming conversations.

We all shared a Valentine's treat with heart chocolates and marzipan, my friend had brought for everybody! It was the most unconventional and sweetest Valentine celebration we had as two families!

I reflected back on why they hadn't reached out earlier. Was it the assumption of giving trouble to others? Was it that I hadn't occurred to her? Or the idea of help hadn't occurred to her? Or perhaps help is something we all reserve as the last resort for the worst survival kind of circumstances?

I reflected back on times when I've been so wrapped up in my troubles, it didn't even occur to ask for help. The atomistic lifestyle of 'being on my own' has showed up as a habit for me for sure. 

Is there an under the surface stigma associated with seeking help for you? Is there a connection between seeking help and opening oneself to being judged and not understood?

Does that make us a 'less than' and perhaps deprive us of the reward of not 'making it on our own'?  Has getting help become too much of a last resort for us?


Whatever it was, the reality of our mutual experience was far from that. As we opened our home to them, they gave us the opportunity to slow down, sit, talk, connect.

I used the opportunity to be a little imperfect. I welcomed them to my not perfectly clean house, a meal cooked with warmth and not perfection and a not so perfect guest bedroom, which my friend has named the 'Black Hole Suite' as an invitation to retrieve deep into a space so far away, it provided her the gift of sound sleep. 

My teacher Jeff Haller, says that a good Feldenkrias lesson is one in which the practitioner receives as s/he is giving to the client. He goes on to say that the hallmark of a good lesson is that both practitioner and client arrive at a place they have never been before.

They arrive there because they took the leap into the not knowing. The practitioner lets go off the idea of delivering perfectly known processes and outcomes. The practitioner embraces unpredictability and the lesson evolves from a mutual listening and quite conversation and trust between two nervous systems.

They both are intelligent givers and receivers. None is superior or better or the teacher. They both are students in this journey of giving and receiving at the same time. 

Would you be open to giving another, the opportunity to support you and receive at the same time? 

Do you have some beliefs about seeking help? What are they? Are they entrenched in past history that makes it hard to let go? What happens in your mind, as you even consider the suggestion of seeking support a bit earlier than you might have? Or perhaps, in areas that you might not have looked for support?

Warmly,
Shrutee

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Being the 'fairest one of all!' Why was that SO important?!

2/17/2019

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How's this 'snowed in' situation going for you? That is, if you're in Seattle! 

Thanks to school closures, we had to press pause on some things. What I didn't realize is that pressing pause on some 'important things' would open a whole new door of reflection on what's really important?

We've had a whole immersion of family time! My son and I were up early one morning. As I sat by the window gazing at the winter wonderland outside, my son brought me the SnowWhite book to read to him. 

So we were reading 'Snow-white' and I wondered to myself, "Whats up with this Queen? Why is she so obsessed with being the 'fairest of all'? She literally depends on it for her survival! In our version of the book, she dies at the end because she couldn't bear not being the fairest.

It got me thinking. What is it that I am so attached to that it defines my existence? What is it that is critical for my survival, mostly in my head? What are my deeply ingrained belief systems that are running my daily behaviors? 

I remembered my days in the college hostel. I was so attached to the idea of showering before heading out that on days I got up late and had just 5 minutes to get my breakfast before the cafeteria closed, I would go hungry because it would take me longer than 5 minutes to shower and make it in time.

Now you could dismiss this as a silly idiosyncrasy or perhaps a good habit taken too far.  As I continued to ponder about why this was so important to me, I remembered how being prim and proper was a big part of my growing up.

As much as I am grateful for the good habits and values I have inherited, somewhere along in my life, the good habit turned into a belief system about some kind of perfection that began to deplete my sense of caring for myself.

Because I had to be a certain way for the world, I would go all the way to host the perfect dinner or birthday party for my child that it didn't matter if my own back hurt like hell at the end of it. This was also the same belief that led me to vacuum the house two weeks after I gave birth to my daughter. 

You can see that I took to this behavior like a fish to water. After all, my mom, known to be the best hostess and someone I looked up to as a strong woman had demonstrated it scores of times. The bar was so high, I wasn't going to beat my sweet mom even in my dreams, but I was going to give it all I got.

Thats was the right thing to do! And the funny thing is I was doing it without even being aware that that was driving my daily behaviors. 

And here's the real kicker when it comes to relationships. When it was beyond my own capacity to live up to this perfection, I would recruit my husband, Anshul to fulfill my promise of perfection to the world. And that raises another question, Do I love Anshul more than the world? What is the world even comprised of? 

But of course, I love him more than anyone else. So then there another opportunity here isn't it?
The opportunity to examine my thoughts and beliefs. To have my thought and behavior be consistent with the beliefs that matter most to me.

So, what's REALLY IMPORTANT to you? Is that driving your everyday behavior? Or are you being run by some deep, deep, subconscious belief way back from your history? Your childhood, your teenage years?

Was it something that someone said to you, and you have taken it upon yourself to live up to or to defy beyond limits? Is this consistent with whats really important to you or are you running cross-motivations?


In Feldenkrais lessons, we study cross-motivations in the context of movement. A simple example would be that I want to lift my hand and bring it to the computer but I am doing everything else in my body to make my hand heavier and sink instead of lifting. One obvious of this  consequence could be that my shoulder or arm hurts.

When we take the time to examine these cross-motivations in the context of a movement lesson, we come to know ourselves deeply. We know how our movement habits are tied to our deeply held beliefs. We can see what was hidden in plain sight. As an example, we can see how our habit of extending in our spine is related to how we had to confront our life circumstances so that we would be ok. 

We can examine these habits and underlying beliefs and if they are causing us much pain, we can let go off them in safety. We can be unhinged and available to respond.  

We can move in any direction without hesitation! That is Moshe Feldenkrais's definition of biological fitness.

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