It seems there’s a blizzard every week here! It started to snow today, but the real stuff is tomorrow. Will likely be a “work from home” kind of day.

Interesting happenings, these days! I had an amazing hot yoga session last night. It was more difficult than I thought it’d be, but I think it was exactly what I needed. It was a Spring Equinox Yoga workshop, and the focus was all about intentions, and manifestation, and setting the pace for Spring and everything that comes with it. Stepping out of the mud, peeling back the layers, all of it.

Honestly, to some people, no matter how you frame it… sometimes talking about this kind of thing never goes more than surface level. It sounds nice, or it sounds weird, or it sounds like total BS. It didn’t hit me until last night in this class that unless your whole self, whole presence and whole mind is behind something you want to change or have happen, it’s like flying a plane with no pilot, or a car with no steering wheel. Where’s your direction?

So… back to this class. It was the first hot class I’d done in a while. It takes a LOT to get me to sweat, which didn’t seem to be a problem last night. I lift weights, quite heavily, 6 days a week. I ride. I exercise. I eat healthy (except for my beloved cheeseburgers now and again). We started moving in this class and I was SO not in sync with what was going on. I was concerned with my towel bunching up, I touched the girl’s hand behind me with my foot, thought about how strange I must’ve looked trying to balance in this position when, apparently, I seemed to have lost my ability to balance in any direction.

That’s when it hit me. I am literally ignoring the very reason I am in this class. I am here to shed the nonsense, start fresh, press the reset button… and here I am still flopping around in the mud.

I did a mental check of why I was denying myself the ability to just disconnect from everything around me, and more literally than figuratively, I was just holding on to everything I shouldn’t have been. Have you ever grabbed  your laundry out of the dryer and tried to carry it all upstairs in your arms? Dropping socks, picking them up only to drop more… and so on, and so on. It was time I just drop it all and walk away.

It’s both a blessing and a curse to be so acutely aware of these “Aha!” moments. It was as if I heard the record rewind, and I thought to myself… ‘Okay, why did I even bother coming if I’m just going to sit here and worry about all this crap?’ After that point, I pushed through my shaking muscles, the stretching, and didn’t care if I wasn’t as limber as I once was when going through my sequences. No one else cared what I was doing, not one bit. No one else would suffer from me being distracted, except me. The rest of the class went like a breeze. We then sampled some interesting juice, and off we were.

The moral of the story here — whenever you have your “aha!” moment, you’ll get it. Unless you’re there, wherever you are, 100%… you’re at a standstill. and that’s on purpose — that’s the universe’s way of saying “hey! big plans need your full attention!” Once you’ve trained yourself to put yourself in the here-and-now, you can set the pace however you went when you shed all the crap you’re holding onto, preventing you from changing whatever it is that you want.

For now, enjoy this delicious little snack! you can eat it on crackers, in a wrap, however you want.

Jalapeno Popper Chicken Salad (Paleo)

Prep time: 20 min

cook time: n/a

serves 3-4 as a meal, 6-8 as an app

Ingredients

• 1 rotisserie chicken, white meat picked out (set aside dark meat for another use!)
• 1 large jalapeno, minced; ribs and seeds removed
• 1 lb. of bacon, cooked until crisp
• 1/2 of a red onion, finely chopped
• 2/3 cup paleo mayonnaise
• 2 tbsp apple cider vinegar, plus more to taste
• pinch of sea salt

Directions

1. In a small mixing bowl, whisk together mayonnaise, apple cider vinegar and sea salt. adjust to taste. if it’s too tangy, add a bit more mayo and whisk. Likewise, add more vinegar or salt if needed. Set aside.
2. Place your chicken in a large mixing bowl. Using a hand mixer (or fork if you’re really old-school), shred chicken until desired consistency. It should be fine and stringy, like pulled pork, enough to thoroughly mix with the sauce.
3. Crumble your bacon and add to the bowl of chicken, along with jalapeno and red onion. Gently mix until combined.
4. Now add your sauce — again, gently stir until combined. Garnish with slices of jalapeno. Enjoy!

-S