I was so stressed yesterday. While I should probably honor the line between professional and personal I'll tell ya the story anyway. I practiced Sunday and Monday. Both days, good, strong, solid practices. I am looking forward to practicing once again. I admit to using it somewhat as an escape but I also don't really care. I had planned out Monday evening carefully.... gonna practice, setup the issued laptop, sleep... get up early, practice at the studio here and then go spend another hour of practice before my presentation.

It started with the laptop being unable to connect with the VPN and, therefore, unable to join the domain and, therefore, unable to be useful. Then I had a meeting invite to review the content that started at 8am in Redmond so I knew I wasn't going to be able make yoga... I couldn't sleep as was expected. The meeting left me feeling that I needed a more technical demo so we were gonna hook that up... but I ended up spending 6 hours trying to get a machine working in order to write the code that needed to be written to do the demo. I got it done 15 minutes before the presentation. Then when I got the presentation, my laptop wouldn't connect... the AV guy had to come... so I started the presentation pulling a copy of my deck from the cloud (ooo THE cloud - if you aren't tech, you won't know). I went too fast and I forgot to say half of what I was gonna say and the audience was so serious and it felt wierd... and then when I flipped to my laptop to do the demo, I took down the entire presentation software so that the screen would only show blue no matter how we tried to do it. I didn't even get to do the demo and ended up having a conversation. I was sweating bullets and I felt like I failed. I was pretty embarrassed. In fact, I was just hammered.

I reached out to the person I love most and asked for a hug. I felt much better after. I was so crazy and so stressed. Then I wrote an email to my boss and lead telling them that I felt it didn't go well. I watched a movie and I went to bed.

I woke up to ladies holiday :( :( Jason and Tara are coming to town tomorrow and I had booked the time on my calendar to practice. We'll see how I feel in the morning... I may have to buck the rules on this one.

But then I got my email... and my lead responded to my email "I knew you did tank. You're too hard on yourself." and included the scores from my presentation... and, you know what? They were good... very good.

I wish I could say it made me feel better. But, the truth is, it wasn't my most stellar performance and that's why I was embarrassed. I'm much better than that and I'll have to give it another shot ;-)

I realized after that how much I needed to let go of the stress. I have so much stress inside me. So I wrote another email revealing the deepest darkest secret I have... and it was received okay (of course, the understanding of the actual situation isn't there yet)... and I began to let go... of all the stress.... don't get me wrong I'm not cured but I am feeling more solid. I'll figure my way through all of this one day at a time.

Before I go, I have to mention the one coolest thing that happened to me all week. I was in the grocery store (my new favorite one Metropolitan Market) walking down an aisle when this little boy, probably 3, his little brother in the cart and the dad pushing... walks towards me, very determined, holds out his arms and says 'I'm going to hug you.' I didn't know what to do at first so I put down my basket and said "You are?" He said "Yes" and he came and hugged me! It was so sweet. I told him thanks, that I missed my kids and getting a hug felt really nice. I'm not sure if his dad was mortified or not but it really made my day.

Every night I open a book of poetry and I just open it... and whatever is on the two pages present is what I try to digest. Tonight I read through 4 poems before I discovered that Today's Rumi is one of my favorites. I have faith.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing
there is a field. I'll meet you there.

Ideas, language, even the phrase each other,
doesn't make any sense.