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Writer's pictureShelby Elsbree Yoga

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So much to binge... so little time.


Does anyone else feel like the past 5 months have simultaneously flown/lulled their way by? Gone are my New Years resolution hopes of embracing the year of 20/20 vision (lmao)... feels like 9 lives ago.


On any given night these days, my fam and I have been second-helping ourselves to berry cobblers and 'court-side' consumption of The Last Dance — much to my chagrin, this 10-episode documentary has absolutely nothing to do with ballet... rather spanning the length of Michael Jordan's air-born career as a mentor/model/SpaceJam/Basketball Star.


... I've always had a sweet spot for the story of a climb. On a recent coffee date *with myself, I came to the shameless realization that the secrets to life we seek can all be found in that section of the book store where self-help meets memoir. The genre-marriage that documentaries are quite literally made of... combining bullet points with character-building stories of humans being (both less than and super) human... all while life gets in the way of "the plan".


Getting up close & personal glimpses of grit behind glory give me hope when I feel hope is lost.


It's easy to envision MJ flying across courts in his name-brand Nike's, glistening through sweat on his way to another championship title... less digestible, perhaps, to sit with the injuries, relentless press, family trauma and personal pressure that it took to be like Mike every dayplot twists aplenty.


In a moment of sleepless reflection, it occurred to me that this pandemic has forced our world into a historically sidelined-season (to say the least). Never have timelines, goals, plans and purpose felt more confusing, untethered, irrelevant.


There's a thing yoga teacher's say. If you haven't heard it, you've read it in a meme or watched it on an SNL parody: Root down, Rise up... Root to Rise.


The idea is to embody moving in two directions at the same time. Up with your fingers...down with your feet. A kind of forward momentum/backward strength that shows up as a "pose" on your mat and a "path"off of it. The simple truth being that you can't have the satisfaction of one without the stability of the other.


At the moment, the world team is benched. Agonizing over a "new normal," masked faces and fear of exposure... when in reality, we've probably never been more collectively exposed, unmasked, and normalized as vulnerable humans, being. We've found ourselves in a humbling season of rooting down, both further & longer than we ever anticipated.


It is my personal belief that we can only go as high as we've gone low. Physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually... the depths to which we've fallen fuel the flight in equidistance — AirJordan style.


The rise is coming.


...tell me what you're reading/watching/digesting these days & let's flow about it.

 

Shameless Self-Help/Memoir Bookshelf:

  • Untamed, Glennon Doyle

  • Becoming, Michelle Obama

  • Home: A Memoir of My Early Years, Julie Andrews

  • Home Work: A Memoir of my Hollywood Years, Julie Andrews

  • My Life in France, Julia Child

  • Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep, Michael Schulman

  • Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the creator of Nike, Phil Knight

  • Raising the Bar: Integrity and Passion in Life and Business, Gary Erikson

  • Big Magic: Creative Living beyond Fear, Elizabeth Gilbert

  • Designing your Life, Dave Evans & Bill Burnett

  • Rising Strong, Brené Brown

Docs to accompany dessert:

  • The Last Dance, Netflix

  • Becoming, Netflix

  • Jiro Dreams of Sushi, Netflix

  • Chef's Table (any & all), Netflix

  • Somm, Amazon Prime

  • Miss Americana, Netflix

  • GAGA: Five foot two, Netflix



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