One of my all-time favorite yoga teachers is Peter Crowley. Since last October my yoga practice has been on hiatus as I was receiving Graston body-work and was told to stop Yoga for a while. Today I returned to Peter's class and my yoga practice. 

Peter is an extraordinary teacher. What makes him so is his slow flow invitation to connect intentionally and intimately with our body. Each class I walk away feeling alive and deeply appreciative for my human vessel that is - quite remarkably - amazing. If you want to love your body in a new way, visit his class. 

Join Peter Crowley Monday & Friday mornings at On The Mat in Concord. 

Click here to learn more about Peter!

three hundred dollars is the amount of cash
this man carried to Canada fifty years ago,
safety-pinned in the inside pocket of his jacket,
moving with my mom and their nine boxes in a taxi
from one furnished apartment to another
where she starched and pressed his white shirts
and, as legend has it, he warmed her side of the bed.
my dad has never been in my office or any shrink's,
but I think he would approve of my brass sign,
leather chairs and final gold-framed diploma,
if not the B.A. that was not to be worth its paper,
a comment he forgets but I fondle like a sore tooth,
even as I know now that that pin pricked him yet
in his rainbow of golf shirts in his solid brick bungalow,
springing open to remind him to tell me, to teach me,
so I would never need to pawn my typewriter for supper,
even though we've both used computers for decades.
I want to murmur shush now there is enough,
but I need to practice with myself a little longer yet.

three hundred dollars is the difference
between a welfare and a disability cheque,
and that's a lot of tuna, dented or otherwise,
I keep reminding myself as I interview this man,
but my nose is tabulating the layers of stench
from his five smoky shirts, forty gnomish nails,
twenty mossy teeth, and one encrusted scalp instead.
and my mind keeps nexting to my plans
for arcs of air-freshener when he leaves my office,
until the meagerness of my grace disgusts me more
than the filthy container of his collapsed self,
and I return to my questions and his blatherings,
forging them into steely words and checkmarks
to jam between the government's cubicled cogs
that keep sending him get a job letters he cannot read.
there will be no box for his delight in birdwatching,
but in my surprised heart, glimpsing his soul
as he did the scarlet tananger, a rare sweet sighting
in the thickets of my everyday assumptions.

three hundred dollars is the Holt Renfrew price
of this man's silk tie, an impeccable noose
around his cologned throat that has gasped and choked
above his frantic chest and curdled bowels
in such clutches of terror he thought he was dying.
but the emerg scrolls of his pulse, like polygraphs,
testified to the ancient cascades for flight or fight,
not a heart attack, and so now he is here with me
to talk body and mind and their million years' headstart
on Armani, Blackberry, and six percent commission.
sometimes I look in his earnest eyes and see my days
of pretending I had many years to make sandcastles
as I dictated reports on dysfunction in beach parking lots,
but sometimes I let myself get lulled by my tales
of at least upon a time (I helped people, we were broke,
I took some holidays, I wore Birkenstocks),
until his tears reawaken my willingness to hold truth
and the duped paperboy and abashed Girl Guide
can share a moment's rest on our steep paths to now.

December 2007