Heart Like a Wheel: Spinning and Fibre Arts as Meditation Practice: Life is a Highway: Travelling the Yoga and Fibre Road

When we walk the path of yoga and meditation, there's no end to the journey, at least while you're on this planet. You take yoga practice as far as you like - you can experiment with a few postures and stop there, go a little further along the path with meditation, or spend your life exploring the meaning and value of sustained practice. What you do and where you go is up to you, with one caveat: if you decide that you've found "the answer" to it all, your practice will come to a halt. Once you think you've stumbled across the true meaning of life, you've lost it. Yoga travels along an endless, meandering path; that thing you think is home is really a giant boulder, an obstacle in your road.

It's that way with spinning, knitting and fibre arts, too. As long as we continue to explore the arts we love, we continue to learn. Although I have decades of spinning and knitting behind me, there are mountains of knowledge I haven't climbed. Even small things can bring us joy when we discover them for the first time.

The crocheted blanket is coming along nicely.

I learned Norwegian cast on yesterday. It's a simple variation on Long Tail cast on, but provides a stretchy edge which is great for socks. I learned this technique from a DVD in the Deluxe Edition of The Knitter's Companion, by Vicki Square. I have the earlier edition and it's wonderful, but I'd meant to update to the new one. Sharon at Golden Willow gave me a copy of the new version on Saturday. It was a wonderful, helpful gift and the DVD's contain many demonstrations of things I do not know.

I know a fair bit about knitting, including several cast on methods, finishing techniques and blocking methods, but if I had decided that I knew all I needed to know about knitting, I would have missed the information contained in this knitting guide. By staying open to new possibilities, I now have fresh ideas which can improve my own work and which may help me with my teaching. What I learned isn't earth-shattering, but it's new and fresh and helps to keep my brain active.

The next time you are offered new possibilities and are undecided about taking them, ask yourself this: further down the road, will I regret not taking the opportunity to do . . . ? If the answer is "yes," then take the leap. At worst, you can only fail; sometimes failure is our best teacher.

If I didn't step away from the obstacle of knowing-it-all, I'd never have explored linking spinning, knitting and fibre arts to meditation. If I believed I knew all I needed to know about yoga, I'd never taken a class I'm enjoying thoroughly. If I thought there was no way I could guide a yoga therapy class, I would never have been given the opportunity to teach one.

It's fine to take a break from whatever you are exploring in life, but never stop travelling. There are so many learning opportunities, even if those opportunities are small things, like a new way to start your knitting or a variation on how you build your spindle cop. It's the small things that enrich us and expand our world. Keep exploring.

Namaste.