This is a letter to my creativity coach Sara (new website!)
Before our call I always give her a headsup.

Dear Sara,

I m writing this from an offline computer, waiting for a mechanic to come. My internet connection is being changed today. I was supposed to stay online with my old provider, until they got a message from the new one the transfer and installation had been successful but that was all theory it seems.
So I woke up in a disconnected world, or the modern day equivalent of that, I woke up without wifi.

Last time we spoke about my assignment for these two weeks to see how I could develop my skill and build a new brand and career in yoga, and -more importantly- how to build the international community I think it’s for.

My estimate had been that it could take up to 5 years before the pre-Covid structures of yoga studios had been rebuilt.
Which would mean I would have to teach online for years, before a real life opportunity would come to see each other.

Before we can have as many people in a room as we want.
Before we can travel without restrictions.
Before we stop seeing the person next to us on the yoga mat as a friend, instead of needing confirmation first that person is vaccinated, tested, or require a medical explanation for every cough or sneeze.

Now that I had finally seen my vision and received my calling to bring yoga to an international community I was already bonding with, but also knew (or had concluded from dropping the activity like a hot potato) that I did not want to make public yoga videos to build up a community in anticipation of the post-Covid world;
Now that I knew I was dying of loneliness and craved for a larger circle of social interactions, and that this needed to be attended to before I could even think of investing in an online one;
Then what?

I recognized that after 20 months of Covid, my intimate connections had started to suffer from the unnatural vacuum they had been forced to exist.
Meaningful interaction can only be freely enjoyed by the grace of friendships and encounters that are more casual and less deep.

If I wanted my deeper friendships and family ties to survive, I needed to invest in creating a circle, locally, revolving around doing something lighthearted and fun.

Just thinking about these questions, and going over the scenarios in my head, was helpful.
This letter has clarity around the specifics of for whom etcetera, that I we did  not know when we talked.
And then I had two really big wins. Two wins in which everything I had always said I did, and wanted to do, came together.

The first was that I decided to start teaching yoga for friends again.
That I was not going to teach yoga as an official yoga teacher, and wasn’t offering courses or multiple series of classes because I never want to give money back, or reschedule when we have new Covid legislation.
For example, we’re currently on a 5PM lockdown.
All yoga teachers had to take their evening classes online or reschedule.

My focus for teaching will be real life connection.
Being a writer I spend so much time online and behind my computer, I crave real life human connection. My writing has suffered from real life interaction marginalizing due to Covid.

I need more than just the inner-inner circle I have kept contact with the past 1.5 years. And this real life connection will be to teach yoga to friends now, and once Covid regulations are released and we can have a bigger group and I can invite former students.
After that comes the building of the new yoga community; new people I do not know yet.
This is when strangers, or people with a common interest which does provide some familiarity, can be in a room together, without feeling uncomfortable.

So the first big win was seeing that I could start teaching the smallest of groups of friends, real life yoga, and I m looking for a yoga studio to teach it in.
This will probably be first week 2022 before it’s final, but it still feels like progress.  

* one groggy night and a full day later *

Copied and pasted this from Word to WordPress. 

I went to bed on time but had such a bad night the Wednesday is going down the drain again. And I feel restless. Less sure that I had the two wins, or less sure that they are enough….
Second win have not told you about. But I will!

There’s two things missing:
1. The new type of yoga, Rock Star Yoga, for the new community I want to teach post-Covid
There is no development, no yoga lab, there is no sharing of what I know, there is no teaching.
I get that being on YouTube in spandex, especially now that I am overweight and middle-aged, is making me uncomfortable.
But not sharing Rock Star Yoga in any form and leaving it not just on the back burner until post Covid, leaving it non-existent for years….. That’s not good either.
This needs to improve.
and
2. Any yoga for myself, is also dearly missing.
And my nights are haunted by hot flashes, anxiety disorders, and possibly a heart condition that cardiologists write hefty books about warning menopausal women that they need to go on meds.
I started getting the complaints in 2018 or 2019, but they disappeared entirely, until about 6 weeks ago they returned (although much milder than a few years back), making their comeback together with this year’s four month fallout of losing the first half of my day, compensating for horrible nights.

Damn.
And that was me thinking I had gotten over the first (the heart complaints) and that the Lost-Half-Days syndrome had ended in September.

So.
Honoring my resistance to showing up in spandex at this stage, yet also acknowledging my desire to not wait out the pandemic before I start my new international yoga career, I ve decided to get back to restoring my old yoga video database.

And honoring my own health which is in dire need of an upgrade, I m not just going to update and share those old videos, but also do them.

So that will result in posting something like:
“Today I practiced these 3 videos from 2017 and added them to the database.”

The plan of teaching online, which I abandoned around the time of our previous letter, was definitely rightfully abandoned.
Real life, local interaction teaching to friends and former students, will be my number one priority and I m not going to torture myself recording new yoga videos at this stage.

But starting by practicing yoga with my own videos and sharing them online, will suffice as the grassroots of my international yoga community.
And prevent an early heart attack.

And I still had to share the second win! 
It’s how I ve tied my yoga, business coaching, free agency, and my writing ALL together into a smoking hot international brand. Under my real name, the extrovert side of me.
I ll send you the business card in an email.

Trust me Sara, when I say that the setup of my new life, my new profession, my exterior to the world as people who know me real life see me;
That is all done.
And it’s exciting, I m going to rock it, and I have no regrets it took me so long, because now it is exactly what I need it to be.

Except we both know of course, that I am more this person here, LS Harteveld, than I am the real me.
The real me, is the stage persona.

And Lauren Harteveld, the introvert, private diarist, is the real me.

The past weeks I have not given Lauren anything to do or to write. The last thing was writing you, two weeks ago.
I have deprived her….

Let’s hope that just like the past two weeks were successful in getting my worldly life back on track, that the final two weeks of this year, I find her back.
Lauren.

Do you know what Harteveld means?
Field of hearts.

Saving my physical heart is one thing.
But there used to be a whole field of them, and I have no idea how they’re doing.