wellness

Starting at “Best of Show” Then Working Backwards

~ Katie Carlson ~ Leave a comment


No one was more surprised than me when the zinnias I grow lovingly in my backyard won a blue ribbon and, even more shocking, the title “Best of Show” at the Indiana State Fair.

I only started growing the zinnias in my backyard three years ago, after one of my friends “gifted” me a bit of landscaping, creating the side garden I’d been dreaming of along my back fence.

My Mom and I have an annual tradition of visiting the Indiana State Fair. This most recent acknowledgement is not the first I received at the State Fair, although nearly 30 years had passed since the last time.

Growing up, my Mom was the 4H (“Head, Heart, Hands, and Health”) Leader at my school. This came with some advantages and disadvantages.

I really didn’t take to sewing the way she, a talented seamstress in her own right, did, or wished I would.

And I would get embarrassed by the litany of 4H songs that my Mom would lead at the meetings. These are songs that I have never known anyone else to know besides my Mom and her sisters.

But I still know them all by heart…

“You take a leg from some old table, you take an arm from some old chair, you take a neck from some old bottle, and from a horse, you take some hair, you take some hair. And then you put them all together, with a little twine and glue. I bet I’ll get more loving from a dumb, dumb dummy than I’ll ever get from you!”

Then at the end there she would point directly at some unassuming, pre-pubescent 11 year old boy in the grade below me at school, whose eyes would go wide upon being singled out as an unintelligent heartbreaker by his 4H Leader.

But there were a lot of things I loved about 4H, too. In fact, it’s how I became friends with one of my lifelong best friends, Katie.

And while I might not have liked sewing, I liked being in the fashion shows. And I enjoyed baking, which led to the aforementioned State Fair honors. I think it was the “Black Lake Muffins” that had won. This was my Mom’s time machine of a recipe that zaps me right back to joyous childhood memories of eating fresh-baked muffins every morning on the quaint Michigan lake with my Dad’s side of the family.

So once I started growing the zinnias in my backyard, I noticed myself scoping out the zinnia competition on our annual trip to the Fair. Last year, I made a “note to self” to enter.

The level of communication throughout the process of entering the Floriculture competition left something to be desired. I was consistently confused. I couldn’t find the rules. I couldn’t find the drop-off information. I didn’t know if vases were provided, or if I provided my own. An initial email went unanswered, but a later phone call was, and the helpful staffer or volunteer answered my questions.

The day of drop off, July 30th, I was multi-tasking. I’d forgotten I had therapy that morning, so while I was recounting the previous week of my life to my therapist, I was going over my zinnias with a tape measure and scissors. I had entered four competitions total: one bloom under three inches, three blooms under three inches, one bloom over three inches, and three blooms over three inches. So I needed to find the best eight. During the selection process, I lost confidence. Especially in the three blooms over three inches category.

I placed them in their vases and packed them up to travel to the Fairgrounds. Once inside the Fairgrounds, I had only a vague idea of where I should go, and wound up parking along the Midway with my blinkers on.

When I entered the colosseum, I was told that they supposedly sent out tags for us to mark our own entries. Like every other step along the way, I had no idea, but the very kind people working the check in were able to print off copies for me.

I was still feeling less than confident, but I was happy when I pointed out some unique coloring on one of the zinnias I had entered in the three blooms under three inches competition, and the volunteer gave a genuine “oooooh!”

A few days later, once the Fair had begun, I looked online for the results, and was confused (again). The results said “2025”, but I wasn’t seeing my name anywhere on any of the lists. Nor was I seeing the results for 1st, 2nd, or 3rd place. (Frankly, I didn’t realize that “Best of Show” was even a possibility.) So while I questioned whether or not I had even entered the contest correctly, I just assumed that my entries had not been recognized in any of the categories. And I made peace with that.

After all, the true source of joy from my zinnias doesn’t come from external recognition, but from the careful tending, watering, cutting, arranging, and eventual deseeding and replanting I do each year. The joy is boundless because between the blooms and the seeds they produce, they give me a sense of infinite abundance.

So you can imagine my surprise a couple days later when my friend Anna sent a video of my three blooms over three inches entry, marked with both a blue 1st Place ribbon sticker AND a purple ribbon sticker marked “Honor”. I HAD NO IDEA. I hadn’t received an email, a phone call, nothing!

So I looked back at the results page that had been confusing me a couple of days before, and to my own shock, at the top of the category listed: “Floriculture Division – Zinnias – Award: Best of Show” followed by my name! I couldn’t believe it! Again, I didn’t know that was even possible.

The first person I called was my Mom. The second person I called was my Aunt Nancy.

I had always admired the abundance of zinnias that my Aunt Nancy had been growing on and around our fifth generation family farm in Central Illinois. Aunt Nancy and my Uncle Bruce were high school sweethearts. Uncle Bruce was my Mom’s youngest brother. He died very unexpectedly at age 59, in 2013. So it was a pretty sudden shift from the fifth generation to the sixth, with my youngest cousin Ben now tending to both the land, and the community.

One visit, Aunt Nancy had given me a bag of those zinnia seeds, and at first I wasn’t sure what to do with them. Until my friend gifted me with the side garden, I really didn’t know where to plant them. So they sat in a ziplock bag for a year or two.

When I did plant them, shortly after Mother’s Day, three years ago, I could never have guessed the joy they would bring to my life. I had no idea they would thrive like they did in my back yard, enticing bees and butterflies to dance and flutter around their blooms all summer, and most of the fall. The flowers suddenly were the anchor of a new ecosystem in my backyard, an ecosystem that very much includes me. In fact, it’s hard for me to say exactly where the zinnias end and I begin. They feel like a part of me.

So after things started to settle down from that “holy shit! I won!” moment, I started to ask myself “Why?” and “How?” Out of the four categories I entered, I didn’t place or receive an honorable mention in either single bloom categories. I did receive an honorable mention in the three blooms under three inches (the ones with the pretty coloring).

So how on earth did my entry in the category I felt least confident in wind up being selected by the judges as the best out of every zinnia in the competition?

I was perplexed, so I took it to ChatGPT. Basically: “Hey Chat, why did these three flowers win best of show?”

It started to explain to me some of the qualities that judges look for in floriculture competitions, something that I would have been wise to explore PRIOR to submission. 

It said they look for vibrancy (the bright pink meets that mark), uniformity (something that I thought was a disadvantage when I turned in three nearly identical blooms), and then things like health, structure and strength.

I started to realize that this all had something to do with my own instincts, and the relationship I had with my zinnias.

Then I asked: “Do you think it has anything to do with the fact that I brought my own vase?”

Chat said that it’s “very likely” to have had an impact because presentation matters. So it wasn’t just about the quality of the blooms, but the overall aesthetic, too.

Again, instinct was at play, because it would be very much unlike me to leave the vessel of my zinnias to chance. 

With more time for this exciting win to settle, other aspects of my relationship to my zinnias started to make more sense. Like how every year, following the instructions of Aunt Nancy, I started drying out the flowers and deseeding them to plant the next Spring.

The first time I did it, I was terrified that I would do it wrong, and lose this legacy line of zinnias. But that next Spring, they bloomed again, and I knew that whatever I had done worked. With each year of planting more and more zinnias, I reap more and more seeds. I save every single bloom, especially those that I cut to bring inside. And I keep separate the seeds from my inside bouquets from those that remained on the stem.

So inadvertently, I’ve been selectively breeding the zinnias that I’d chosen to brighten my home with pink bursts.

But then I started thinking about the heritage of these seeds. 

I don’t just cultivate zinnias, I cultivate a meaningful relationship with my ancestors. These ancestor acknowledgements started with one of my teachers, Ashley, but deepened through my own practice, honoring, and my understanding of my nervous system.

From my work and studies, I know that my nervous system is not just mine, but something that has been passed down to me. My nervous system, wired for survival and recovery, has been inherited through the DNA of my parents and every ancestor of mine since the dawn of humanity – and millions of years before. So when I say something like “writing is in my blood” from my Dad, that’s not a stretch. And so maybe there’s something inherited about these zinnias, too.

Just as I do now, my Aunt Nancy had cultivated these seeds year after year. But they weren’t growing just anywhere. They were growing on the rich, fertile, black Illinois soil that my family has been farming for over a Century. The land where my Mom grew up.

But when I called Aunt Nancy to tell her about the “Best of Show” nod, she told me that she had inherited the seeds as well, through a favorite relative of hers through her father, Alice Gorden. She also told me a story about a day when she went to visit Alice, who was elderly, to find her on the floor. She got down on the floor with her and Alice asked her if she was “Helen Louise”.

Helen Louise was my grandmother, though I don’t have any memory of her because she died suddenly of a heart attack when I was six months old. She’s also my namesake… my middle name is Helen.

And while I didn’t know her, I look at her picture every day.

I didn’t realize it until more recent years… the unimaginable pain of losing your mother right after having your first child. Right when you need your Mom the most. I don’t know how my Mom managed, because this girl (me) was completely dependent on her for life, and had no idea or sympathy for what was happening.

But something I think about a lot is this: My Mom is able to see her Mom in me… the physical features, the personality traits, but I’m not able to recognize those traits in her.

Aunt Nancy said that she was honored that, in that moment on the floor, Alice would associate her with Helen Louise. She was a pillar of her community, and always willing to step up to help someone in need. This is a quality that rubbed off – if not inherited – on all who knew her, or so I hear. 🙂

Who knows where or how Alice got the seeds, but I sure would love to know. 

Still… the seeds have been passed down through generations, and nourished on ancestral land. They were already very special before they ever ended up in my possession. 

And I suppose knowing how to take care of them, how to be in relationship with them, and how to help them thrive is something that came naturally to me. After all, I come from a long and impressive line of 4Hers. And cultivating seeds into joy is about as good of a use of our hands, head, heart, and health that I can think of.

Sweet Clarity: Choosing to Feel, Heal, and Shine

~ Katie Carlson ~ 1 Comment

Today marks 100 days with no alcohol! It’s probably the 3rd or 4th time I’ve hit this milestone. I don’t consider myself “sober”. I don’t like that word very much. And at this moment, I don’t foresee alcohol in my future. But you have to know yourself, and I know telling myself “never” or “forever” doesn’t work for me.

I’ve never considered myself an alcoholic. I never hit a rock bottom. My choices while using alcohol never negatively affected or impacted other people. If anything, I become more bubbly and pleasant with a couple drinks in me.

But there came a point, about six or seven years ago, when I realized that I couldn’t remember the last time I had gone a day without two or three glasses of wine. That pattern settled in without me realizing it. Numbing had long been one of my ‘go-to’ responses to a series of traumatic events in my teens and early twenties. As a young adult working in the toxic and hard-partying environment of the Indiana Statehouse, alcohol-fueled evenings became the norm. In 2012, I went through a challenging divorce while managing a Congressional campaign in Southern Indiana, and the two to three glasses of wine a day became a balm.

Then I began my career in public safety. I fell in love with the field, but I went from living in the green to living in the orange, a heightened state of stress and vigilance. Suddenly, I was ultra aware of every bad thing happening in my community, and as the sole Public Information Officer, I was on call to the media 24/7/365.

The first time I took a break from alcohol was like a punch in the face. Without my rosé-colored glasses, I looked at my life and I did not like what I saw. I didn’t like how I was spending my time, I didn’t like how I looked, I didn’t like how people were treating me. I was neglecting my health, my passions, and my boundaries.

I was going through a program called “Hip Sobriety” that I’d stumbled across on Instagram. The founder, Holly Whitaker, eventually wrote a book “Quit Like a Woman”. I’d highly recommend it.

And while I didn’t stay “dry” beyond that 8 week program (it had never been my intention)… my eyes were open, and I couldn’t unsee what I saw.

Three things all happened around the same time. I stopped drinking for the first time and began a long conversation with myself about my relationship to alcohol. I found my current therapist! I don’t know what I would do without her. And I signed up for Yoga Teacher Training. It was something that I had always wanted to do, but it was never the right time. After the “sobering” view of my life, I decided that I was doing it, and nothing was going to stop me. The rest is history.

Obviously, teaching yoga has been deeply transformative for me. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to actually teach at first. My early motivations were more along the lines of education. I knew I wanted to write and talk more about spirituality. Being a yoga teacher could be a platform for that. What I wasn’t expecting was for the philosophy and energy systems behind yoga – aspects of the practice that are often overlooked in Western yoga practices – would begin my journey to healing deep-seated trauma. I also didn’t realize that this healed—or continually healing—version of myself, who once dreamed of sharing these transformative practices with my colleagues in public safety, would soon have the opportunity to create meaningful change in my community and present these practices (and more!) on stage at international conferences.

When I talk about my work, I often tell people that I have to pinch myself that this is really my life. And that’s mostly because this was NOT THE CASE just a handful of years ago.

Over the past several years, there have been times when I have slipped back into old habits, particularly when I’ve been in mourning or when life has just been kicking my ass.

But when I rededicate myself, not to sobriety, but to CLARITY, to feeling all the feels without turning away or numbing, it reminds me of my wholeness, my inner worth, and what I (and all of you) deserve: to wake up in the morning ready to make a difference, and to whole-heartedly reject the ideas, the people, and yes, the substances that dim my inner light.

The Butterfly Effect: On Wanting to Be Something You’re Not

~ Katie Carlson ~ 2 Comments

The Butterfly Effect: On Wanting to Be Something You’re Not

I’ll blame the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad summer I had for this delusion I had of wanting to become a butterfly.

Not an actual butterfly, of course. I know I’m not an insect. But I’d been in such a dark place – from a severe infection on my leg, to losing my sweet, sweet dog Oke, and sustaining injuries in a car wreck that totaled my car- that I saw a light at the end of the tunnel in the form of getting accepted into an exclusive training program.

I had it all planned out. I would travel across the country, I’d knock the socks off the other students and instructors with my experience, my passion, and my knack for teaching. When I came back, I’d re-emerge from the dark cocoon of grief, illness, and injury, brighter, shinier, and ready to make an enormous impact by sharing my new skill set.

But that’s not what happened. Not at all.

Instead of the transformation I’d hoped for, I came back sleep-deprived and disillusioned, a rough version of myself. I even lost four pages of raw reflections I’d written, which I thought might be for the best. 

As I traveled home, inspired by one of my favorite podcasts – “The Emerald Podcast” – I wrote out a long plan for a detox, and a reset. The primary focus of this period of cleansing and renewal would be getting enough sleep, a subject matter that I teach, but know from a lifetime of experience that it’s easier said than done.

Slowly but surely, I started to feel like my normal self again, and for the second time that summer, I pulled myself up out of a deep, dark hole.

The evening I returned home from San Francisco, I met up with one of my best friends for dinner, and over our conversation, it dawned on me: I didn’t need to become someone different. I just needed to come back to myself.  I’m not a butterfly. I’m Katie Carlson. Purposeful, passionate, playful, resilient, unapologetic Katie.

It’s hard to blame myself for wanting life to be different, but I was failing to utilize one of the most powerful tools in my toolbox, me. My truest, most authentic self.

Like many people, particularly women, I struggle with “imposter syndrome”. As a civilian working in the field of law enforcement wellness, I feel pulled between knowing that I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be, doing exactly what I’m supposed to be doing, and a sense of defensiveness, feeling I need to prove that I belong in my field.

This sense of wanting to fit in draws me toward certain modalities of healing and wellness because they are more highly “accepted” in the field of public safety. My belief in the power of these more accepted modalities is deeply real. I’ve witnessed them in action. I’ve watched them work, over and over again. But that doesn’t mean I need them to justify my existence.

One positive thing, however, stuck out from the training. Even in a room of incredibly impressive people, folks with unmistakable credentials in the field, when the topic of conversation turned to holistic wellness practices, like yoga, wellness, and breathwork – and it did on multiple occasions – suddenly my credentials were unmistakable. 

Compared to about 64 hours of training in the widely-accepted healing modality, and another 24-30 as a practitioner, my yoga teacher training was 200 hours, and my meditation teacher training was 300 hours. I’ve taught almost 450 hours of yoga, and about 100 hours of teaching meditation. I’ve spent more than 400 hours, just since 2021, in my own meditation practice, and over 18 years, it’d be impossible to guess how many hours I’ve spent in yoga practice, but at least 1,000.

I don’t need to justify my existence, nor do I need to doubt the impact of my work in the field of public safety. The proof is in the pudding.

This whole thing has given me a much higher degree of compassion for people I see trying to figure out who they are, folks who are trying to figure out the truest version of themselves. So long as they aren’t causing harm, I’ll now try to suspend my judgment of them as inauthentic.

I went through a course recently with one of my favorite teachers, Nikki Myers, called “Healing Secrets, Healing Self”, and she would often reference Michaelangelo’s meticulous work on the statue of David in which discussed the pre-existing completeness of the status, noting that he just needed to chip away at everything that wasn’t David.

Our paths to authenticity, more often than not, are a matter of subtraction, not addition.

Over the course of our lives, we pick up a lot of stories. Families tell us what we should value. Political parties tell us how we should vote. Religious doctrines tell us what we should believe. Industries tell us how we should look. Corporations tell us what our goals should be. Social media accounts tell us how we should be doing in comparison with others.

All of this conditioning, all of these added layers, sediment, if you will, cloud our vision of the truest version of ourselves. The self that has always been there, that will always be there. 

I saw an Instagram post recently that said “Two people to impress: Your 5-year-old self and your 85-year-old self.”

So there’s good news, and there’s bad news. The good news is that we can in fact metamorphosize, though the timeline is different from that of a butterfly. We can transform our bodies, our minds, and our souls. The bad news is that you aren’t going to come out on the other side a different person. Yep, sorry, you’re stuck with you.

All of the physical conditioning and plastic surgery in the world can’t change the purity of your child-like soul and it can’t erase the scars that have been acquired along the way. But you can shed all of the things that you are not.

Unlike the metamorphosis of a butterfly, which is brief and linear, human transformation is cyclical and deeply rooted in our previous life experiences. Our transformation is ongoing, and even our truest, and most authentic versions of ourselves can shift and take new forms over time. 

When you are in your purpose, living your truth, being your most authentic self, it won’t matter what anyone else thinks. You might fall. You probably will, but you’ll fall forward. You might get criticized, but it can’t hurt you.

It might take some shedding, some cleansing, some experimentation to find the real you. But you’ll know it when you find it.

Mirroring and a Yoga Yell: Reflections on Five Years of Teaching Yoga

~ Katie Carlson ~ 1 Comment

Monday, March 4th, 2024 was the five year anniversary of my Community Yoga class in Garfield Park, which means it was also my fifth anniversary of being an actual yoga teacher. I completely missed the anniversary, despite Community Yoga falling on a Monday and on the exact day. 

Our class – and I say “our” because it’s truly a class that belongs to our community – has bounced around to several locations. It began in the Burrello Family Center. About a year in, we were shut down due to COVID, we started back up outside that Fall, we took another pause, started back up outdoors that next Spring, moved inside to the Garfield Park Arts Center, first upstairs, and then downstairs, moved back outside, and now we’re at the Burrello Center again.

You know the saying “the more things change, the more they stay the same”? It was surreal coming back to the Burrello Center. I could feel the flood of terror I felt as a first time yoga teacher wondering what the hell I had gotten myself into, and arriving nearly 45 minutes early every week to walk around the room in circles repeating mantras to myself.

I almost didn’t go through yoga teacher training for one main reason. I’m not great at distinguishing my right from my left, or, it takes considerable thought, and sometimes looking for the “L” shape in my left hand. As a navigator, I drove many drivers crazy by simply pointing and saying “this way” or “that way” or “left, no I mean right!”

It didn’t stop me, though, because I didn’t think that I’d actually want to teach yoga. In fact, I’d convinced myself of that. “It’s just a way for me to get some additional education in the spiritual realm,” I’d say. “I’m mostly just interested in learning more about the philosophy of yoga. I love philosophy!,” I’d reason.

Well, the joke’s on me. 

I didn’t love teaching at first. It terrified me. I had imposter syndrome. I questioned my own authenticity. I picked apart my classes. I picked apart my appearance in the front of the classroom. Ironically, I didn’t start to love teaching until after the pandemic hit.

In the earliest days of the lockdown, I began “Yoga Lunch Breaks” on Facebook Live. A classic millennial, I felt a little more comfortable with a screen between me and my audience. But it became a lot more than that. When people were scared of them and their children and their parents of getting sick and dying, unable to leave their homes or obtain household basics, like cleaning supplies, I learned what it really meant to “hold space”. While acknowledging the fear and uncertainty in the world around us, I had the opportunity to create an accessible practice for people to connect to their body and their breath. It meant a lot to a lot of people, and it still gets brought up from time to time.

Teaching full length classes online, along with the Daily Lunch Breaks, helped me grow more confident as a teacher, and by the time Community Yoga was able to start back up outside, I was hitting my stride.

I had intentionally chosen to wait until I felt comfortable teaching yoga before requesting to teach it at the Marion County Sheriff’s Office Training Academy. I did not want to “practice” on incoming law enforcement personnel. I wanted to know that I could deliver them high quality classes. But by December of 2020, I was ready. One of my dear colleagues, now-Lieutenant Jason Kirlin, who oversees all physical training at the MCSO Academy, attended that first class for Detention Deputies, and immediately included yoga in the physical training of the next Deputy class. Without his belief in the benefits of the practice for law enforcement, I can hardly imagine that I would be in the position that I am today.

By June of 2021, I was teaching at the Indiana Law Enforcement Training Academy, as well as the Indiana State Police Training Academy, thanks to my friend, and an incredible trainer and leader in public safety wellness, Troy Torrence.

The rest, as they say, is history. Once I started teaching incoming law enforcement personnel, I never stopped. I also don’t shut up about it.

Another opportunity landed in my lap during the Summer of 2021. I had the opportunity to go through Mindfulness and Meditation Teacher Training through the Engaged Mindfulness Institute, a training organization under the same umbrella of the Center for Mindfulness in Public Safety, through which I met Troy, and several others who are now good friends.

Like the concern about knowing my left from my right, I had concerns about becoming a meditation teacher, too. Primarily, that I didn’t meditate that much. The opening “silent retreat” via Zoom almost killed me. I’d gone from meditating sometimes for about twenty minutes to being expected to meditate for hours a day. If I hadn’t been home by myself, I might have killed someone. I thought I had made a big mistake.

But as the training went on, I was soothed by a heavy emphasis on philosophy (“I love philosophy!”). Then, as we got into the techniques of teaching, not just teaching, or guiding meditations, but facilitating, something clicked in me. For years before I had been a volunteer at Girls Incorporated of Greater Indianapolis. I taught hundreds and hundreds of girls, usually between the ages of 9 and 11, in a variety of life skills, like conflict management and media savvy. I loved teaching the girls, but eventually parted ways with the organization. For a while, I felt that I didn’t have much to show for that investment in time (hundreds of hours over eight years). But as I began to facilitate meditation courses, I realized that not only did I have hundreds of hours in facilitation practice, but that training willing or required (in the case of recruits) adults is WAY easier than 9 to 11 year old girls. That transference of skill was such a blessing.

I’ll admit it. While I LOVE teaching yoga, I love teaching mindfulness and meditation even more. I think it’s a matter of accessibility…something that has always been very important to me. So while it would be unreasonable to expect everyone to love yoga (although I try to teach it in a way that makes it feel as good as possible), everyone, and I mean everyone, can benefit from mindfulness and meditation.

It makes me giggle because I remember in yoga teacher training when my teacher, the beloved Marsha Pappas, warned us against using a “yoga voice” or using an unnaturally soft, wispy voice to teach yoga. She said to just be ourselves. It’s easier said than done. When you have a room full of people who come with an expectation of leaving more relaxed than when they arrive, you want to sound soothing. However, when I teach yoga and meditation at the Indiana Law Enforcement Training Academy, it is me, in a gym, and about 150-160 cadets. I don’t have a “yoga voice”, I have a “yoga yell”. That same “yoga yell” carries outdoors for our Community Yoga class. And yet, somehow, people, whether they are in the Park, or at the Training Academy, still tend to leave a little more relaxed than when they came. So there must be something to that sense of authenticity.

And how are things going with my left and right, you ask? Well, in the past year or so, I have taught myself how to mirror, so that when I’m facing a class, and calling out for them to step their right foot forward, I’m stepping my left foot forward, mirroring them. I’m still surprised I can do this, but I can observe the considerable impact this skill has on my effectiveness as a yoga teacher and demonstrating the poses, especially to those totally new to yoga. But sometimes I still have to shout out, “left, no! I mean right!” and vice versa.

All this is to say, I can’t believe I’ve been teaching for five years. I can’t believe it’s ONLY been five years. It feels like a lifetime. I’m grateful to so many people… my many teachers, my friends and colleagues at the Training Academies, and every student (probably close to 2,000) who has ever trusted me with a configuration of their body or their breath. And I’m so excited to see where it goes from here.