I've been trying out different ways of structuring my classes so I have something to work around. Teaching has been a lot of flailing around with moments of clarity, but I'm starting to notice a few things about what feels the best. I started with a pose - building the class around the pose. That's useful to an extent, but I lack immediate access to anatomical terminology to really feel like this is interesting and effective. That's a future undertaking. And then I tried thematic structuring, using poses as physical metaphors to tie into the theme I offer. What I've settled on so far is somewhere in between. I like having a pose to think about, but it's better when it has a little theme to go along with it. It feels more natural to chatter on about something not limited to the physical experience.
So this week's theme? Patience!
I was flipping through a book I've been loving (which my friend gave to me, even better), about meditation, and one of the big themes is "self-pacing." You can't rush your own development as a human being. Things happen at the rate they happen - there are a lot of competing clocks out there (the universe, happenstance, whatever), and the one that will always come in last is your own notion of where you are and how far along you are on whatever path you are on.
Patience is: an act of humility. It takes a lot of pride-swallowing to say, "I am not ready for this thing that I want to do/have/experience/learn." To wait instead. Harder. Boy, imagine if you had had the wisdom to decline certain experiences as they rose before you when you were younger because you weren't ready. Hm, that might get me into a Catch-22 - if you had the experience, you were ready for it, no? Well, maybe.
Maybe, because the next thing I read in this meditation book was (paraphrasing here), "better knowledge come to you lifetimes too late than a moment too soon." Yes, the possibility of misusing information and knowledge is big. But more importantly, this idea makes me feel better about the waiting part. Where's the fire? What's my hurry? One hundred more lifetimes would be fine, I'd do it all again 100 million times. If it takes that long to realize something, to be fully bloomed, that's fine. Better that than trying to be chasing personal evolution frantically, desperately. This little bit of wisdom makes it easier to be content with the here/now, methinks.
So I was thinking about this, and I came up with an image for patience. It's standing in a forest and seeing a deer in the distance. And then holding out an apple for the deer in an effort to get the deer to come eat the apple out of your hand. You clearly can't chase the deer. It's big and fast and easily spooked. Don't even let yourself feel too heavy on the earth for fear the branches breaking will frighten it away. Nope, just hold out the apple and wait. Make peace with the idea that the deer might never come, but hold out the apple anyway. I mean, if you don't hold out the apple, the deer will definitely never come.
And I like this thematically because if there's one thing I want people to take away from a yoga class, it's don't worry about it. Seriously, never do a handstand, that's fine. Never touch your toes, really, it's completely beside the point. Hold out the apple. Don't chase the deer. Just hold out the apple.
Does that jive? I'm into it. The other good thing is that I teach Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday, so I can bust it out on Sunday, fix the big problems by Tuesday, and then polish it up for Thursday. It's great. Oh, maybe the point of this post from the reader's point of view is: only come to my Thursday classes. Hm, I'll have to mix it up a bit so that Sunday isn't always the cold run.
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Saturday, October 22, 2011
God is not Square
I rejected the opportunity to be confirmed at my family's church when I was 13 or so by telling the Reverend that I wasn't sure I was ready to sign on to all that jazz. It disappointed my parents, but the Reverend acted as diplomat and I didn't have to get confirmed. I was pleased.
Why didn't I want to? Well, it had zero substantive meaning for me. Jesus loves me, blah blah blah, don't steal or lie, whatever. I liked singing songs in the choir but that's really it. Of course, as a gloomy and cynical teenager, I'm sure that declining to be confirmed comported with my sense of dark sophistication and all that. And rejection of something mainstream felt right to me. Probably mostly in a vanity way, in a too-cool-for-school kind of way, adults-are-stupid and I-can't-believe-I-have-to-be-here kind of way. But maybe also in an authentic, this-isn't-right kind of way, too.
But now I sort of resent god's reputation as a total square. I don't want to go godless just because it's been made so freaking lame in lots of corners of the world. I want to feel great about god, like it's hip and meaningful and rad to believe in god and feel grateful and full of wonder (wonderful?) about life. I don't want it to feel embarrassing to say grace over my dinner. I don't want anyone to look at me like I'm crazy if I were to say I actually believe in god.* Why is it so lame to be goddy? It is lame that it is lame. Warm is better than cool, people! Being too cool for stuff is over. Are you noticing this? It's like how no one wants to stand in the dark and barely sway while a moody band emotes its ennui - nope, we're done with that - instead, we want to connect and collaborate and dance and have fun. Same thing with god stuff. The Occupy movements, happy music, reclaiming god - there is a wave happening, a good, happy, positive wave. We had to reject and deny and be sad and directionless to get here, but I think that's ending. Something else is happening. I'm glad.
*Side not on "belief": I don't necessarily mean this in a hard-and-fast "faith" kind of way. For now, I mean it more in the way that I believe in equality and an end to poverty: life is nicer with these aspirations, and we are sooooo close, really, to living with them (and god) in an every day way that is true and immediate and empirical, not just conceptual.
Why didn't I want to? Well, it had zero substantive meaning for me. Jesus loves me, blah blah blah, don't steal or lie, whatever. I liked singing songs in the choir but that's really it. Of course, as a gloomy and cynical teenager, I'm sure that declining to be confirmed comported with my sense of dark sophistication and all that. And rejection of something mainstream felt right to me. Probably mostly in a vanity way, in a too-cool-for-school kind of way, adults-are-stupid and I-can't-believe-I-have-to-be-here kind of way. But maybe also in an authentic, this-isn't-right kind of way, too.
But now I sort of resent god's reputation as a total square. I don't want to go godless just because it's been made so freaking lame in lots of corners of the world. I want to feel great about god, like it's hip and meaningful and rad to believe in god and feel grateful and full of wonder (wonderful?) about life. I don't want it to feel embarrassing to say grace over my dinner. I don't want anyone to look at me like I'm crazy if I were to say I actually believe in god.* Why is it so lame to be goddy? It is lame that it is lame. Warm is better than cool, people! Being too cool for stuff is over. Are you noticing this? It's like how no one wants to stand in the dark and barely sway while a moody band emotes its ennui - nope, we're done with that - instead, we want to connect and collaborate and dance and have fun. Same thing with god stuff. The Occupy movements, happy music, reclaiming god - there is a wave happening, a good, happy, positive wave. We had to reject and deny and be sad and directionless to get here, but I think that's ending. Something else is happening. I'm glad.
*Side not on "belief": I don't necessarily mean this in a hard-and-fast "faith" kind of way. For now, I mean it more in the way that I believe in equality and an end to poverty: life is nicer with these aspirations, and we are sooooo close, really, to living with them (and god) in an every day way that is true and immediate and empirical, not just conceptual.
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
What is Addiction? Why is it Bad? All Your Questions Answered.
I am now an expert in clinical diagnoses! Just kidding, I talk out of my rear end, just like everyone else.
At work we were talking about addiction. I was thinking about this because it occurred to me that processed food is like opium or heroin - you take something whole and innocent and natural, refine and extract and condense it to (one of) its essence(s), and you're left with something extremely potent and usually bad for you. The experience of ingesting such highly concentrated materials is an exaggeration of our normal sensory spectrum. Whether in the form of getting super high or tasting something super sweet, our sense are manipulated by processed goods, and we are more likely to feel addicted to them since our concept of the range of our sensory spectrum has been artificially distorted, requiring repeated input from hyper-ized products to return to the falsely elevated feeling of "good." Personally, this makes a lot of sense to me when I think about spaghetti and potato chips, which I love and have emotional cravings for.
Okay so that's what we were talking about at work. So then I suggested that people become "addicted" to processed foods the same way they become addicted to opium or anything else. This isn't a new concept at all, but it finally seemed really clear to me. And we were talking about the overuse of the concept of addiction, and victimhood culture, and people's relinquishing of their own autonomous decision making power to something they can claim to be addicted to. So this got pretty heady pretty fast, so to back it up we decided to define addiction.
My offering: anything that has a negative impact on one's life that one feels powerless to combat. Seem broad? I think it fits. Habits and routines and practices that do not serve us, and yet we continue to do, I think can be swept under the definition of addiction.
And I think this is useful, because then everything can be given the AA treatment - by which I mean: abstention, community support, and giving oneself over to a higher power. My pal at work said that everyone getting to be addicted to whatever they want makes a culture of helplessness and excuse making. I sort of like the view of addiction, however, that connects us to a sense of our own smallness - we are not all powerful, autonomous beings who just need to try harder, think harder, and do better. Instead, we are tiny particles of a larger, more mysterious set of forces, and sometimes the self-obsessed feeling of addiction/helplessness is an inroad to this more selfless feeling of humble connectedness. Why not, right?
Sometimes I feel like I'm combating my "addictions" one by one, and that my view of myself and my progress toward inner peace is the process of shedding the negative habits that I seem to do without thinking. And I have to ask for a little cosmic help to do it because I'm pretty weak, generally speaking - I'm giving myself 30 days for t.v. right now, which would be from October 9th to November 9th I suppose, and I already fell off the wagon once for 1.5 hours of House on the 19th, but it's still a worthy undertaking - and I need a little Sky God Earth Power or whatever to help me exercise my will. The whole thing forces me to redirect my attention more positively, and I really appreciate the after effects.
So I think that giving attention to your challenges as though they are addictions can be a handy way of thinking about yourself in order to take your obstacles seriously and to be connected to the magical powers of the universe. The end.
At work we were talking about addiction. I was thinking about this because it occurred to me that processed food is like opium or heroin - you take something whole and innocent and natural, refine and extract and condense it to (one of) its essence(s), and you're left with something extremely potent and usually bad for you. The experience of ingesting such highly concentrated materials is an exaggeration of our normal sensory spectrum. Whether in the form of getting super high or tasting something super sweet, our sense are manipulated by processed goods, and we are more likely to feel addicted to them since our concept of the range of our sensory spectrum has been artificially distorted, requiring repeated input from hyper-ized products to return to the falsely elevated feeling of "good." Personally, this makes a lot of sense to me when I think about spaghetti and potato chips, which I love and have emotional cravings for.
Okay so that's what we were talking about at work. So then I suggested that people become "addicted" to processed foods the same way they become addicted to opium or anything else. This isn't a new concept at all, but it finally seemed really clear to me. And we were talking about the overuse of the concept of addiction, and victimhood culture, and people's relinquishing of their own autonomous decision making power to something they can claim to be addicted to. So this got pretty heady pretty fast, so to back it up we decided to define addiction.
My offering: anything that has a negative impact on one's life that one feels powerless to combat. Seem broad? I think it fits. Habits and routines and practices that do not serve us, and yet we continue to do, I think can be swept under the definition of addiction.
And I think this is useful, because then everything can be given the AA treatment - by which I mean: abstention, community support, and giving oneself over to a higher power. My pal at work said that everyone getting to be addicted to whatever they want makes a culture of helplessness and excuse making. I sort of like the view of addiction, however, that connects us to a sense of our own smallness - we are not all powerful, autonomous beings who just need to try harder, think harder, and do better. Instead, we are tiny particles of a larger, more mysterious set of forces, and sometimes the self-obsessed feeling of addiction/helplessness is an inroad to this more selfless feeling of humble connectedness. Why not, right?
Sometimes I feel like I'm combating my "addictions" one by one, and that my view of myself and my progress toward inner peace is the process of shedding the negative habits that I seem to do without thinking. And I have to ask for a little cosmic help to do it because I'm pretty weak, generally speaking - I'm giving myself 30 days for t.v. right now, which would be from October 9th to November 9th I suppose, and I already fell off the wagon once for 1.5 hours of House on the 19th, but it's still a worthy undertaking - and I need a little Sky God Earth Power or whatever to help me exercise my will. The whole thing forces me to redirect my attention more positively, and I really appreciate the after effects.
So I think that giving attention to your challenges as though they are addictions can be a handy way of thinking about yourself in order to take your obstacles seriously and to be connected to the magical powers of the universe. The end.
Monday, October 3, 2011
Bloggerwhelming. Teaching is neat.
You know what's overwhelming? The yoga blogosphere. Holy bananas people are writing a lot about yoga all the time. It's a little too much. Too much to process, too much to reconcile for points of view, too much to select from. How can anyone know what to read when there's so much? Ah the problem of the information age. That's why we're all so vulnerable to selective aggregation services - the news, Pandora, the blogs - we can't process anything effectively on our own so we need the selection service.
Anyway that's besides the point. You know what else I love? Teachin' yoga. Oh man it's really interesting. I am really liking it. I think I'm starting to get a little better at it, but it's slow going. I teach twice a week right now and I'm about to start teaching three times a week. The two classes I teach are so different from each other in audience, space, and general vibe. It's really interesting to have to fit myself into the scheme of things and adjust for the class. And how many people are in the class makes a big difference, too, and where they are in their yoga practice. Anyway I like the whole thing. It's a learning experience unlike anything I've tried to do thus far in my life, and I like it for that reason alone.
Anyway that's besides the point. You know what else I love? Teachin' yoga. Oh man it's really interesting. I am really liking it. I think I'm starting to get a little better at it, but it's slow going. I teach twice a week right now and I'm about to start teaching three times a week. The two classes I teach are so different from each other in audience, space, and general vibe. It's really interesting to have to fit myself into the scheme of things and adjust for the class. And how many people are in the class makes a big difference, too, and where they are in their yoga practice. Anyway I like the whole thing. It's a learning experience unlike anything I've tried to do thus far in my life, and I like it for that reason alone.
Friday, September 30, 2011
Yoga Commodification
So I like yoga a lot, that's pretty clear. And I certainly acknowledge that wanting to find peace etc will make me buy stuff from time to time. Yesterday friend sent me an article about the commodification of the true self that pointed out the sales aspect of yoga to me in a new way. Basically, instead of, say, lipstick or new clothes making you feel better and happier and more like the you you want to be, well, yoga and poses and meditation are the lipstick or clothes.
I guess the real commodity is the same as it's always been: anything that will help relieve you of your feelings of inadequacy. There is a catch-22 here, of course, in the sense that usually we have to be told by the manufacturer that we have some inadequacy, then we internalize that inadequacy as true to us, and then we commit to purchasing something regularly for the rest of time to help relieve that inadequacy. Hooray advertising!
So, yes, in one sense yoga is a commodity that plays upon human dissatisfaction, creating a culture of consumers with the promise of an improved self. There are lines of yoga clothing and lots of workshops and stuff to buy and oils and incense and beads and whatever. In another sense, well, aren't we all ever just trying to grow? And do new things and expand our minds and experiences? And we need to know about stuff and participate in the world and read the newspaper and some books and check out fliers and do all of that, too, right? How can you differentiate "buying in" to make yourself feel better from "growing as a person" to make yourself improve?
I guess the real commodity is the same as it's always been: anything that will help relieve you of your feelings of inadequacy. There is a catch-22 here, of course, in the sense that usually we have to be told by the manufacturer that we have some inadequacy, then we internalize that inadequacy as true to us, and then we commit to purchasing something regularly for the rest of time to help relieve that inadequacy. Hooray advertising!
So, yes, in one sense yoga is a commodity that plays upon human dissatisfaction, creating a culture of consumers with the promise of an improved self. There are lines of yoga clothing and lots of workshops and stuff to buy and oils and incense and beads and whatever. In another sense, well, aren't we all ever just trying to grow? And do new things and expand our minds and experiences? And we need to know about stuff and participate in the world and read the newspaper and some books and check out fliers and do all of that, too, right? How can you differentiate "buying in" to make yourself feel better from "growing as a person" to make yourself improve?
Saturday, September 24, 2011
More on Yoga Sutras n Stuff, Feat.: God
At Yoga Sutras discussion group we're up to the aphorism on god - so far the system has described what yoga "is" (the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind/freedom from identification with those fluctuations), and all the different kinds of mental wanderings one can experience (a bunch), and then how to work hard at yoga (by practicing both dedication/perseverance and non-attachment/dispassion), and then some of the good stuff that happens with that (various types of samadhi, aka oneness with the Seer), and the types of effort/personalities that achieve varying stages of oneness (basically success is proportionate to effort) . . . and then, most fascinatingly, the god stuff.
The god stuff, in a nutshell, states that whilst hard work and climbing the ole workaday mountain to enlightenment are the usual road to samadhi, another, more efficient and effective road to liberation is to surrender everything to god.
The nice thing in some of the Sutras commentaries is that there is room in the term Patanjali uses for god to let it apply to anyone's deity/prophet/high power (Jesus, Krishna, the Universal Intelligence, etc). Um, please note that scholars and commentators differ in their approach, and I'm singing my own song here so let's roll with it. So anyway contemporary practitioners can "surrender" to whatever higher power gives them the very bestest sparkly magicals. On a personal note, this to me is most tangibly experienced in the tingle underneath the skin and the swirling many-colored darkness behind the eyes. I think I can "surrender" to that. I have a little trouble with the more abstract part of it.
I guess it's the word surrender that I have the most trouble with. What does that mean? God I think I can comprehend - all knowing source of all great big awesome neat thing. Sure. And I've heard the relinquishing stuff before - give over to god, relinquish everything to god, take absolute shelter in god - but what does that mean?
The usual way that people submit themselves to god, it seems to be, is through prayer. What's that? Well, in discussion group, my dedicated, regularly-attending pal identified three types of praying: one, journal/talk-therapy prayer (hi god, here's what went on today and what I'm thinking about); two, request prayer (dear god, please gimme a better job and make peace on Earth and help me deal with my crazy sister); three, gratitude prayer (wow god, thank you for my safety and access to food and the experience of community and my proximity to a good grocery store and the miracles of popcorn and breathing and babies and flowers).
The one that I feel gets me closest to understanding the surrender part is the gratitude prayer. It seems effective for connecting one to a sense of wonder (popcorn really is a miracle, I'm serious, NASA for kids has a great entry HERE), and of humility for one's blessings (safety, nutrition, political freedom). It's still pretty vague for me, but the "something is bigger than me" part comes from general wonder. Wow, I love the tingle under my skin, where does it come from? Golly, the sun is sooooo huge! Did you know that if you put a seed in the dirt and let it hang out it can grow into something pretty big and frequently delicious, what?!
So that's how that makes sense to me at the moment. I had one other glimpse of effectively connecting with a feeling of surrender to god in another class where a teacher was talking about it (the same day that discussion group was covering it, fate!), and it was still feeling pretty "Huh?" to me. But then we were doing something sort of hard in class, and he said something like, "see how we forget to take shelter when things are hard? And we could just surrender to god right now." That made some sense, too. I'm having trouble articulating why, but it did make sense at the moment.
Anyway fun to think about.
The god stuff, in a nutshell, states that whilst hard work and climbing the ole workaday mountain to enlightenment are the usual road to samadhi, another, more efficient and effective road to liberation is to surrender everything to god.
The nice thing in some of the Sutras commentaries is that there is room in the term Patanjali uses for god to let it apply to anyone's deity/prophet/high power (Jesus, Krishna, the Universal Intelligence, etc). Um, please note that scholars and commentators differ in their approach, and I'm singing my own song here so let's roll with it. So anyway contemporary practitioners can "surrender" to whatever higher power gives them the very bestest sparkly magicals. On a personal note, this to me is most tangibly experienced in the tingle underneath the skin and the swirling many-colored darkness behind the eyes. I think I can "surrender" to that. I have a little trouble with the more abstract part of it.
I guess it's the word surrender that I have the most trouble with. What does that mean? God I think I can comprehend - all knowing source of all great big awesome neat thing. Sure. And I've heard the relinquishing stuff before - give over to god, relinquish everything to god, take absolute shelter in god - but what does that mean?
The usual way that people submit themselves to god, it seems to be, is through prayer. What's that? Well, in discussion group, my dedicated, regularly-attending pal identified three types of praying: one, journal/talk-therapy prayer (hi god, here's what went on today and what I'm thinking about); two, request prayer (dear god, please gimme a better job and make peace on Earth and help me deal with my crazy sister); three, gratitude prayer (wow god, thank you for my safety and access to food and the experience of community and my proximity to a good grocery store and the miracles of popcorn and breathing and babies and flowers).
The one that I feel gets me closest to understanding the surrender part is the gratitude prayer. It seems effective for connecting one to a sense of wonder (popcorn really is a miracle, I'm serious, NASA for kids has a great entry HERE), and of humility for one's blessings (safety, nutrition, political freedom). It's still pretty vague for me, but the "something is bigger than me" part comes from general wonder. Wow, I love the tingle under my skin, where does it come from? Golly, the sun is sooooo huge! Did you know that if you put a seed in the dirt and let it hang out it can grow into something pretty big and frequently delicious, what?!
So that's how that makes sense to me at the moment. I had one other glimpse of effectively connecting with a feeling of surrender to god in another class where a teacher was talking about it (the same day that discussion group was covering it, fate!), and it was still feeling pretty "Huh?" to me. But then we were doing something sort of hard in class, and he said something like, "see how we forget to take shelter when things are hard? And we could just surrender to god right now." That made some sense, too. I'm having trouble articulating why, but it did make sense at the moment.
Anyway fun to think about.
Saturday, August 13, 2011
Yoga Book Truth Error Thing
So at my weekly Yoga Sutras discussion group we are moving through the aphorisms of Patanjali a little at a time. It's pretty fun, and I have a regular discussion buddy and another lady who shows up when she can, and another who plans to come back after her summer vacation - things promise to be pretty action-packed, and I'm pleased about it. So we just went through the types of "vrttis," the fluctuations of the mind, and I was thinking about "error." One translation says that "Error is incorrect knowledge based on misinterpretation of reality." And the classic example apparently is mistaking a rope for a snake - drawing a "hasty conclusion" whilst in the "grip of emotions." Sure, yes, I dig that. It's a nice articulation of the way errors are made. Our feelings in any moment can distort a perception away from its basic aspect.
This same translation offers an explication that I think is nice, and adds that "Not always negative, error can lead us to question ourselves once more and to progress. Truth is often a succession of corrected mistakes."
Pleasant, no? I really liked that last phrase a lot. What a nice way to view one's mistakes - as a path to truth. Then I got to thinking about how negatively we think about corrections and mistakes - and thinking about how, as I've said before, I view yoga mostly as one big helpful suggestion, and not really as a right/wrong thing. I'd like something more like, "truth is a succession of adjustments to perception," or "truth is a succession of refined attempts," or "truth is the accumulated result of recovery from blunder," or "the process and result of seeking truth is the accumulation of humility and curiosity" - well, I could go on and on. Just something a bit softer, maybe?
That's all.
This same translation offers an explication that I think is nice, and adds that "Not always negative, error can lead us to question ourselves once more and to progress. Truth is often a succession of corrected mistakes."
Pleasant, no? I really liked that last phrase a lot. What a nice way to view one's mistakes - as a path to truth. Then I got to thinking about how negatively we think about corrections and mistakes - and thinking about how, as I've said before, I view yoga mostly as one big helpful suggestion, and not really as a right/wrong thing. I'd like something more like, "truth is a succession of adjustments to perception," or "truth is a succession of refined attempts," or "truth is the accumulated result of recovery from blunder," or "the process and result of seeking truth is the accumulation of humility and curiosity" - well, I could go on and on. Just something a bit softer, maybe?
That's all.
Thursday, July 21, 2011
Fever Break
The stress fever at work has, knock on wood, broken. I had a little time off at the end of last week and had a terrible time - the weather was great, people were around to have funtimes, I have a car, whatever - but it was pretty horrible. I just could not relax. And then I ended up with a migraine Sunday night so bad I barfed. I think I have been really stressed out by work. It's bizarre to think I don't necessarily recognize that that is what is the matter. It feels so cellular to be in a state of stress, less about what is stressing me out and more about how it feels and how much I want to feel differently.
The capacity to endure stress is really curious. The reasons we endure stress are particularly interesting - all of the justifications that comprise denial - driven by (generally) false imperatives of things like money, networking, contacts, health insurance, expenses, reputation, inclusion . . . they bolster our sense that whatever we are doing is the right choice, and this is our denial about how to live.
I wish I could endure more stress - oh the things I would get done if I didn't have to sit with my cup of tea for half an hour, or clean the house just so I can sit in a chair and enjoy the orderliness. I might have a magazine publishing law firm with music lessons and yoga classes in the community space. Ah, I see - so the justifications that comprise denial are fed from an egoistic center of ambition - and this sense of ambition is created from . . . what source of values? Family? Society? Capitalist conspiracy? So the chain is like this: values - ambition - justification/denial - stress. Maybe values and ambition are really the same thing. Anyway interesting to think about.
It's funny that I just said I wish I could endure more stress. As though all the tools of living that I engage in, like yoga, health and exercise stuff, socializing, therapy, acupuncture, or whatever, are supposed to help me adapt upwards to a way of living that is not suiting me. So of course I can blame exercise and diet for failing to support me enough, and then change my exercise and diet routine instead of the core issues. Don't get me wrong, I'm all about going for walks and eating vegetables, for sure. But in some ways even that stuff is just topical ointment, too, isn't it? I remember one of my yoga teachers talking about an article called "How Yoga Ruined My Life" that someone wrote about how after getting super into yoga, a lot of things from this person's life were shed because it was clear that some things were incompatible with his/her new perspective on life. I'm sure it must feel like total ruination to abandon staples of one's identity. It's hard to change the narrative once you've so fully adopted a story's trajectory.
I wonder what my adopted story trajectory is? I don't think I can see it clearly enough to tell. Take the lawyer thing - am I bold for rejecting a legal career (yes I can change the narrative!), or is this just part of some more buried story about how I will never have an actual job (I relentlessly and unconsciously pursue my built-in trajectory and rearrange the narrative to sound as cool as possible)? Tough to say.
So what will have to change in my world for work to be less stressful? I could always stand to work on myself, so that's a given. And I've been trying to be more clear and consistent with my supervise-ees at work, and that's been an incredible challenge, but is paying off. And more time for me me me, of course, my favorite.
The capacity to endure stress is really curious. The reasons we endure stress are particularly interesting - all of the justifications that comprise denial - driven by (generally) false imperatives of things like money, networking, contacts, health insurance, expenses, reputation, inclusion . . . they bolster our sense that whatever we are doing is the right choice, and this is our denial about how to live.
I wish I could endure more stress - oh the things I would get done if I didn't have to sit with my cup of tea for half an hour, or clean the house just so I can sit in a chair and enjoy the orderliness. I might have a magazine publishing law firm with music lessons and yoga classes in the community space. Ah, I see - so the justifications that comprise denial are fed from an egoistic center of ambition - and this sense of ambition is created from . . . what source of values? Family? Society? Capitalist conspiracy? So the chain is like this: values - ambition - justification/denial - stress. Maybe values and ambition are really the same thing. Anyway interesting to think about.
It's funny that I just said I wish I could endure more stress. As though all the tools of living that I engage in, like yoga, health and exercise stuff, socializing, therapy, acupuncture, or whatever, are supposed to help me adapt upwards to a way of living that is not suiting me. So of course I can blame exercise and diet for failing to support me enough, and then change my exercise and diet routine instead of the core issues. Don't get me wrong, I'm all about going for walks and eating vegetables, for sure. But in some ways even that stuff is just topical ointment, too, isn't it? I remember one of my yoga teachers talking about an article called "How Yoga Ruined My Life" that someone wrote about how after getting super into yoga, a lot of things from this person's life were shed because it was clear that some things were incompatible with his/her new perspective on life. I'm sure it must feel like total ruination to abandon staples of one's identity. It's hard to change the narrative once you've so fully adopted a story's trajectory.
I wonder what my adopted story trajectory is? I don't think I can see it clearly enough to tell. Take the lawyer thing - am I bold for rejecting a legal career (yes I can change the narrative!), or is this just part of some more buried story about how I will never have an actual job (I relentlessly and unconsciously pursue my built-in trajectory and rearrange the narrative to sound as cool as possible)? Tough to say.
So what will have to change in my world for work to be less stressful? I could always stand to work on myself, so that's a given. And I've been trying to be more clear and consistent with my supervise-ees at work, and that's been an incredible challenge, but is paying off. And more time for me me me, of course, my favorite.
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Holy Blog Post
I have been sucked sucked sucked sucked into my job. That is the darn truth. And I miss ye olde blog, I really do. I think what I miss is the time set aside to force me to put my thoughts into complete sentences. I think it has residual benefits in my world.
Yes, clear articulation of thoughts/feelings is something that requires practice, and I am feeling a little out of practice. I have verily stumbled over my words lately, having the idea and intention fully formed in my head, but lacking the actual terminology to translate thoughts/feelings into sentences. Yes indeedy, practice is useful.
Let's see, what have I been stumbling over verbally lately? Ah yes. Personnel issues. My job is, let me repeat, easy and fun, but oh lordy my gracious what to do about those employees? Talk about letting go of control, yep, learning a lot about that. Can't be every player on the team. And how about explaining stuff that you never thought you would ever have to explain to someone over 18, like Fibbing is Bad, and Apologizing for Blunders is Good. Do all young people come half-raised these days? Christ-y I feel old.
But anyway, I need to re-direct my energy away from too much work and back into me me me, because I am much more balanced when I get to nurture myself. Seriously, I really thrive when I don't have a job. Seems ridiculous to say out loud, but the best possible thing for me is not working. So far, at least. So anyway I'm still trying to move toward a yoga-tastic version of life, which includes a Regular Yoga gig, hooray! It starts on Thursdays in August in a church community room - I will post a link when it's mega-officially a go. And I started a Yoga Sutras discussion group on Monday nights, and it's been two weeks, and I'm loving that so far. I hope it keeps up! And I got myself a couple of subbing gigs, which is wonderful experience.
Speaking of yoga subbing gigs - can we talk about the general public for a minute? My first subbing class someone walked out after 20 minutes, but that's fine - you can't be everyone's teacher. My second subbing gig someone came to class with a shoulder injury that prevented her from lifting her arm over her head or putting any weight on it. Of course, I had prepared an elaborate shoulder-based class, sigh. So she probably had a sub-par experience, but my feeling is kind of that she should have stayed home. Would you go to typing class with a broken hand? Probably not. Boy, I can't wait to see more of the general yoga-going public. It's completely different from teaching friends. I'm ready though, to repel who I repel and attract who I attract. We'll see!
Yes, clear articulation of thoughts/feelings is something that requires practice, and I am feeling a little out of practice. I have verily stumbled over my words lately, having the idea and intention fully formed in my head, but lacking the actual terminology to translate thoughts/feelings into sentences. Yes indeedy, practice is useful.
Let's see, what have I been stumbling over verbally lately? Ah yes. Personnel issues. My job is, let me repeat, easy and fun, but oh lordy my gracious what to do about those employees? Talk about letting go of control, yep, learning a lot about that. Can't be every player on the team. And how about explaining stuff that you never thought you would ever have to explain to someone over 18, like Fibbing is Bad, and Apologizing for Blunders is Good. Do all young people come half-raised these days? Christ-y I feel old.
But anyway, I need to re-direct my energy away from too much work and back into me me me, because I am much more balanced when I get to nurture myself. Seriously, I really thrive when I don't have a job. Seems ridiculous to say out loud, but the best possible thing for me is not working. So far, at least. So anyway I'm still trying to move toward a yoga-tastic version of life, which includes a Regular Yoga gig, hooray! It starts on Thursdays in August in a church community room - I will post a link when it's mega-officially a go. And I started a Yoga Sutras discussion group on Monday nights, and it's been two weeks, and I'm loving that so far. I hope it keeps up! And I got myself a couple of subbing gigs, which is wonderful experience.
Speaking of yoga subbing gigs - can we talk about the general public for a minute? My first subbing class someone walked out after 20 minutes, but that's fine - you can't be everyone's teacher. My second subbing gig someone came to class with a shoulder injury that prevented her from lifting her arm over her head or putting any weight on it. Of course, I had prepared an elaborate shoulder-based class, sigh. So she probably had a sub-par experience, but my feeling is kind of that she should have stayed home. Would you go to typing class with a broken hand? Probably not. Boy, I can't wait to see more of the general yoga-going public. It's completely different from teaching friends. I'm ready though, to repel who I repel and attract who I attract. We'll see!
Sunday, June 12, 2011
Life Plans
I think I mentioned before that having a full-time job, even one that I like a lot, really highlighted for me that I’d rather be teaching yoga, and that I want to subsist teaching yoga. If anything is going to be demanding on my time in an exciting and challenging way, I want it to be yoga.
My friend is opening a store front in the town we live in to sell t-shirts and local music. Not exactly a big money-making enterprise. This was sort of amazing to me. How much money could it possibly cost to get a little space set aside to get going on a business if my crazy friend is doing it? I don’t know the answer to that question yet. But I’m hoping that it’s less than $600 a month. Then I think I could do it.
I would want a space that is geared toward yoga practice as well as yoga discussion and meditation. I feel like the overhead is pretty minimal – space rental, heat and electricity (no AC for me unless it’s pretty desperate), a major initial purchase of mats and straps and blocks and blankets, a little stereo, maybe some candles and pretty curtains. Bathroom and cleaning supplies. Insurance. I don’t know, seems manageable at the moment, especially since my friend is doing it.
There’s a neighborhood business improvement group that gives business-starting classes. There are a huge number of steps to be taken, which is pretty annoying, because since this occurred to me, I feel like I have to do this Right Now. I’ve checked out three yoga places in the area, and I think that I have something different to offer that could gather its own steam. And I want to make community. It’s certainly one thing to find and participate in community that appeals to me – but how about making one’s own? There might be a megalomaniacal, “my way or the highway” downside to this kind of thinking, but I hope my motives are pure. I don’t want permission or approval or acceptance from anyone to start sharing my yoga experience with my community. I guess I also don’t want to wait – and that’s something to think about in terms of purity of intention. Patience. “Deserving.” Mostly I’m nervous that someone else is going to open a yoga studio in my ‘hood that has a similar approach, and I’ll have missed the boat.
Oh lordy.
So anyway here’s a version of the plan: get a space and rent it, and take it easy for the first year. I’d teach two classes a week, and get a few other people interested in teaching one or two classes a week, and we’d start off with evenings. Hopefully it breaks even with rent, but even if it comes up a little bit short that’s fine. Then maybe eventually quit the job and teach a bunch of days a week. Sweet plan!
My friend is opening a store front in the town we live in to sell t-shirts and local music. Not exactly a big money-making enterprise. This was sort of amazing to me. How much money could it possibly cost to get a little space set aside to get going on a business if my crazy friend is doing it? I don’t know the answer to that question yet. But I’m hoping that it’s less than $600 a month. Then I think I could do it.
I would want a space that is geared toward yoga practice as well as yoga discussion and meditation. I feel like the overhead is pretty minimal – space rental, heat and electricity (no AC for me unless it’s pretty desperate), a major initial purchase of mats and straps and blocks and blankets, a little stereo, maybe some candles and pretty curtains. Bathroom and cleaning supplies. Insurance. I don’t know, seems manageable at the moment, especially since my friend is doing it.
There’s a neighborhood business improvement group that gives business-starting classes. There are a huge number of steps to be taken, which is pretty annoying, because since this occurred to me, I feel like I have to do this Right Now. I’ve checked out three yoga places in the area, and I think that I have something different to offer that could gather its own steam. And I want to make community. It’s certainly one thing to find and participate in community that appeals to me – but how about making one’s own? There might be a megalomaniacal, “my way or the highway” downside to this kind of thinking, but I hope my motives are pure. I don’t want permission or approval or acceptance from anyone to start sharing my yoga experience with my community. I guess I also don’t want to wait – and that’s something to think about in terms of purity of intention. Patience. “Deserving.” Mostly I’m nervous that someone else is going to open a yoga studio in my ‘hood that has a similar approach, and I’ll have missed the boat.
Oh lordy.
So anyway here’s a version of the plan: get a space and rent it, and take it easy for the first year. I’d teach two classes a week, and get a few other people interested in teaching one or two classes a week, and we’d start off with evenings. Hopefully it breaks even with rent, but even if it comes up a little bit short that’s fine. Then maybe eventually quit the job and teach a bunch of days a week. Sweet plan!
Saturday, June 4, 2011
Traveling
Yeah, I don’t really care about traveling. The whole thing is generally harder than usual life, and I don’t find it particularly relaxing. I get a lot of anxiety about things like where to sleep and eat, and how to use the public transportation or read the road signs. It’s cool to do stuff, for sure, and see things and go places, don’t get me wrong. Like THIS post from my friend Katie’s travels – I mean, how could you not want to see that? But I am not going to travel the world to do that. Sounds hard.
While on vacation, I enjoyed having no responsibilities, I guess. And my parents are pretty organized and motivated to go sight-seeing (bleh, stressful and cattle-call feeling to me usually), so that level of decision-making was also taken care of, and that was nice. But really I wanted to be home working on my projects. My guitar practice was going really well, and of course Le Blogge needs a-tendin’, and I didn’t get to do my yoga stuff while on vacation (no mat, no private empty space), so leaving all the active threads of my mind behind was a little tough. Naturally I could have found ways to make it all continue for the 8-9 days we were on the ground, but come on, I was supposed to be there to see my folks and see Germany, and it was only a week.
So by the end of the week+, I was ready to head out. I wanted to be back in action on my personal self-fulfillment/improvement stuff. And I am wondering about a few things related to this feeling: one, is feeling ho-hum about travel an entitled way of thinking, an unsophisticated way of thinking, or a legitimate preference? Two, is my preference for my carefully crafted self-distractions a crutch for my mind or an investment in my mind expansion? Probably everything is true in one way or another.
As far as the ho-hum travel thing goes, the entitled interpretation is that I have no idea what a neat opportunity it is to go abroad. This could be because I have been abroad enough times in enough ways, and I have my own ideas about what it means to travel well, that I don’t feel impressed or blown away by Western sight-seeing. One church after another or one lovely vista after another, it doesn’t matter. The best thing we did in Germany was go to a parade in the tiny home town of one of my Dad’s friends, and have beer in a big tent with the whole town singing Bavarian songs to an oom-pa band. This experience was more about the human interaction and participating in community than anything, and I like that when I’m at home, too (it's a breadth/depth thing - I think as we get older we crave depth above breadth). So whatever. The unsophisticated interpretation is that I am a pedestrian and closed-minded person who can’t be ripped away from her own comforts for ten minutes to open her mind to other ways of living and thinking. This could be true because, well, at this point in my life, I don’t feel like more “input” is what I need. I need LESS input. I’m finding it challenging enough to work on breathing in and out without going insane, and whether or not another country of humans on the planet yield the right of way for left-hand turns doesn’t rock me, it overloads me. Wait, hm - Germans in the south sunbathe naked near the water like it’s no big deal in the cities’ public parks and the countryside’s hiking trails, and it made me a little sad that America isn’t that chill about it, and I did think about that a little for a while. Okay so lastly, the legitimate preference option means that I just like to stay put, really, and that’s fine. I might be turning, at last, into one of those people who just wishes she could move her whole apartment to the beach for two weeks and not go to work, and that would be the perfect vacation. No driving, no phones, no t.v., just reading and exercising and sunning and swimming and cookouts. Pretty American approach to vacation, actually, at least as far as my own memories of vacationing on Cape Cod as a kid goes. I think my feelings about travel are all of these things. I am both entitled and unsophisticated and have legitimate feelings and maybe want to recreate my childhood and it’s all fine. I want to travel by going to somewhere else and staying put for a while and working on stuff. That’s what I like.
And next: is my desire to stay put and work on my little projects a weakness or a positive thing? On the one hand, it would be nice to feel totally okay with the unproductiveness of traveling instead of thinking about what I want to get done when I get home. It’s a be-here-now problem. And I think I am generally okay with being-there-now, and I enjoyed the countryside and the weather and walks and certainly enjoyed myself. But I feel un-tethered from life when I can’t engage with myself in a more focused, learning- and progress-based way, and it expands my enjoyment of things outside myself as well as makes little connections in my mind that complete my understanding of the way I view things blah blah blah. So it could be that my mind prefers the discipline and the feeling of working toward something, and I really get something good out of it. But this could be a crutch – instead of being-here-now, I would rather elaborately occupy myself with mental departures that take me outside my mind, because I find simply enjoying life to be boring, because really I am boring and my mind is not actually a great place for me to be. Hm. So, as you may have guessed, I think both these things are true, too.
Ah travel, sneakily enough it was mind-expanding, though, regardless of my resistance and toe-tapping, since it made me consider some stuff about myself. Well played, Travel.
While on vacation, I enjoyed having no responsibilities, I guess. And my parents are pretty organized and motivated to go sight-seeing (bleh, stressful and cattle-call feeling to me usually), so that level of decision-making was also taken care of, and that was nice. But really I wanted to be home working on my projects. My guitar practice was going really well, and of course Le Blogge needs a-tendin’, and I didn’t get to do my yoga stuff while on vacation (no mat, no private empty space), so leaving all the active threads of my mind behind was a little tough. Naturally I could have found ways to make it all continue for the 8-9 days we were on the ground, but come on, I was supposed to be there to see my folks and see Germany, and it was only a week.
So by the end of the week+, I was ready to head out. I wanted to be back in action on my personal self-fulfillment/improvement stuff. And I am wondering about a few things related to this feeling: one, is feeling ho-hum about travel an entitled way of thinking, an unsophisticated way of thinking, or a legitimate preference? Two, is my preference for my carefully crafted self-distractions a crutch for my mind or an investment in my mind expansion? Probably everything is true in one way or another.
As far as the ho-hum travel thing goes, the entitled interpretation is that I have no idea what a neat opportunity it is to go abroad. This could be because I have been abroad enough times in enough ways, and I have my own ideas about what it means to travel well, that I don’t feel impressed or blown away by Western sight-seeing. One church after another or one lovely vista after another, it doesn’t matter. The best thing we did in Germany was go to a parade in the tiny home town of one of my Dad’s friends, and have beer in a big tent with the whole town singing Bavarian songs to an oom-pa band. This experience was more about the human interaction and participating in community than anything, and I like that when I’m at home, too (it's a breadth/depth thing - I think as we get older we crave depth above breadth). So whatever. The unsophisticated interpretation is that I am a pedestrian and closed-minded person who can’t be ripped away from her own comforts for ten minutes to open her mind to other ways of living and thinking. This could be true because, well, at this point in my life, I don’t feel like more “input” is what I need. I need LESS input. I’m finding it challenging enough to work on breathing in and out without going insane, and whether or not another country of humans on the planet yield the right of way for left-hand turns doesn’t rock me, it overloads me. Wait, hm - Germans in the south sunbathe naked near the water like it’s no big deal in the cities’ public parks and the countryside’s hiking trails, and it made me a little sad that America isn’t that chill about it, and I did think about that a little for a while. Okay so lastly, the legitimate preference option means that I just like to stay put, really, and that’s fine. I might be turning, at last, into one of those people who just wishes she could move her whole apartment to the beach for two weeks and not go to work, and that would be the perfect vacation. No driving, no phones, no t.v., just reading and exercising and sunning and swimming and cookouts. Pretty American approach to vacation, actually, at least as far as my own memories of vacationing on Cape Cod as a kid goes. I think my feelings about travel are all of these things. I am both entitled and unsophisticated and have legitimate feelings and maybe want to recreate my childhood and it’s all fine. I want to travel by going to somewhere else and staying put for a while and working on stuff. That’s what I like.
And next: is my desire to stay put and work on my little projects a weakness or a positive thing? On the one hand, it would be nice to feel totally okay with the unproductiveness of traveling instead of thinking about what I want to get done when I get home. It’s a be-here-now problem. And I think I am generally okay with being-there-now, and I enjoyed the countryside and the weather and walks and certainly enjoyed myself. But I feel un-tethered from life when I can’t engage with myself in a more focused, learning- and progress-based way, and it expands my enjoyment of things outside myself as well as makes little connections in my mind that complete my understanding of the way I view things blah blah blah. So it could be that my mind prefers the discipline and the feeling of working toward something, and I really get something good out of it. But this could be a crutch – instead of being-here-now, I would rather elaborately occupy myself with mental departures that take me outside my mind, because I find simply enjoying life to be boring, because really I am boring and my mind is not actually a great place for me to be. Hm. So, as you may have guessed, I think both these things are true, too.
Ah travel, sneakily enough it was mind-expanding, though, regardless of my resistance and toe-tapping, since it made me consider some stuff about myself. Well played, Travel.
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Vacation mit Parentzen
So I'm here in Germany on a vacation with my parents, which is a total throwback to days gone by on Cape Cod, chafing against the sand in my bathing suit, eating potato chips, and reading "just for fun" books.
My "just for fun" book for vacation is one of the Terry Pratchett Discworld books, dozens of which have been kicking around the house since I was as little as I recall - at least from my most early literate era (I brought The Brothers Karamazov with me, but I keep re-realizing that I am not much of a High Thinker, so I've put it down 20 pages in in favor of sci-fi-fantasy-humor). Terry Pratchett writes magical fantasy books with a comic twist, featuring lovable and fallible wizards-in-training, very well organized assassins' guilds, and, my personal favorite, death's apprentice named, of course, "Mort." So then, yes. I'm reading yet another of his delightful books, this time about sexism in the magical education system, and it's terrific, of course. And this got me to thinking about magic books and how much I liked them when I was little.
I liked magic books probably mostly because I hoped that my magical powers would be shortly revealed to me by a kindly witch/grandmother who'd been watching and waiting for the right moment to reveal me to myself, and then I would at last be ripped from my longing for specialness into a state of actual specialness. By ten or eleven I thought I had been doing a heroic amount of waiting and figured it was going to happen basically any day now. Oh how long it takes to shed dreams of our own significance.
I read other books, too, with other versions of magical children in them (no Harry Potter for me, though - I feel too old for those, somehow). There's always some version of using one's powers wisely, and that things go poorly for people who abuse their powers. Sort of along the lines of pointing a finger at someone means there's three pointing back at you blah blah blah. The full import of this magical approach to the golden rule didn't really gel for me until well into adulthood. I remember it coming up with road rage - I remember wishing I had the power to pop someone's tire from my car and inconvenience them, or that I could control their speedometer or otherwise use some magic to thwart them. I can't remember if I've blogged about this yet, but one day it occurred to me that if I really were a witch, and I popped someone's tires, then at least three of my tires would pop or some other equally inconvenient thing would happen right back to me, and I don't want that at all. But I would like to affect the meanness in the world . . . . So then, how to exact my revenge without incurring any negative effects? Why, a wise witch will use her power for good, yes? But if "punishing" the "evil" isn't clearly "good," then that changes things - maybe it's less for "good" (which requires a judgment call) and more "in a good way." So instead of wishing for people's tires to pop, I wish in my head that they feel more patient and less stressed out. That way it will hopefully come back to me times three that I feel patient and calm, and that would be very nice. This is a good game to play in all corners of life. It's hard to practice, though.
But anyway, I was reading this Pratchett book and it's about magic of course and one phrase in it was very nice: "Magic's easy, you just find the place where everything is balanced and push. Anyone could do it. There's nothing magical about it." Nice, yes? But I like this because I disagree (yoga stuff coming). In my Jivamukti book the authors say that it's much harder to put something together than take it apart - this makes sense to me - I could certainly unscrew a radio without thinking about it, but put it back together? Yeah, harder, right? And yoga is all about integrating and balancing oneself with oneself - that's the magic that yoga is getting at. It's taking things that are out of balance and pushing them into place. The study of it, the real academic part about it, is learning to identify imbalance, or to see where balance should be underneath all the veils and smoke and fog of life and of the mind. Because it's not easy to tell "what's wrong" and then make it right. Figuring out where things are imbalanced takes a lot of time, and it's easy to get sidetracked or obsessed with correcting one particular thing and then that ends up tipping the scales a different direction, and you need to be shaken sometimes to see that all your effort towards balance is taking you further away - it's a way of mistaking an attempt for balance with what is actually egotism and a desire for specialness.
So the good news that I'm getting from this is that I do have a chance to develop my magical powers, after all. And when I see imbalance at work in the world and how far away from center out efforts can take us, my fantasies about increasing my own specialness have been replaces by my gratitude for my ordinariness. Therefore, yoga is great, and sci-fi-fantasy-humor is great, and Germany is great. You can order beer bigger than your head anywhere you go, and drink it at 10 in the morning and nobody judges.
My "just for fun" book for vacation is one of the Terry Pratchett Discworld books, dozens of which have been kicking around the house since I was as little as I recall - at least from my most early literate era (I brought The Brothers Karamazov with me, but I keep re-realizing that I am not much of a High Thinker, so I've put it down 20 pages in in favor of sci-fi-fantasy-humor). Terry Pratchett writes magical fantasy books with a comic twist, featuring lovable and fallible wizards-in-training, very well organized assassins' guilds, and, my personal favorite, death's apprentice named, of course, "Mort." So then, yes. I'm reading yet another of his delightful books, this time about sexism in the magical education system, and it's terrific, of course. And this got me to thinking about magic books and how much I liked them when I was little.
I liked magic books probably mostly because I hoped that my magical powers would be shortly revealed to me by a kindly witch/grandmother who'd been watching and waiting for the right moment to reveal me to myself, and then I would at last be ripped from my longing for specialness into a state of actual specialness. By ten or eleven I thought I had been doing a heroic amount of waiting and figured it was going to happen basically any day now. Oh how long it takes to shed dreams of our own significance.
I read other books, too, with other versions of magical children in them (no Harry Potter for me, though - I feel too old for those, somehow). There's always some version of using one's powers wisely, and that things go poorly for people who abuse their powers. Sort of along the lines of pointing a finger at someone means there's three pointing back at you blah blah blah. The full import of this magical approach to the golden rule didn't really gel for me until well into adulthood. I remember it coming up with road rage - I remember wishing I had the power to pop someone's tire from my car and inconvenience them, or that I could control their speedometer or otherwise use some magic to thwart them. I can't remember if I've blogged about this yet, but one day it occurred to me that if I really were a witch, and I popped someone's tires, then at least three of my tires would pop or some other equally inconvenient thing would happen right back to me, and I don't want that at all. But I would like to affect the meanness in the world . . . . So then, how to exact my revenge without incurring any negative effects? Why, a wise witch will use her power for good, yes? But if "punishing" the "evil" isn't clearly "good," then that changes things - maybe it's less for "good" (which requires a judgment call) and more "in a good way." So instead of wishing for people's tires to pop, I wish in my head that they feel more patient and less stressed out. That way it will hopefully come back to me times three that I feel patient and calm, and that would be very nice. This is a good game to play in all corners of life. It's hard to practice, though.
But anyway, I was reading this Pratchett book and it's about magic of course and one phrase in it was very nice: "Magic's easy, you just find the place where everything is balanced and push. Anyone could do it. There's nothing magical about it." Nice, yes? But I like this because I disagree (yoga stuff coming). In my Jivamukti book the authors say that it's much harder to put something together than take it apart - this makes sense to me - I could certainly unscrew a radio without thinking about it, but put it back together? Yeah, harder, right? And yoga is all about integrating and balancing oneself with oneself - that's the magic that yoga is getting at. It's taking things that are out of balance and pushing them into place. The study of it, the real academic part about it, is learning to identify imbalance, or to see where balance should be underneath all the veils and smoke and fog of life and of the mind. Because it's not easy to tell "what's wrong" and then make it right. Figuring out where things are imbalanced takes a lot of time, and it's easy to get sidetracked or obsessed with correcting one particular thing and then that ends up tipping the scales a different direction, and you need to be shaken sometimes to see that all your effort towards balance is taking you further away - it's a way of mistaking an attempt for balance with what is actually egotism and a desire for specialness.
So the good news that I'm getting from this is that I do have a chance to develop my magical powers, after all. And when I see imbalance at work in the world and how far away from center out efforts can take us, my fantasies about increasing my own specialness have been replaces by my gratitude for my ordinariness. Therefore, yoga is great, and sci-fi-fantasy-humor is great, and Germany is great. You can order beer bigger than your head anywhere you go, and drink it at 10 in the morning and nobody judges.
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Headaches.
I get a lot of headaches. This feels particularly unfair when I get to thinking about how comparatively well-behaved I am with my vices. I'm a whole-grainer with a solid yoga habit who BARELY drinks anymore, and I try to get plenty of sleep, usually 9 hours. I should feel awesome every single freaking day. But I do not. I get a lot of headaches, like, at least one a week, and not infrequently two.
I guess I don't mind it that much, it's not so bad, but I could do without it. I throw 1,000 mg of ibuprofen at pretty much everything in my life, and it helps a little, but not always. Yesterday I had a particularly bad one, and 1,600 mg didn't help. So that's interesting. I get migraines, too, and that's a whole different ball of wax, and I have the most supremely excellent migraine medication that is sort of delightful to take - take one, get into bed, try to sleep, and in an hour wake up feeling all soft and light and comfy all over, and then try not to look forward to the next migraine. Well, it's not that good, but it's not bad, either.
Headaches just shut everything down. My mood, my energy, my strength; and there's usually some nausea and blurriness as a bonus prize. So lame.
Here's something else sort of annoying - you know what helped my headache a little bit yesterday? A donut. Someone brought them into work and I had one and I got a little chemical rush from the sugar dose and I really think it sped along the process. It sort of makes me nervous - what's that about? Sugar addiction? Something else chemical? Do I need to "detox" or have someone touch my vibrations and tell me to realign my planetary noodles or something?
Whatever. So I'm going to Germany today!! My parents got a cottage and invited us (me and the Huzband) to come stay with them, and we are going to do that. Maybe I'll have some feelings to blog out from abroad. That'll be fun. I am looking forward to turning 14 again as I sit in the back seat of the rental car while my parents navigate us around a foreign place, and then give up and pull over at the first luncheonette we see for lunch and beer. Thus ended many a school-shopping trip in my youth: "Forget it, this sucks, let's get lunch and go home." Ahh youth.
I guess I don't mind it that much, it's not so bad, but I could do without it. I throw 1,000 mg of ibuprofen at pretty much everything in my life, and it helps a little, but not always. Yesterday I had a particularly bad one, and 1,600 mg didn't help. So that's interesting. I get migraines, too, and that's a whole different ball of wax, and I have the most supremely excellent migraine medication that is sort of delightful to take - take one, get into bed, try to sleep, and in an hour wake up feeling all soft and light and comfy all over, and then try not to look forward to the next migraine. Well, it's not that good, but it's not bad, either.
Headaches just shut everything down. My mood, my energy, my strength; and there's usually some nausea and blurriness as a bonus prize. So lame.
Here's something else sort of annoying - you know what helped my headache a little bit yesterday? A donut. Someone brought them into work and I had one and I got a little chemical rush from the sugar dose and I really think it sped along the process. It sort of makes me nervous - what's that about? Sugar addiction? Something else chemical? Do I need to "detox" or have someone touch my vibrations and tell me to realign my planetary noodles or something?
Whatever. So I'm going to Germany today!! My parents got a cottage and invited us (me and the Huzband) to come stay with them, and we are going to do that. Maybe I'll have some feelings to blog out from abroad. That'll be fun. I am looking forward to turning 14 again as I sit in the back seat of the rental car while my parents navigate us around a foreign place, and then give up and pull over at the first luncheonette we see for lunch and beer. Thus ended many a school-shopping trip in my youth: "Forget it, this sucks, let's get lunch and go home." Ahh youth.
Sunday, May 15, 2011
Oh Man Stress AGAIN
I’ve had this feeling lately of a sliding downhill. At first I thought it was connected to the drinking. I thought I’d been having some moderate success with having *a* drink from time to time, like two drinks a week, but it seemed that I was noticing it in a physical/emotional way. So I stopped that, and got back to my real hangover problem: stress. Now that I am settled more into my job, actual stress and responsibilities are also settling in, and I’m spending a little more time in my head worrying about stuff or hoping to remember to do things. So it’s getting harder lately to maintain the equanimity that I spent 7 months working on. Yep, it’s much simpler to stay calm when you have no stressful data coming in.
I went home from work on Thursday this week at about 10:30am. I felt horrible; I hadn’t felt 100% this week anyway – I had a teeny tiny cold and took some cold meds for two nights. But Thursday was a little special - I had woken up at about 5:40 in the morning with that familiar pounding feeling in my head, and a cold shiver, and nausea – zero alcohol involved, mind you. But I did my tried and true hangover prayer anyway, which is to sit under the hot water in the shower for as long as the hot water lasts, and beg the sky that the vascular constriction or whatever would cure me or at least make me comfortable enough to go back to sleep. Neither of these happened, as they never have, and I ended up waiting it out over a pot of tea and probably some ibuprofen, I can’t really remember. I was still pretty shaky by the time I got to work, and feeling like an emotional time-bomb, and the moment I started lifting boxes all my veins started throbbing blood up to my eyes and temples. It felt like my pulse was trying to knock me out. I tried a short cup of coffee, since caffeine can provide some relief for this feeling by dilating, you know, everything, but it just made me jumpy. And then the nausea came back. So I lined up my ducks at work and said see you later, came straight home in the car somehow (barely remember that either), took off my grubby work stuff and fell asleep until about 1pm. I think I probably had a tiny fever – the chills and nausea and fatigue were pretty in line with that feeling. But anyway this go-home-and-skip-a-day was sort of unusual for me. I think of myself as a pretty tough work-horse. I love the all-over fatigue of physical work. I would do it all the time (and I do, now). So I felt a little defeated by having to go home.
My friend SoapyKittens diagnosed me over the phone with allergies. I sort of thought this was off, since I haven’t been sneezy, and I felt feverish, and my eyes aren’t itchy or anything. But the pollen has been flying around quite a bit and it surely clogs the sinuses and screws up one’s head and sleep in ways besides sneezing and itchiness. I thought about the apples at work, of which I eat many a discarded and bruised reject, and since my cootie-meter has totally lowered its standards I only wash about half my fruit these days – so I’m thinking some kind of pesticide or bacteria thing lodged itself in me and that’s what I get for feeling invincible.
So while there is certainly a lesson to be learned in my bruised-apple-laxity, I don’t think that was it, either. I think it was stress. I think I am really kind of a baby about stress, and that I reached a little bit of a maxed-out point, and had to go home and sleep and lay in the bed for a day.
So now that I have a somewhat manageable life, and don’t work 80 million hours a week, I have a little bit of room to contemplate how to cope with stress. I already do a bunch of yoga, and I think I do enough focused breathing to be getting some stress relief out of it, but maybe not enough? I could stand to meditate more than I do, for sure, that would probably help. I really practiced a bunch of stress-relieving habits on my 7 month vacation from life, like rubbing my feet and sleeping 9 hours a night, so I could draw upon that to up my self-care regimen a bit. And I think I should absolutely knock it off with the caffeine, which will also help (except today, since I already drank a pot of tea, which was delicious and wonderful). And as always, contemplate diet changes. Goddammit I get sick of contemplating diet changes. Life is always better with brown rice and green tea, blah blah blah, but seriously, how insanely do I have to tweak my environmental input to feel physically steady? Feels unfair. It’s like 80 year olds who can only handle plain toast and a gently poached banana because everything else is too upsetting. Is this my new super-sensitive-bunny reality? Sigh. But when I do add a little extra mindfulness to stuff it’s always much simpler than I think, and more rewarding than I anticipate. Bleh. Anyway stress is, like, really serious you guys. So I’m gonna eat some brown rice about it, basically.
I went home from work on Thursday this week at about 10:30am. I felt horrible; I hadn’t felt 100% this week anyway – I had a teeny tiny cold and took some cold meds for two nights. But Thursday was a little special - I had woken up at about 5:40 in the morning with that familiar pounding feeling in my head, and a cold shiver, and nausea – zero alcohol involved, mind you. But I did my tried and true hangover prayer anyway, which is to sit under the hot water in the shower for as long as the hot water lasts, and beg the sky that the vascular constriction or whatever would cure me or at least make me comfortable enough to go back to sleep. Neither of these happened, as they never have, and I ended up waiting it out over a pot of tea and probably some ibuprofen, I can’t really remember. I was still pretty shaky by the time I got to work, and feeling like an emotional time-bomb, and the moment I started lifting boxes all my veins started throbbing blood up to my eyes and temples. It felt like my pulse was trying to knock me out. I tried a short cup of coffee, since caffeine can provide some relief for this feeling by dilating, you know, everything, but it just made me jumpy. And then the nausea came back. So I lined up my ducks at work and said see you later, came straight home in the car somehow (barely remember that either), took off my grubby work stuff and fell asleep until about 1pm. I think I probably had a tiny fever – the chills and nausea and fatigue were pretty in line with that feeling. But anyway this go-home-and-skip-a-day was sort of unusual for me. I think of myself as a pretty tough work-horse. I love the all-over fatigue of physical work. I would do it all the time (and I do, now). So I felt a little defeated by having to go home.
My friend SoapyKittens diagnosed me over the phone with allergies. I sort of thought this was off, since I haven’t been sneezy, and I felt feverish, and my eyes aren’t itchy or anything. But the pollen has been flying around quite a bit and it surely clogs the sinuses and screws up one’s head and sleep in ways besides sneezing and itchiness. I thought about the apples at work, of which I eat many a discarded and bruised reject, and since my cootie-meter has totally lowered its standards I only wash about half my fruit these days – so I’m thinking some kind of pesticide or bacteria thing lodged itself in me and that’s what I get for feeling invincible.
So while there is certainly a lesson to be learned in my bruised-apple-laxity, I don’t think that was it, either. I think it was stress. I think I am really kind of a baby about stress, and that I reached a little bit of a maxed-out point, and had to go home and sleep and lay in the bed for a day.
So now that I have a somewhat manageable life, and don’t work 80 million hours a week, I have a little bit of room to contemplate how to cope with stress. I already do a bunch of yoga, and I think I do enough focused breathing to be getting some stress relief out of it, but maybe not enough? I could stand to meditate more than I do, for sure, that would probably help. I really practiced a bunch of stress-relieving habits on my 7 month vacation from life, like rubbing my feet and sleeping 9 hours a night, so I could draw upon that to up my self-care regimen a bit. And I think I should absolutely knock it off with the caffeine, which will also help (except today, since I already drank a pot of tea, which was delicious and wonderful). And as always, contemplate diet changes. Goddammit I get sick of contemplating diet changes. Life is always better with brown rice and green tea, blah blah blah, but seriously, how insanely do I have to tweak my environmental input to feel physically steady? Feels unfair. It’s like 80 year olds who can only handle plain toast and a gently poached banana because everything else is too upsetting. Is this my new super-sensitive-bunny reality? Sigh. But when I do add a little extra mindfulness to stuff it’s always much simpler than I think, and more rewarding than I anticipate. Bleh. Anyway stress is, like, really serious you guys. So I’m gonna eat some brown rice about it, basically.
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Inoculation vs. Antibiotics
This weekend I had to work for a few hours at a big, popular, flower event that the city has every year, usually the same weekend as Mother’s Day. It’s right near the law school I went to, and I realized that professors and people I know from that time might swing through and see me, and I’d end up having some conversations about what I’m doing with myself these days etc. And that’s fine, I’m completely happy with my life choices and don’t feel accountable to anyone for any of my decisions anyway (I’m a grown-up, yes? Yes.). But it did get me thinking about what I usually say about what I'm doing and why, and it made me think about "where" I like to put myself in the stream of human experience. I have concluded that I prefer to be more on the inoculation side of things and less on the antibiotics end of things.
So I think I’ve mentioned before the pro bono thing, providing free legal services to people who can’t afford them. And that I hated it and found it ridiculously stressful and horrible. And yet, the tug at myself to “help” people and use my supposed powers for good created a lot of conflict in me. It’s like forcing yourself to eat something really bitter because it’s good for you. There are really other ways to keep yourself positively occupied or full of nutrients than by doing things that you hate.
Anyway. When providing legal services to anyone, you’re usually on the We’re F***ed end of an event. There’s certainly very little opportunity for working in a preventive roll for an attorney unless you have an ongoing relationship with a client who consults you as they move through their personal decisions. Nope, for most people, calling a lawyer is like getting antibiotics - you're f*****, but we can through some expert-seeming crap on it, and you'll be fine. And I think I prefer working on the inoculation end of life, in that it involves the point in time before everything goes to hell, when everyone can do some yoga and go for a walk and eat some vegetables. That’s what I can handle; that’s what I like.
I used to feel really mystified by people who spent their lives seemingly dedicated to “how” one lives their life. Seemed really boring to me. Diet gurus, exercise lifestyle people, whatever – it seemed like such a limited life to consume oneself with these kinds of things and want to talk to people about how to act all day. Weird. I think it seemed to me that we all sort of figure out how to act anyway, and we should be aiming for higher things like art and music or whatever; that our personal potential is primary, and that the tiny facts of sustenance and connectedness and fitness and peace were secondary pursuits that should be balanced in accordance to their ability to support or detract from one’s primary purpose. But I feel a little more interested in versions of life that have a lot to do with how to live life, as opposed to leaving that as an afterthought or as the natural consequence of one’s other choices/primary pursuits. It’s endlessly fascinating, this examination-breakdown of our tiny choices, and the measuring of our feelings and reactions against these choices, and the adjusting of ourselves depending on the impact we sense. Finding satisfaction in this requires some letting go, perhaps. You might have to let go of ideas of importance or fame or success or whatever else you might think is “more important” than the tiny decisions that come up every day about how to live. Really it all kind of felt small to me, but now I’m starting to feel like it’s everything. Nowadays we have a lot of forces pressing on us that do make small (mostly consumption-based) decisions really big – oil consumption, free range animals, whatever, but even without all the social/ethical baggage that we assign to our decisions, attentiveness to the mundane is pretty much where it’s at. There is a dark side to this attentiveness, which is that stuff like going to a coffee shop can become an event of emotional impact completely disproportionate to its import, i.e., “did the barista hate me with that snarling snarkiness,” “this table is too sticky,” “those people are talking too loud,” “is someone looking at my laptop information,” “I have to pee but I don’t want to leave my stuff here but I also don’t want to lose my seat.”
The roller-coaster of our everyday experience can be pretty intense if you absorb yourself too fully in its minutiae. Maybe I’m trying to say something else about being happy just trying to live. That the range of interactions and emotions we have going to a coffee shop are the higher purpose in life? Something like that?
BUT ANYWAY. Suffice it to say that I empathize with people who are a bit obsessed with the hard work of making their daily decisions have a positive impact on themselves, because it doesn’t seem small-minded or less lofty to me, it seems real and powerful. And I am much happier trying to part of the prospective, as opposed to responsive, aspect of sentient happiness here on the planet, which is to say that I prefer inoculations (or the lifestyle equivalent) to antibiotics. Prevention is way less toxic a game than cure, and I am okay with a life that has less to do with accomplishing “important” things and more to do with living well.
So I think I’ve mentioned before the pro bono thing, providing free legal services to people who can’t afford them. And that I hated it and found it ridiculously stressful and horrible. And yet, the tug at myself to “help” people and use my supposed powers for good created a lot of conflict in me. It’s like forcing yourself to eat something really bitter because it’s good for you. There are really other ways to keep yourself positively occupied or full of nutrients than by doing things that you hate.
Anyway. When providing legal services to anyone, you’re usually on the We’re F***ed end of an event. There’s certainly very little opportunity for working in a preventive roll for an attorney unless you have an ongoing relationship with a client who consults you as they move through their personal decisions. Nope, for most people, calling a lawyer is like getting antibiotics - you're f*****, but we can through some expert-seeming crap on it, and you'll be fine. And I think I prefer working on the inoculation end of life, in that it involves the point in time before everything goes to hell, when everyone can do some yoga and go for a walk and eat some vegetables. That’s what I can handle; that’s what I like.
I used to feel really mystified by people who spent their lives seemingly dedicated to “how” one lives their life. Seemed really boring to me. Diet gurus, exercise lifestyle people, whatever – it seemed like such a limited life to consume oneself with these kinds of things and want to talk to people about how to act all day. Weird. I think it seemed to me that we all sort of figure out how to act anyway, and we should be aiming for higher things like art and music or whatever; that our personal potential is primary, and that the tiny facts of sustenance and connectedness and fitness and peace were secondary pursuits that should be balanced in accordance to their ability to support or detract from one’s primary purpose. But I feel a little more interested in versions of life that have a lot to do with how to live life, as opposed to leaving that as an afterthought or as the natural consequence of one’s other choices/primary pursuits. It’s endlessly fascinating, this examination-breakdown of our tiny choices, and the measuring of our feelings and reactions against these choices, and the adjusting of ourselves depending on the impact we sense. Finding satisfaction in this requires some letting go, perhaps. You might have to let go of ideas of importance or fame or success or whatever else you might think is “more important” than the tiny decisions that come up every day about how to live. Really it all kind of felt small to me, but now I’m starting to feel like it’s everything. Nowadays we have a lot of forces pressing on us that do make small (mostly consumption-based) decisions really big – oil consumption, free range animals, whatever, but even without all the social/ethical baggage that we assign to our decisions, attentiveness to the mundane is pretty much where it’s at. There is a dark side to this attentiveness, which is that stuff like going to a coffee shop can become an event of emotional impact completely disproportionate to its import, i.e., “did the barista hate me with that snarling snarkiness,” “this table is too sticky,” “those people are talking too loud,” “is someone looking at my laptop information,” “I have to pee but I don’t want to leave my stuff here but I also don’t want to lose my seat.”
The roller-coaster of our everyday experience can be pretty intense if you absorb yourself too fully in its minutiae. Maybe I’m trying to say something else about being happy just trying to live. That the range of interactions and emotions we have going to a coffee shop are the higher purpose in life? Something like that?
BUT ANYWAY. Suffice it to say that I empathize with people who are a bit obsessed with the hard work of making their daily decisions have a positive impact on themselves, because it doesn’t seem small-minded or less lofty to me, it seems real and powerful. And I am much happier trying to part of the prospective, as opposed to responsive, aspect of sentient happiness here on the planet, which is to say that I prefer inoculations (or the lifestyle equivalent) to antibiotics. Prevention is way less toxic a game than cure, and I am okay with a life that has less to do with accomplishing “important” things and more to do with living well.
Sunday, May 8, 2011
Positive Job Anxiety! Negative Coping Mechanisms
Another nutty week of existence. Have I mentioned that I love my job? I really do. I wish that I could love my job for about 30 hours a week instead of 40-45, but still, it’s really fun. I love riding around in a big truck with other people who also love riding around in the big truck, and bullsh*tting with the customers, and learning about produce prices and markets, and saying I won’t take the collard greens because they aren’t up to snuff today, look at ‘em, they’re slimey!
So on the list of “personal growth” items this week was: having to confront an employee about behavior, which was pretty intense for me. I lost a little sleep, and it was really interesting to observe my mind in this situation. I couldn’t stop my mind from turning the problem around and around in my head, but I did feel pretty effective about watching the thinker, if you know what I mean (which you do), and I felt pretty yoga-tastic about it, even though I wasn’t successful at keeping the anxiety at bay. And I did have a chance to have the conversation with this person that I needed to have, and it went awesomely, and I feel great about it, even though I had some rough time in my head about it.
So clearly, even though I am pretty happy, I still have anxiety about job performance, for sure – there are a lot of important things that have to get done for our jobs to exist, mainly being: buy produce, put it on the truck, drive the truck to places people will be expecting the truck to be full of produce, and be extremely cheery and rad to people to create a feeling of fun and ease around eating healthy. I will say that in terms of potential work consequences, i.e., how far down you have to fall and how hard you hit, this job feels both more important to do right and less terrifying if I blunder as compared to my legal (CLA) job. More important because I think I am starting to care that the truck be great, not just pressured that people view me as a billable resource like the CLA job; and less terrifying for blunders because every single day is another opportunity to make the truck great, and the cumulative impact of my personal screw ups washes out in the bigger pool of the job. At the CLA job, it felt a little more severe – although screw ups happened and at the CLA job people were really understanding about that stuff, the head trip about making something screw up was pretty rough, way rougher than this job (and might have created expensive consequences). But I feel like the anxiety and challenges at my job are enjoyable; I feel ready for them and like I can handle them and like everyone is a teacher and it’s going to help me grow as a person and eventually as a parent. I finally feel like I’m in the right place at the right time in so far as challenges I need to meet goes. Was I just so freaking over-my-head at the CLA job that I shouldn’t even have been there? Probably. I can’t believe people adapt to that stress.
So on to the next fun bit of information – we got in a car accident on the highway in the truck! Good god if you’ve ever felt an 8 ton vehicle rock from side to side and fishtail on the highway, well, I have too (I was not driving). And it’s pretty scary. We could have tipped over – well, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but I felt for a split second the possibility of that. A convertible, driven by a 19 year old male (if you can see where I’m going with this), came up super fast behind us and clipped our back end trying to pass us. The convertible spun out and stopped across two lanes. No one was hurt, but key-rice-st it was scary. I called 911 which is a weird thing to do, if you’ve ever had to that, well, I also had to do that, too. The other car needed a tow, but our big truck drove away with a mutilated back bumper thing but fine otherwise.
Again, we were fine and all that, but the emotional impact was surprising. It’s like when you get into a fight with someone and you spend the rest of the day pacing and anxious and reeling in your head. Except after the car accident I wasn’t thinking up good things to say to anyone that would have really zinged them, so it’s actually kind of better than that. To decompress a little, I took the crew out for burgers and beer, on me. And I had half a xanax, so that smoothed things out like you wouldn’t believe (if you've heard my "the day I quit my CLA job" story this might ring a bell, but don't worry about me, it's fine). And after making an appointment with our vehicle service people and trying to go to the DMV to get the accident report, I rode my bike home on the bike trail with no cars around, had some spaghetti (more comfort medication), two more beers, watched Brigitte Bardot movies (which are horrible/excellent), and fell asleep at 9:30pm.
So for coping with this experience – the tingling and boiling in the stomach, the out-of-body feeling, the bowel-loosening - I went straight for the old stress standbys – drinks, tv, and starch. This might have been an amazing opportunity to roll with it yoga-style, but I did not do that. I had beer instead. Man, what an amazing shortcut to mental relief that is. The spinning just stops as your mind gets so deflated. But I am absolutely letting myself off the hook for that. It was An Occasion. I’d be less inclined to treat my best friend’s wedding as a reason to drink than a car accident – after the car accident, I wanted to feel shutdown and tired and wake up the next day with everything over. Happy occasions and everyday life, not so much. I had one good stress-coping event at work (had to talk to employee) and one pretty rough stress-coping event (car accident). So that’s a note about my progress on vice and coping mechanisms.
That’s what happened at work this week, and that’s how I’m doing with stress and life. Forward, back, you know how it is.
So on the list of “personal growth” items this week was: having to confront an employee about behavior, which was pretty intense for me. I lost a little sleep, and it was really interesting to observe my mind in this situation. I couldn’t stop my mind from turning the problem around and around in my head, but I did feel pretty effective about watching the thinker, if you know what I mean (which you do), and I felt pretty yoga-tastic about it, even though I wasn’t successful at keeping the anxiety at bay. And I did have a chance to have the conversation with this person that I needed to have, and it went awesomely, and I feel great about it, even though I had some rough time in my head about it.
So clearly, even though I am pretty happy, I still have anxiety about job performance, for sure – there are a lot of important things that have to get done for our jobs to exist, mainly being: buy produce, put it on the truck, drive the truck to places people will be expecting the truck to be full of produce, and be extremely cheery and rad to people to create a feeling of fun and ease around eating healthy. I will say that in terms of potential work consequences, i.e., how far down you have to fall and how hard you hit, this job feels both more important to do right and less terrifying if I blunder as compared to my legal (CLA) job. More important because I think I am starting to care that the truck be great, not just pressured that people view me as a billable resource like the CLA job; and less terrifying for blunders because every single day is another opportunity to make the truck great, and the cumulative impact of my personal screw ups washes out in the bigger pool of the job. At the CLA job, it felt a little more severe – although screw ups happened and at the CLA job people were really understanding about that stuff, the head trip about making something screw up was pretty rough, way rougher than this job (and might have created expensive consequences). But I feel like the anxiety and challenges at my job are enjoyable; I feel ready for them and like I can handle them and like everyone is a teacher and it’s going to help me grow as a person and eventually as a parent. I finally feel like I’m in the right place at the right time in so far as challenges I need to meet goes. Was I just so freaking over-my-head at the CLA job that I shouldn’t even have been there? Probably. I can’t believe people adapt to that stress.
So on to the next fun bit of information – we got in a car accident on the highway in the truck! Good god if you’ve ever felt an 8 ton vehicle rock from side to side and fishtail on the highway, well, I have too (I was not driving). And it’s pretty scary. We could have tipped over – well, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but I felt for a split second the possibility of that. A convertible, driven by a 19 year old male (if you can see where I’m going with this), came up super fast behind us and clipped our back end trying to pass us. The convertible spun out and stopped across two lanes. No one was hurt, but key-rice-st it was scary. I called 911 which is a weird thing to do, if you’ve ever had to that, well, I also had to do that, too. The other car needed a tow, but our big truck drove away with a mutilated back bumper thing but fine otherwise.
Again, we were fine and all that, but the emotional impact was surprising. It’s like when you get into a fight with someone and you spend the rest of the day pacing and anxious and reeling in your head. Except after the car accident I wasn’t thinking up good things to say to anyone that would have really zinged them, so it’s actually kind of better than that. To decompress a little, I took the crew out for burgers and beer, on me. And I had half a xanax, so that smoothed things out like you wouldn’t believe (if you've heard my "the day I quit my CLA job" story this might ring a bell, but don't worry about me, it's fine). And after making an appointment with our vehicle service people and trying to go to the DMV to get the accident report, I rode my bike home on the bike trail with no cars around, had some spaghetti (more comfort medication), two more beers, watched Brigitte Bardot movies (which are horrible/excellent), and fell asleep at 9:30pm.
So for coping with this experience – the tingling and boiling in the stomach, the out-of-body feeling, the bowel-loosening - I went straight for the old stress standbys – drinks, tv, and starch. This might have been an amazing opportunity to roll with it yoga-style, but I did not do that. I had beer instead. Man, what an amazing shortcut to mental relief that is. The spinning just stops as your mind gets so deflated. But I am absolutely letting myself off the hook for that. It was An Occasion. I’d be less inclined to treat my best friend’s wedding as a reason to drink than a car accident – after the car accident, I wanted to feel shutdown and tired and wake up the next day with everything over. Happy occasions and everyday life, not so much. I had one good stress-coping event at work (had to talk to employee) and one pretty rough stress-coping event (car accident). So that’s a note about my progress on vice and coping mechanisms.
That’s what happened at work this week, and that’s how I’m doing with stress and life. Forward, back, you know how it is.
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Finding a Locus for a More Hocus-Pocus Yoga Focus
So last week I went to yoga on Monday night at a local place that definitely appears to be the main center of happ-nin yoga around here, and took a Jivamukti class. Jivamukti is a type of yoga that two Manhattanite folks started in the ‘80s that focuses a lot on ahimsa, or nonviolence (very much in the form of vegan living), and has a pretty vigorous post-Ashtanga vinyasa-flow approach. Anyway. From what I understand, in order to call oneself a Jivamukti teacher, as opposed to someone who teaches yoga and was trained and certified by Jivamukti teachers, one must adhere to a certain kind of class structure and style. And I get this in one sense – Jivamukti needs to protect its brand, and it can’t have way off-base teachings with its name attached to it happening all over the place. So, sure. It was in the back of my head, though, at this class, that this teacher couldn’t fully be himself within the parameters of this method. It’s probably not true – there’s certainly lee-way available – but that was one distraction about the class for me. It felt so very by-the-book in terms of the little snippets of yoga wisdom that came out that I wondered if the teacher really felt it. Well, it’s also that he rambled a bit – like he knew what he should be offering up but didn’t really know how to say what he was trying to say. His chattiness ran a little long, which to me indicated a level of searching as he was talking, which meant his vision wasn’t concrete to him yet.
This is something I want to keep in mind for my own teaching. Sincerity is important. Lack of sincerity is extremely obvious, no matter how well you can “say” the words. And I’ve noticed this in the classes that I’ve been teaching – part of me feels like I need to hand out some kind of peace/love guidance thing to give to the class, and it’s pretty tough to articulate peace/love feelings genuinely. First of all, it’s hard to articulate them at all. “You know, peace and stuff.” Second, communicating one’s feelings genuinely and succinctly enough in a class context requires serious choice of words and clarity of thought, so you have to know and mean what you say. Third, hell to muffins I am no beacon of successful peace/love for someone to model and I don’t want to suggest that any yoga information I have to offer represents my confidence or achievement of something great.
Which leads to me to the fourth, which is that peace/love isn’t the primary thing for me in yoga right now. The teacher last week, in spite of my feelings about his convictions and his teaching, said something that really rang in my mind – he said that if you are doing yoga postures in a checklist kind of way to feel accomplishment then you are missing the point of yoga. And this is something I do. I am pretty caught up in the athleticism of yoga. I love feeling myself progress in postures that have been eluding me because they require more strength than I have, and I feel pretty pleased with myself when I notice I have gained the strength to do something. I am mostly motivated to do yoga by my desire to exert my energy and expand my vocabulary of movements so that I can really get sweaty. The sheer exertion feels like a huge relief, and I can purge some anxiety and shed the day away, but this mostly happens because of the physical fatigue, not because I connect with the Universal like a champ. Well, actually, I have usually considered my exertion to BE my connection with the Universal, but there is definitely an element of the inner world that is lacking right now, something I’m just not going for. I can feel transcendent etc. when I am doing my postures, and I do my final relaxation on the floor, and I sit still and try to focus on my breathing, but I’m not as gung-ho about it as I am the pure work-out part of it. So I’d like to up the ante a little bit on my spiritual hocus-pocus, so that maybe I’ll have something more genuine to offer to future classes about the inner-world aspect of yoga practice.
This is something I want to keep in mind for my own teaching. Sincerity is important. Lack of sincerity is extremely obvious, no matter how well you can “say” the words. And I’ve noticed this in the classes that I’ve been teaching – part of me feels like I need to hand out some kind of peace/love guidance thing to give to the class, and it’s pretty tough to articulate peace/love feelings genuinely. First of all, it’s hard to articulate them at all. “You know, peace and stuff.” Second, communicating one’s feelings genuinely and succinctly enough in a class context requires serious choice of words and clarity of thought, so you have to know and mean what you say. Third, hell to muffins I am no beacon of successful peace/love for someone to model and I don’t want to suggest that any yoga information I have to offer represents my confidence or achievement of something great.
Which leads to me to the fourth, which is that peace/love isn’t the primary thing for me in yoga right now. The teacher last week, in spite of my feelings about his convictions and his teaching, said something that really rang in my mind – he said that if you are doing yoga postures in a checklist kind of way to feel accomplishment then you are missing the point of yoga. And this is something I do. I am pretty caught up in the athleticism of yoga. I love feeling myself progress in postures that have been eluding me because they require more strength than I have, and I feel pretty pleased with myself when I notice I have gained the strength to do something. I am mostly motivated to do yoga by my desire to exert my energy and expand my vocabulary of movements so that I can really get sweaty. The sheer exertion feels like a huge relief, and I can purge some anxiety and shed the day away, but this mostly happens because of the physical fatigue, not because I connect with the Universal like a champ. Well, actually, I have usually considered my exertion to BE my connection with the Universal, but there is definitely an element of the inner world that is lacking right now, something I’m just not going for. I can feel transcendent etc. when I am doing my postures, and I do my final relaxation on the floor, and I sit still and try to focus on my breathing, but I’m not as gung-ho about it as I am the pure work-out part of it. So I’d like to up the ante a little bit on my spiritual hocus-pocus, so that maybe I’ll have something more genuine to offer to future classes about the inner-world aspect of yoga practice.
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Oh Man Like/Dislike Mind-F*** Continues
So to keep thinking about all this personality and like/dislike stuff – I’m trying to find the inner part of what disliking someone means to me. As Ferd noted in my comments (loving it!), repulsing people is pretty effective in a wheat/chaff sense, and you can end up repulsing the exact people you'd like to repulse, so, you know, win-win. Win-win since one of the major things about this is that in a basic way it’s pleasant to be with people you enjoy, of course. Connecting and laughing and joking and discussing things with people who resonate with you is pretty exciting. And there’s such a wide range of kinds of relationships that are interesting to have with people – for example, in some friendships I bet you like someone because they really bring out the sense of fun in you, and in other friendships you are the fun one. But in all the forms of friendship to have, the most fun to have with people is when there is some sense of life moving forward just in the being together. It’s sort of like exciting conversations, in which your ideas just feed off each other’s and by the end of the conversations you and your friend have figured out just so darn much about life and the nature of reality and perception etc.
And then, on the other hand, there’s those attempts at connectedness that just fall completely flat, where you or the other person just can’t pick up the other end of the interaction; either the idea doesn’t click with you, or they say it in a way that doesn’t seem to permit further interesting discussion, or just completely misses the point of what you were trying to say. It’s deflating energetically. But anyway spending time with someone who you dislike sort of takes the air out of the tires of life. Imagine spending the rest of time with someone you don’t like, bleh. I suppose you’d find common ground eventually, but it’s much nicer when you ring with someone.
So what makes one “ring” with someone? Right now I’m thinking about this in terms of my own disapproval. Not liking someone, for me, feels a lot about shaking my head or clucking about “the way someone is.” Some of these are personality/value judgments, like “she’s a know-it-all,” or “he’s a bigot,” or “she’s a complainer,” or “he’s full of sh*t all the time,” or “she’s too needy and reaches further in than I think this relationship should go.” Others of these are behavioral judgments, like “she chimes in with inappropriate nonsense just to be part of the conversation,” or “he jumps right in with advice even though I’m not done explaining this thing and if he’d let me finish he’d see this isn’t an advice request,” or “she drinks too much,” or “he pursues nothing beyond video games and it’s just sad.” All of these things come from my ideas about what kind of person it is okay to be. It’s not okay to ignore the conversation topic. It’s not okay to speak with total confidence about topics you’ve seen one documentary about. It’s not okay to complain all the time or make yourself out to be something you’re not. It’s not okay to play a lot of video games or drink too much. I mean, clearly I have a lot of rules in my head about what to do and how to act, and it is a person’s failure to conform to my normative imaginings that makes me dislike them. When I meet someone else who seems to have come to the same kind of behavioral/personality conclusions that I have come to, then this confirms something about my view of the world (Hey look, we both live on the same planet at the same point in history and both understand a lot of things in the same way! I must be on to something! This “rings.”). Disapproving of people also reaffirms my view of the world to me, of course.
So if I think of my disapproval in terms of looking for ways to confirm or reaffirm my view of the world, I am using my perceptions of other people as a way to stay as closed-minded as possible. If you already fit a certain mold, you’re part of the evidence of me being right about the world – and if you defy my model of existence, as luck would have it, you’re also part of the evidence of me being right about the world. Feels pretty convenient.
So then, this week's Boatmeal Challenge Continued? Why, critically consider my human-personality worldview, of course, in the hope that by loosening my concepts of what is acceptable in a person I can be a little less affected by feelings of dislike.
And then, on the other hand, there’s those attempts at connectedness that just fall completely flat, where you or the other person just can’t pick up the other end of the interaction; either the idea doesn’t click with you, or they say it in a way that doesn’t seem to permit further interesting discussion, or just completely misses the point of what you were trying to say. It’s deflating energetically. But anyway spending time with someone who you dislike sort of takes the air out of the tires of life. Imagine spending the rest of time with someone you don’t like, bleh. I suppose you’d find common ground eventually, but it’s much nicer when you ring with someone.
So what makes one “ring” with someone? Right now I’m thinking about this in terms of my own disapproval. Not liking someone, for me, feels a lot about shaking my head or clucking about “the way someone is.” Some of these are personality/value judgments, like “she’s a know-it-all,” or “he’s a bigot,” or “she’s a complainer,” or “he’s full of sh*t all the time,” or “she’s too needy and reaches further in than I think this relationship should go.” Others of these are behavioral judgments, like “she chimes in with inappropriate nonsense just to be part of the conversation,” or “he jumps right in with advice even though I’m not done explaining this thing and if he’d let me finish he’d see this isn’t an advice request,” or “she drinks too much,” or “he pursues nothing beyond video games and it’s just sad.” All of these things come from my ideas about what kind of person it is okay to be. It’s not okay to ignore the conversation topic. It’s not okay to speak with total confidence about topics you’ve seen one documentary about. It’s not okay to complain all the time or make yourself out to be something you’re not. It’s not okay to play a lot of video games or drink too much. I mean, clearly I have a lot of rules in my head about what to do and how to act, and it is a person’s failure to conform to my normative imaginings that makes me dislike them. When I meet someone else who seems to have come to the same kind of behavioral/personality conclusions that I have come to, then this confirms something about my view of the world (Hey look, we both live on the same planet at the same point in history and both understand a lot of things in the same way! I must be on to something! This “rings.”). Disapproving of people also reaffirms my view of the world to me, of course.
So if I think of my disapproval in terms of looking for ways to confirm or reaffirm my view of the world, I am using my perceptions of other people as a way to stay as closed-minded as possible. If you already fit a certain mold, you’re part of the evidence of me being right about the world – and if you defy my model of existence, as luck would have it, you’re also part of the evidence of me being right about the world. Feels pretty convenient.
So then, this week's Boatmeal Challenge Continued? Why, critically consider my human-personality worldview, of course, in the hope that by loosening my concepts of what is acceptable in a person I can be a little less affected by feelings of dislike.
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Besides Personality Problems, There's This Problem
Why oh whydee why why is it so upsetting to be nice to someone I dislike? I have a few theories.
*The Implicit Approval Problem*
Let’s say being nice to people functions as our implicit approval of them. Therefore, being nice to someone you do not like is a form of lying, which feels bad or insincere or whatever – I do not approve of you and your behavior, yet here I bestow my kindness as though I do. Even though, seriously now, I do not approve of you. Perhaps this makes a chink in our integrity armor? Maybe it’s a sort of Pride & Prejudice problem, in that we do not communicate sincerity in our kindness when it is indiscriminately offered (i.e., Jane Bennett was so nice to everyone that Mr. Darcy could not be assured she had any particular regard for Mr. Bingley)?
*The Invasion of my personal sense of . . . something*
This is the one I’m more interested in - for this example let’s say now that it feels gross to me to be nice to someone I don’t like. I don’t want to look in their eyes. I don’t want to make little I-am-amused-by-your-puns titters or express other niceties that indicate some version of “I’m listening to you, and you’re okay by me, man.” I don’t want to ask them regular, everyday conversational questions in the usual polite way because I do not want to invite them to talk or indicate in any way that I would like to pursue a greater level of intimacy than complete distance. It’s not that it would feel like lying, or insincerity, or anything like that to make eye contact, laugh politely, or ask banal questions, no no. Instead, it feels like kindness on my part would widen the very pores of my skin and let the disliked person’s invisible yuck-oil slime all over me. You see, the disliked person in my mind has a kind of abhorrent dander that intrudes on me. To stay “untainted” I go into shut down mode. No smiling. No eye contact. No questions. It’s like avoiding poison ivy. Look out, don’t get any on you.
Why? Why does it feel gross to be nice to people I don’t like? Why does it give me the ick-it’s-getting-on-me feeling?
Is this too brutal to share? Too late now. Really though, what is the deal with disliking people and its effect on me?
I understand a few things about the futility of dislike. One ridiculous thing is that there is clearly no “benefit” to me of disliking someone – what do I think, that I can dislike them so much that they become likeable eventually? That they learn their lesson a la the playground and re-align their behaviors to become re-ingratiated? Dislike them so much that it somehow makes being around them bearable for me? Yeah, no – it’s more like be so mean that they dislike me right back or feel kind of upset, or that I become so distracted by my loathing that it takes up way too much space in my brain. So basically my feelings have the potential for either imaginary or horrible outcomes. So what’s the plan here? What’s my strategy? What’s my problem?
One strategy I’ve heard, besides pretending you’ve never met the person before each time you see them (hi! What’s your name? ha ha), is to be nice. I know, this sounds pretty obvious, but it isn’t to me. Being nice has all those problems I mentioned above – I want to make no indication that I am inviting further intimacy or encourage what would feel like over-reaching, and there’s that sincerity problem in there related to how I express my affection. But I guess there is a way to be nice that has nothing to do with either of these things. This is really clear in some circumstances, such as marketplace interactions – consider being nice to customers in a store. It’s free, it makes things better for everyone, and it doesn’t crack anyone’s integrity to do it (from my point of view). But there’s a clear boundary there between people; the interaction is in a store and is limited to the five minutes you spend together, so there’s no long-lasting further entanglement consequence attached to the niceness here. This example is different with regular customers you see every day, with whom your relationship can become damaged, or over-reaching customers who think workplace friendliness is actual life friendliness - then it gets messier. And then there’s this thing about politeness – people’s knowledge, conscious or unconscious, that our culture’s type of politeness requires people to endure certain kinds of unacceptable behavior, another kind of over-reaching. Well I guess I'll still be thinking about this for a while. Book suggestions welcome.
*The Implicit Approval Problem*
Let’s say being nice to people functions as our implicit approval of them. Therefore, being nice to someone you do not like is a form of lying, which feels bad or insincere or whatever – I do not approve of you and your behavior, yet here I bestow my kindness as though I do. Even though, seriously now, I do not approve of you. Perhaps this makes a chink in our integrity armor? Maybe it’s a sort of Pride & Prejudice problem, in that we do not communicate sincerity in our kindness when it is indiscriminately offered (i.e., Jane Bennett was so nice to everyone that Mr. Darcy could not be assured she had any particular regard for Mr. Bingley)?
*The Invasion of my personal sense of . . . something*
This is the one I’m more interested in - for this example let’s say now that it feels gross to me to be nice to someone I don’t like. I don’t want to look in their eyes. I don’t want to make little I-am-amused-by-your-puns titters or express other niceties that indicate some version of “I’m listening to you, and you’re okay by me, man.” I don’t want to ask them regular, everyday conversational questions in the usual polite way because I do not want to invite them to talk or indicate in any way that I would like to pursue a greater level of intimacy than complete distance. It’s not that it would feel like lying, or insincerity, or anything like that to make eye contact, laugh politely, or ask banal questions, no no. Instead, it feels like kindness on my part would widen the very pores of my skin and let the disliked person’s invisible yuck-oil slime all over me. You see, the disliked person in my mind has a kind of abhorrent dander that intrudes on me. To stay “untainted” I go into shut down mode. No smiling. No eye contact. No questions. It’s like avoiding poison ivy. Look out, don’t get any on you.
Why? Why does it feel gross to be nice to people I don’t like? Why does it give me the ick-it’s-getting-on-me feeling?
Is this too brutal to share? Too late now. Really though, what is the deal with disliking people and its effect on me?
I understand a few things about the futility of dislike. One ridiculous thing is that there is clearly no “benefit” to me of disliking someone – what do I think, that I can dislike them so much that they become likeable eventually? That they learn their lesson a la the playground and re-align their behaviors to become re-ingratiated? Dislike them so much that it somehow makes being around them bearable for me? Yeah, no – it’s more like be so mean that they dislike me right back or feel kind of upset, or that I become so distracted by my loathing that it takes up way too much space in my brain. So basically my feelings have the potential for either imaginary or horrible outcomes. So what’s the plan here? What’s my strategy? What’s my problem?
One strategy I’ve heard, besides pretending you’ve never met the person before each time you see them (hi! What’s your name? ha ha), is to be nice. I know, this sounds pretty obvious, but it isn’t to me. Being nice has all those problems I mentioned above – I want to make no indication that I am inviting further intimacy or encourage what would feel like over-reaching, and there’s that sincerity problem in there related to how I express my affection. But I guess there is a way to be nice that has nothing to do with either of these things. This is really clear in some circumstances, such as marketplace interactions – consider being nice to customers in a store. It’s free, it makes things better for everyone, and it doesn’t crack anyone’s integrity to do it (from my point of view). But there’s a clear boundary there between people; the interaction is in a store and is limited to the five minutes you spend together, so there’s no long-lasting further entanglement consequence attached to the niceness here. This example is different with regular customers you see every day, with whom your relationship can become damaged, or over-reaching customers who think workplace friendliness is actual life friendliness - then it gets messier. And then there’s this thing about politeness – people’s knowledge, conscious or unconscious, that our culture’s type of politeness requires people to endure certain kinds of unacceptable behavior, another kind of over-reaching. Well I guess I'll still be thinking about this for a while. Book suggestions welcome.
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Personality Problems
So one of my personality problems (flaws) is that I talk a little loud and bulldozer-ish and kind of know-it-all-ish in a class clown kind of way that is hilarious to me but not always hilarious to the listener. I like to start sentences with the phrase “here’s what you should do” and follow it up with something preposterous. I also like to roll my eyes about things and identify the problems in arguments or points of view. Nobody likes this. I also enjoy cutting off your sentences to say something funny to me. Nobody likes this either. But anyway.
I noticed a couple of incidents at my job this week that reminded me of how annoying I can be to people and it got me thinking about what aspects of myself I should want to change, and what aspects I should accept as being part of “myself.” Sometimes I don’t care if people don’t think I’m funny, in what my dear pal calls the “joke ‘em if they can’t take a f***” approach to things. Under this perspective, I am in charge of my half of the interaction, which is My Personal Intention, and everybody else can worry about themselves and it’s not my problem. MPI is not (usually) to be hurtful or mean or dismissive, but rather, to be funny and interested and interesting and bat around ideas and critiques of things for fun and banter (and to get laughs, which is a vanity/insecurity thing). The listener’s experience my boisterousness might be different from MPI, of course. The listener could be offended or feel misunderstood or get the impression that I think s/he is foolish or whatever, so it’s not always effective.
The examples at work were as follows: two gals in the workplace were discussing Eat, Pray, Love, and one had seen the movie but not read the book, and the other had the book and brought it in to share. I saw the book on the table and immediately launched into some version of “oh lordy who’s reading THIS,” fully believing that I was effectively opening up the channels of communication for fun discussion of the book and its problematic and successful qualities. This belief of mine that saying how much I hate stuff is actually a great ice breaker is funny in itself, and of course, "channel-opening" is not what happened. Instead I prompted the gal who brought it in to say “yeah I guess only people with terrible taste, like me, like this book.” It took me a minute to catch on that this was the hurt-feelings kind of sarcasm and not funny self-deprecating humor, so I said “yeah only dumb-dumbs like this crap.” And then I realized that I had provoked hurt feelings, and I had to let the crankiness settle for a minute and then explain that I didn’t want to be mean or superior about it, I was trying to be funny and that I was sorry.
So that’s one incident. Another one was a different set of gals chit chatting about stuff, and one of them starts saying how she got an iris reading the other day – yes, someone looks into your eyeball and tells you all about yourself. I guess the premise is that there is information in the iris of the eye that says stuff about you and your choices and your life – and the first two things that the iris reader told this gal were that her deodorant was clogging her breast tissue lymph drainage and that she eats too much dairy. Yawn! These are totally generic and I said so, again, thinking that I am funny. Instead the gal’s face fell a bit and I have probably effectively inhibited her from ever wanting to share anything about her life with me ever again for the rest of time. Here’s how that conversation could have gone in my ideal world with a friend who “gets” me:
“Hey Marth I got my iris read last week, and it was so rad! This chick looked into my eyes and told me my lymph stuff wasn’t draining because of my deodorant and that I eat too much dairy!”
“Dude, she also tell you that you had a hard time high school, and detect stress and confusion in your life? That stuff is way generic!”
“Ha ha whatever lame-o, no way, you had to be there, it was different than that – it was really right on, for reals!”
“Whoa, that’s nutty! Are you going to go back? Tell me what else she said!”
See, was that so hard? Fun! Shows my attention and critical thinking and delight in life, no? I mean, I recognize how snarky and combative and potentially offensive it is, so yeah, maybe not.
So now here’s the real problem: I don’t want to alienate people, but I also want to be myself. I don’t want to maintain relationships with people who willfully misunderstand me or who are too sensitive or serious about themselves, but I want to be relate to lots of different kind of people in my life and not use my personality as some kind of filter or friend deterrent. I want to do my half of whatever it is that happens between people to make sure everyone knows that everyone is cool with everyone else being exactly how they are. And I want to be around people who can do their half of not taking things the wrong way, or being too attached to their decisions or preferences or anything else such that disagreement on books or iris readings is really offensive to them.
But I also don’t want to become so settled in my personality or defensive about my characteristics such that I deny the possibility or necessity of improving myself when it comes to my personality problems. I mean, it’s maddening to be around people who are really protective of their bad personality traits (lots of old people do this, and I think it can be pretty lazy sometimes). But how do I know which things to work on changing and which things are okay to keep? My friend suggested that I can get comfortable with this idea by thinking about being myself, but just adjusting my behaviors to what is "appropriate" for the situation. This is a nicer way of thinking about it than just saying I need to change myself or censor my nature. Even if it’s just semantic that’s fine with me, I can work with it. So that’s what I’ll be trying to think about for a while.
I noticed a couple of incidents at my job this week that reminded me of how annoying I can be to people and it got me thinking about what aspects of myself I should want to change, and what aspects I should accept as being part of “myself.” Sometimes I don’t care if people don’t think I’m funny, in what my dear pal calls the “joke ‘em if they can’t take a f***” approach to things. Under this perspective, I am in charge of my half of the interaction, which is My Personal Intention, and everybody else can worry about themselves and it’s not my problem. MPI is not (usually) to be hurtful or mean or dismissive, but rather, to be funny and interested and interesting and bat around ideas and critiques of things for fun and banter (and to get laughs, which is a vanity/insecurity thing). The listener’s experience my boisterousness might be different from MPI, of course. The listener could be offended or feel misunderstood or get the impression that I think s/he is foolish or whatever, so it’s not always effective.
The examples at work were as follows: two gals in the workplace were discussing Eat, Pray, Love, and one had seen the movie but not read the book, and the other had the book and brought it in to share. I saw the book on the table and immediately launched into some version of “oh lordy who’s reading THIS,” fully believing that I was effectively opening up the channels of communication for fun discussion of the book and its problematic and successful qualities. This belief of mine that saying how much I hate stuff is actually a great ice breaker is funny in itself, and of course, "channel-opening" is not what happened. Instead I prompted the gal who brought it in to say “yeah I guess only people with terrible taste, like me, like this book.” It took me a minute to catch on that this was the hurt-feelings kind of sarcasm and not funny self-deprecating humor, so I said “yeah only dumb-dumbs like this crap.” And then I realized that I had provoked hurt feelings, and I had to let the crankiness settle for a minute and then explain that I didn’t want to be mean or superior about it, I was trying to be funny and that I was sorry.
So that’s one incident. Another one was a different set of gals chit chatting about stuff, and one of them starts saying how she got an iris reading the other day – yes, someone looks into your eyeball and tells you all about yourself. I guess the premise is that there is information in the iris of the eye that says stuff about you and your choices and your life – and the first two things that the iris reader told this gal were that her deodorant was clogging her breast tissue lymph drainage and that she eats too much dairy. Yawn! These are totally generic and I said so, again, thinking that I am funny. Instead the gal’s face fell a bit and I have probably effectively inhibited her from ever wanting to share anything about her life with me ever again for the rest of time. Here’s how that conversation could have gone in my ideal world with a friend who “gets” me:
“Hey Marth I got my iris read last week, and it was so rad! This chick looked into my eyes and told me my lymph stuff wasn’t draining because of my deodorant and that I eat too much dairy!”
“Dude, she also tell you that you had a hard time high school, and detect stress and confusion in your life? That stuff is way generic!”
“Ha ha whatever lame-o, no way, you had to be there, it was different than that – it was really right on, for reals!”
“Whoa, that’s nutty! Are you going to go back? Tell me what else she said!”
See, was that so hard? Fun! Shows my attention and critical thinking and delight in life, no? I mean, I recognize how snarky and combative and potentially offensive it is, so yeah, maybe not.
So now here’s the real problem: I don’t want to alienate people, but I also want to be myself. I don’t want to maintain relationships with people who willfully misunderstand me or who are too sensitive or serious about themselves, but I want to be relate to lots of different kind of people in my life and not use my personality as some kind of filter or friend deterrent. I want to do my half of whatever it is that happens between people to make sure everyone knows that everyone is cool with everyone else being exactly how they are. And I want to be around people who can do their half of not taking things the wrong way, or being too attached to their decisions or preferences or anything else such that disagreement on books or iris readings is really offensive to them.
But I also don’t want to become so settled in my personality or defensive about my characteristics such that I deny the possibility or necessity of improving myself when it comes to my personality problems. I mean, it’s maddening to be around people who are really protective of their bad personality traits (lots of old people do this, and I think it can be pretty lazy sometimes). But how do I know which things to work on changing and which things are okay to keep? My friend suggested that I can get comfortable with this idea by thinking about being myself, but just adjusting my behaviors to what is "appropriate" for the situation. This is a nicer way of thinking about it than just saying I need to change myself or censor my nature. Even if it’s just semantic that’s fine with me, I can work with it. So that’s what I’ll be trying to think about for a while.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
College is Dumb
I have ranted about this before, but it deserves revisiting. I was talking with my friend the other day about what college means. I think a lot of people my age have parents who treated the college degree as some kind of success-measurement-threshold in launching their kids into the world ("well, at least they're educated, I did my job"). I think by now most people understand this as a socialization and class status exercise, because the bachelor's degree draws a line between the lower classes and the slightly less lower classes. Having a bachelor's degree, my friend said, is a just handy vetting qualification to weed out the people who didn't have judgment enough to figure out they should smoke someplace besides the boys' bathroom in high school. Having a college degree indicates all kinds of things to employers that we can't really say are the actual qualifications for a job: college degree = probably has enough sense to lay low and do his/her misbehavior out of sight, and participate in a scheme of expectations involving respect for hierarchy and maybe a little independent decision making. "Values"-wise it also probably indicates that someone comes from a non-threatening, bourgeois, SAT-prep-course-attending kind of household that most bosses (the ultimate bourgeois) can relate to. It's just a class indicator. I mean, my job requires a college degree. I load and unload a truck. Bachelor's degree required.
Yoga instruction, however, requires no college degree. You can teach yoga after a month of training for anywhere from three to seven thousand dollars. So there's that. There's a class thing involved in yoga-doing, but that's another story. Maybe later.
Yoga instruction, however, requires no college degree. You can teach yoga after a month of training for anywhere from three to seven thousand dollars. So there's that. There's a class thing involved in yoga-doing, but that's another story. Maybe later.
Friday, April 8, 2011
Not Yet the Boss
I am sort of supposed to be in charge of some stuff and a few people at work, but the transition is a little slow going. I've spent the first month being told what to do by the people I am "in charge of," because they definitely know how to do the job way better than I do, which makes it a little tough to start telling them what to do and overriding their judgment calls from time to time. And plus the old boss is still definitely in the mix, and still definitely in charge-charge, so that is still happening.
But most of all I have been missing my chance to assert my authority, which is really hard to think about today. Today especially, since something happened at work that I didn't stomp down on immediately - it took me a little while to process what was going on and figure out how I felt about it and how to articulate it, and only now am I recognizing the exact moment that I missed to make an important point about expectations and behavior and stuff like that. It was pretty minor event-wise, but still, I'm going to have to adopt a little bit sharper of a "persona" about stuff. I don't like the idea of having to be armed and ready to shut stuff down all the time, but it's pretty interesting to see myself in this position of letting things slide by and then thinking I shouldn't have, or I should have reacted differently. Blerg, whatever.
What it really makes me think about is parenting. There are a lot of decisions that need to be made right on the spot, or the moment slips by. There is some kind of stop-gap solution sometimes, like saying, "hey, hold up a minute, this is not cool," and then just sort of using that as a place holder to pause for a bit and figure out WHY it isn't cool and what you mean to say about it. It was so different at my old job - being in charge of stuff just meant rational delegating and sensible deadlines, clear instructions and cheerful demeanors. The cooperation was pretty easy in that sense. This job is like waitressing - team effort, team dynamic, team drama. Anyway back to the parenting thing: my friend CheetahDress told me a story once about working at a day care, and having to reprimand two little girls for not including a third child in their fun. When they were instructed with the disappointing directive of including the third, one girl said to the other, "that's okay, we weren't having that much fun anyway," so that the third kid could hear it. When I heard this, it was pretty shocking to me - this comment shows a pretty sophisticated kind of malice. What the hell do you say to a kid who says something like this? Something is way wrong with that comment, but what is it exactly? And what to do about it? There's no way it would be okay to let that go without consequence. (It's like parenting or working at a day care just becomes one huge exercise in doing that thing where you think of a great comeback two days later!) So when I heard this I instantly imagined myself in that situation and tried to think about a quick way to snuff that behavior, and I couldn't think of anything to say at all. Some lame adult thing probably would have occurred to me, like "hey, play nice." Lame-o! My pal CheetahDress, on the other hand, said, "whoa now, that's a pretty sneaky way of being mean," to the little girl. This was perfect - it's fast, and identifies the problem happening, and isn't so complicated that has to be the exact thing (describing passive aggression or the whole complexity of the girl's cruelty would have been pointless), it calls the little girl out specifically on her bullshit . . . I mean, this was an A+ thing to say in the moment, in my opinion. How to stay this present and direct and crap-cutting in life? How?
So anyway not that my job is a preschool, but really life is a preschool, and I'm going to have to call people out on their sneaky ways of punishing each other or blaming each other or whatever, and I'm using this preschool example as my template.
But most of all I have been missing my chance to assert my authority, which is really hard to think about today. Today especially, since something happened at work that I didn't stomp down on immediately - it took me a little while to process what was going on and figure out how I felt about it and how to articulate it, and only now am I recognizing the exact moment that I missed to make an important point about expectations and behavior and stuff like that. It was pretty minor event-wise, but still, I'm going to have to adopt a little bit sharper of a "persona" about stuff. I don't like the idea of having to be armed and ready to shut stuff down all the time, but it's pretty interesting to see myself in this position of letting things slide by and then thinking I shouldn't have, or I should have reacted differently. Blerg, whatever.
What it really makes me think about is parenting. There are a lot of decisions that need to be made right on the spot, or the moment slips by. There is some kind of stop-gap solution sometimes, like saying, "hey, hold up a minute, this is not cool," and then just sort of using that as a place holder to pause for a bit and figure out WHY it isn't cool and what you mean to say about it. It was so different at my old job - being in charge of stuff just meant rational delegating and sensible deadlines, clear instructions and cheerful demeanors. The cooperation was pretty easy in that sense. This job is like waitressing - team effort, team dynamic, team drama. Anyway back to the parenting thing: my friend CheetahDress told me a story once about working at a day care, and having to reprimand two little girls for not including a third child in their fun. When they were instructed with the disappointing directive of including the third, one girl said to the other, "that's okay, we weren't having that much fun anyway," so that the third kid could hear it. When I heard this, it was pretty shocking to me - this comment shows a pretty sophisticated kind of malice. What the hell do you say to a kid who says something like this? Something is way wrong with that comment, but what is it exactly? And what to do about it? There's no way it would be okay to let that go without consequence. (It's like parenting or working at a day care just becomes one huge exercise in doing that thing where you think of a great comeback two days later!) So when I heard this I instantly imagined myself in that situation and tried to think about a quick way to snuff that behavior, and I couldn't think of anything to say at all. Some lame adult thing probably would have occurred to me, like "hey, play nice." Lame-o! My pal CheetahDress, on the other hand, said, "whoa now, that's a pretty sneaky way of being mean," to the little girl. This was perfect - it's fast, and identifies the problem happening, and isn't so complicated that has to be the exact thing (describing passive aggression or the whole complexity of the girl's cruelty would have been pointless), it calls the little girl out specifically on her bullshit . . . I mean, this was an A+ thing to say in the moment, in my opinion. How to stay this present and direct and crap-cutting in life? How?
So anyway not that my job is a preschool, but really life is a preschool, and I'm going to have to call people out on their sneaky ways of punishing each other or blaming each other or whatever, and I'm using this preschool example as my template.
Thursday, April 7, 2011
"Networking" and "Energy"
My thesis is pretty shaky here, folks, so bear with me - something about how personal energy and networking and friendship are all related. We'll see.
Yesterday I was talking with someone about how the term "networking" is kind of icky. It can suggest that other humans are available to you for your selfish interests and that you should schmooze them enough to get things you want. So my pal and I were agreeing that it feels yucky and why can't we just want to make friends, since friendship in all its degrees is the way that life opportunities arise, for the most part. It's pretty tough to be a successful jerk, in other words, since your peers will eventually ostracize you, and your reputation will blow. Unless you become the powerful jerk in charge somehow - hmm, well this is sort careening out of control already, but let's just stick with the premise that it's better for you life dreams and opportunities and basic connectedness to be likable and sociable and convivial etc. So then "networking" is this way of meeting other people who are into things that you like, and demonstrating to them that you are, in fact, likable and reasonable to work with and maybe funny and nice and punctual, and then you exist in their mind as someone who would be good to bring into the fold of whatever they are doing.
So why can't we just say we're going to go out and make friends? Since this model works for friendship, too - you meet people who are into stuff that you like, everybody sniffs each other out as being fun or game or whatever, and then you end up calling each other to go camping or something. And then you use your connections to people and your reputation to create more relationships, and find other opportunities, and to accumulate ever more and further ways of expanding your life and perspective etc.
So I was all about hating "networking" and loving "friendship" when I thought back to lawyering. Man, you ain't need to be friends with people for this stuff. You need to be reasonable to work with (reliable, friendly, responsive) and good at what you do, and it's important to be in contact with people and spread your good reputation around so that you can gain access to contexts that will let you do the work that you want to do. And this is important, too. It's different from friendship of course in that a company or something will dispose of you regardless of your awesomeness from time to time (but maybe it's not all that different - some friendships are good for one reason but not another, and one friend who goes camping with you might not be the friend you take bowling). But really friendship is still at work in business/law situations. I saw this a lot at my old job in the big firm - the presumption was that everyone was capable of doing the work. You can write, research, finish stuff on time, and it'll be usable etc. Even better if you are capable of being confident and an expert about whatever you just did. But really, the opportunities came to the likable people who made friends with other people or who were somehow charismatic and nice to be around and could joke on the phone, because it really helps your work efforts to cooperate with someone who has pleasant energy to offer, not just a pit of limp availability, even if they are highly capable and productive. I think it's the pleasant energy thing that I'm trying to get to here while thinking about networking vs. friendship.
And speaking of energy, I guess I'm really thinking about this stuff for yoga teaching. This past weekend at the yoga workshop we talked a lot about attracting the kinds of students you actually want, and what that's about and how that goes. Our teacher talked about having a field of energy that is bigger than the situation, and that having a broken energy attracts broken students and then you all end up in a vortext of craziness. Students who don't like you have something else going on, and it could be that you just aren't their teacher at this point in their life, or it could be that the student is toxic and you don't want their energy around anyway - having your own sense of command and presence and power in the room will deter this kind of student. I've been to classes with teachers who don't have a clearly authoritative and compassionate vibe, who are hesitant or feel vulnerable, and the students' vibe feels like an out-patient psych ward. I mean, you can tell that the vibe in the classroom is a down spiral, and it sure doesn't feed the teacher to attract draining clients. And the teacher should want to feel fed by teaching, not drained - isn't this interesting to consider? I hadn't really thought about it this way, but really, even though yoga is for everyone (even, and maybe especially, the crazies), I don't want to share my energetic space with draining or toxic people. This is going to be the next hurdle in my yoga teaching - right now I just teach a small group of my young, fit, emotionally well friends, and it really feeds me to do this. I have to broaden my reach a little bit here, you know, network and make friends, so that I can assert my energy field a little and see how it goes. I guess I just hadn't really thought about treating students as a kind of co-worker or friend before, but it really is the same thing - we all get our best work done with the kind of people who are responsive and inspiring to us, whether they friends, co-workers, students - we don't want desperate or confused or draining friends or co-workers or students. I mean, a bad friend will want a weak and desperate friend to use. A bad boss will want insecure and frightened employees to control. A dangerous teacher will want needy and broken students to manipulate. Yep, it's all the same, I guess, we're all auditioning for each other for reciprocal energy exchange all the time.
Yesterday I was talking with someone about how the term "networking" is kind of icky. It can suggest that other humans are available to you for your selfish interests and that you should schmooze them enough to get things you want. So my pal and I were agreeing that it feels yucky and why can't we just want to make friends, since friendship in all its degrees is the way that life opportunities arise, for the most part. It's pretty tough to be a successful jerk, in other words, since your peers will eventually ostracize you, and your reputation will blow. Unless you become the powerful jerk in charge somehow - hmm, well this is sort careening out of control already, but let's just stick with the premise that it's better for you life dreams and opportunities and basic connectedness to be likable and sociable and convivial etc. So then "networking" is this way of meeting other people who are into things that you like, and demonstrating to them that you are, in fact, likable and reasonable to work with and maybe funny and nice and punctual, and then you exist in their mind as someone who would be good to bring into the fold of whatever they are doing.
So why can't we just say we're going to go out and make friends? Since this model works for friendship, too - you meet people who are into stuff that you like, everybody sniffs each other out as being fun or game or whatever, and then you end up calling each other to go camping or something. And then you use your connections to people and your reputation to create more relationships, and find other opportunities, and to accumulate ever more and further ways of expanding your life and perspective etc.
So I was all about hating "networking" and loving "friendship" when I thought back to lawyering. Man, you ain't need to be friends with people for this stuff. You need to be reasonable to work with (reliable, friendly, responsive) and good at what you do, and it's important to be in contact with people and spread your good reputation around so that you can gain access to contexts that will let you do the work that you want to do. And this is important, too. It's different from friendship of course in that a company or something will dispose of you regardless of your awesomeness from time to time (but maybe it's not all that different - some friendships are good for one reason but not another, and one friend who goes camping with you might not be the friend you take bowling). But really friendship is still at work in business/law situations. I saw this a lot at my old job in the big firm - the presumption was that everyone was capable of doing the work. You can write, research, finish stuff on time, and it'll be usable etc. Even better if you are capable of being confident and an expert about whatever you just did. But really, the opportunities came to the likable people who made friends with other people or who were somehow charismatic and nice to be around and could joke on the phone, because it really helps your work efforts to cooperate with someone who has pleasant energy to offer, not just a pit of limp availability, even if they are highly capable and productive. I think it's the pleasant energy thing that I'm trying to get to here while thinking about networking vs. friendship.
And speaking of energy, I guess I'm really thinking about this stuff for yoga teaching. This past weekend at the yoga workshop we talked a lot about attracting the kinds of students you actually want, and what that's about and how that goes. Our teacher talked about having a field of energy that is bigger than the situation, and that having a broken energy attracts broken students and then you all end up in a vortext of craziness. Students who don't like you have something else going on, and it could be that you just aren't their teacher at this point in their life, or it could be that the student is toxic and you don't want their energy around anyway - having your own sense of command and presence and power in the room will deter this kind of student. I've been to classes with teachers who don't have a clearly authoritative and compassionate vibe, who are hesitant or feel vulnerable, and the students' vibe feels like an out-patient psych ward. I mean, you can tell that the vibe in the classroom is a down spiral, and it sure doesn't feed the teacher to attract draining clients. And the teacher should want to feel fed by teaching, not drained - isn't this interesting to consider? I hadn't really thought about it this way, but really, even though yoga is for everyone (even, and maybe especially, the crazies), I don't want to share my energetic space with draining or toxic people. This is going to be the next hurdle in my yoga teaching - right now I just teach a small group of my young, fit, emotionally well friends, and it really feeds me to do this. I have to broaden my reach a little bit here, you know, network and make friends, so that I can assert my energy field a little and see how it goes. I guess I just hadn't really thought about treating students as a kind of co-worker or friend before, but it really is the same thing - we all get our best work done with the kind of people who are responsive and inspiring to us, whether they friends, co-workers, students - we don't want desperate or confused or draining friends or co-workers or students. I mean, a bad friend will want a weak and desperate friend to use. A bad boss will want insecure and frightened employees to control. A dangerous teacher will want needy and broken students to manipulate. Yep, it's all the same, I guess, we're all auditioning for each other for reciprocal energy exchange all the time.
Monday, April 4, 2011
Yoga Energy Feelings Weekend
So this weekend I went to a three-day yoga thing hosted by a teacher that I really like. Her yoga thing is pretty slow-going, with a lot of holding of poses, some less typical takes on the poses (like doing bridge, for example, is really different and I really like it), and the room is pretty warm, like 80 to 85 degrees. The practice she offers is meant to bring up emotions, and for the most part, I say, well done. Nothing gets me pissed for no reason like holding a yoga pose forever. But that's the magic in it - I love the mind bending in her classes. There's also a lot of energetic semi-psychological talk in her class, about things like resentment and forgiveness, and accepting our lives the way they are, and cultivating patience for ourselves and others, and all that jazz.
So normally super touchy-feely isn't my thing, but I am pretty receptive to it in the yoga context. And even though this teacher does a lot of it, she is so completely practical and regular and crap-cutting that her way of talking about feelings and energy just sound like she is articulating reality, just without leaving out the magic like we usually do. I don't know, whatever, but I like her thing that she does and thought I could get some good perspective or new tools from her, and I think I did. Although this is not without caveats.
We practiced using our empathic skills and trying to translate it into actual yoga poses, and we practiced reading people and touching them intuitively to "run energy" for them in a give/receive way that benefits both people. Sound too fluffy yet? Yeah, maybe, but it really wasn't. The teacher even said at one point that she was trying to take the "woo woo" out of energy healing and empathic intuition etc. So we did some energy drawings of each other, which just involves a basic gestural mapping of the body and the impressions we get from someone by looking and feeling (not by thinking though, no no no). I had so much fun doing this! I wish I were smart about the computer, I'd put up the drawings I did, I'm sort of pleased with them. I'll see if I can figure it out. Anyway I loved doing it, it really felt relaxing and fun and creative and great. My pal Electrical Storm was there for the training too and she is a great illustrator and her drawings were rad. It was neat to see them. And we did fun theater-exercise type stuff like take turns teaching while people distracted you with noise or questions or a game of tag, or singing the instructions, or dancing while you talked. I love love love doing this stuff, even if it's just because it's fun. It didn't have to be extra deep for me to love it. I have a hang up about not getting to go to camp enough as a kid and I'm probably sort of working it out a little, but that's for another time.
Things got a little hairy at the end when we did energy readings of each other, having to say out loud what we saw and felt from someone and then put them into a yoga posture to adjust their energy field (I know, corny, but really, my resistance to corniness is coming down pretty fast). I had to do the reading on a student who was pretty imbalanced. I was actually nervous when I saw her at the training because I was sort of aware of her from the scene and her vibe is pretty stressful to be around, and I was concerned that negotiating her vibe was going to take up a fair amount of the weekend, and be distracting or something. It wasn't bad at all - and she read my energy at one point and was DEAD ON with all her "feelings" about my body and what I was working on. It was pretty rad. But anyway yes she's pretty hyper-juiced up and a little imbalanced, and estranged from her family and children, and a total devotee of this particularly strict type of yoga and was pretty vocal about it, and I just found her to be a little nutty and stressful, which I acknowledge as very much blended in with my own judgments about things, but that's also another story. So when I did her reading I was truthful up to a point, stating the panic and chaos I felt, and then held back a little because she was starting to cry and key-rice-st I'm not a therapist and I didn't want to provoke some kind of emotional event so I eased off, and our teacher called me out on it, which was pretty wild since I thought I had covered it up pretty well. Guess not! Anyway it was a little intense and maybe more than I was ready for - but it was also very immediate and natural and I enjoyed it. SO ANYWAY long story short if I become a full-blown crystal-rubber I'll try to be a grounded one. And that's what happened this weekend.
So normally super touchy-feely isn't my thing, but I am pretty receptive to it in the yoga context. And even though this teacher does a lot of it, she is so completely practical and regular and crap-cutting that her way of talking about feelings and energy just sound like she is articulating reality, just without leaving out the magic like we usually do. I don't know, whatever, but I like her thing that she does and thought I could get some good perspective or new tools from her, and I think I did. Although this is not without caveats.
We practiced using our empathic skills and trying to translate it into actual yoga poses, and we practiced reading people and touching them intuitively to "run energy" for them in a give/receive way that benefits both people. Sound too fluffy yet? Yeah, maybe, but it really wasn't. The teacher even said at one point that she was trying to take the "woo woo" out of energy healing and empathic intuition etc. So we did some energy drawings of each other, which just involves a basic gestural mapping of the body and the impressions we get from someone by looking and feeling (not by thinking though, no no no). I had so much fun doing this! I wish I were smart about the computer, I'd put up the drawings I did, I'm sort of pleased with them. I'll see if I can figure it out. Anyway I loved doing it, it really felt relaxing and fun and creative and great. My pal Electrical Storm was there for the training too and she is a great illustrator and her drawings were rad. It was neat to see them. And we did fun theater-exercise type stuff like take turns teaching while people distracted you with noise or questions or a game of tag, or singing the instructions, or dancing while you talked. I love love love doing this stuff, even if it's just because it's fun. It didn't have to be extra deep for me to love it. I have a hang up about not getting to go to camp enough as a kid and I'm probably sort of working it out a little, but that's for another time.
Things got a little hairy at the end when we did energy readings of each other, having to say out loud what we saw and felt from someone and then put them into a yoga posture to adjust their energy field (I know, corny, but really, my resistance to corniness is coming down pretty fast). I had to do the reading on a student who was pretty imbalanced. I was actually nervous when I saw her at the training because I was sort of aware of her from the scene and her vibe is pretty stressful to be around, and I was concerned that negotiating her vibe was going to take up a fair amount of the weekend, and be distracting or something. It wasn't bad at all - and she read my energy at one point and was DEAD ON with all her "feelings" about my body and what I was working on. It was pretty rad. But anyway yes she's pretty hyper-juiced up and a little imbalanced, and estranged from her family and children, and a total devotee of this particularly strict type of yoga and was pretty vocal about it, and I just found her to be a little nutty and stressful, which I acknowledge as very much blended in with my own judgments about things, but that's also another story. So when I did her reading I was truthful up to a point, stating the panic and chaos I felt, and then held back a little because she was starting to cry and key-rice-st I'm not a therapist and I didn't want to provoke some kind of emotional event so I eased off, and our teacher called me out on it, which was pretty wild since I thought I had covered it up pretty well. Guess not! Anyway it was a little intense and maybe more than I was ready for - but it was also very immediate and natural and I enjoyed it. SO ANYWAY long story short if I become a full-blown crystal-rubber I'll try to be a grounded one. And that's what happened this weekend.
Thursday, March 31, 2011
New Job Side Effects
One of the blessing/curses of my new job is that I get to take home produce that we can't sell. This has been coming in the form of scarred zucchini, avocados on the edge of browning, bruised MacIntosh apples, sad looking beets, etc. My rescue and conserve impulses are being stretched to their ends with all the waste that goes on with produce. I made two huge loaves of zucchini bread, put zucchini and leeks in my pasta thing, I have borscht on the stove right now, had two avocados for dinner last night, and spent about a half hour last night just peeling red peppers that I had roasted to save them from becoming garbage. So this definitely isn't sustainable. I can't be a one-woman garbage-to-food conversion operation indefinitely. But the waste! If my tiny organization is making this much waste, I can't even contemplate the chain grocery stores and their garbage. And it's amazing what people won't buy even though it's perfectly fine. And admittedly, I won't buy a zucchini with scars all over it, I'm usually pretty suspicious of it. But the way we get our produce doesn't even resemble what food actually looks like when it comes out of the ground. Someone made a joke about organic oranges at work yesterday, and apparently it was funny because they're so hard to get/make/find. Organic bananas might be an oxymoron, too. We'll see. There's a whole world of produce industry crapola I have to learn about.
But anyway I definitely attach a certain level of morality to waste, ie, it isn't just a shame to throw away stuff, it's wrong. And don't get me started on refrigerators, either - nobody needs a refrigerator as big as we have them. Personally I'm starting to feel that no one needs a freezer, either. So many adaptations we've made to convenience just to become crap-buying garbage-makers who are too good for scarred zucchini, oh lordy I'm getting fired up about this now, better chill out. Anyway it's 6:30 in the morning and I'm going to work to buy produce, that I hope we will sell all out of to people who will eat it and not end up throwing it away. Cheers!
But anyway I definitely attach a certain level of morality to waste, ie, it isn't just a shame to throw away stuff, it's wrong. And don't get me started on refrigerators, either - nobody needs a refrigerator as big as we have them. Personally I'm starting to feel that no one needs a freezer, either. So many adaptations we've made to convenience just to become crap-buying garbage-makers who are too good for scarred zucchini, oh lordy I'm getting fired up about this now, better chill out. Anyway it's 6:30 in the morning and I'm going to work to buy produce, that I hope we will sell all out of to people who will eat it and not end up throwing it away. Cheers!
Monday, March 28, 2011
So What Was Law School About?
I was recently talking with a pal, well, a few pals really, about what law school was all about for me. A few things to get out of the way here - I definitely went to law school because by age 27 I felt that still having no idea what the hell to do with myself was a big problem that needed some kind of answer. It's funny to think about in retrospect because right around the same time I was thinking about doing yoga teacher training, but it ended in the fall and law school would start in the fall and it wasn't going to work out in time to do both. Hm. Second, I hated the bureaucracy of the world and felt pretty powerless and broke a lot of the time, and was tired of that; getting one blood test and a prescription for antibiotics from the hospital cost more than my rent and caused a serious panic about How Am I Going to Live at one point. Um, I also got a preposterous scholarship and my vanity was so ridiculously flattered that I was definitely going to get this bargain education even if I didn't really know what the hell I was doing it for. And of course, being a lawyer is sooooo versatile, yes? You do aaaaaanything with a law degree, right? Ha ha, that's funny. Anyway, being a lawyer certainly sounds like something indisputably worthwhile, skill-set wise. "Marketable" is the term we hear tossed around.
Okay so there's that. What did law school do for me? The way I found myself putting it over the phone to one friend is that, well, "I basically have the exact same life I had before I became a lawyer, except now, I really like my life." This sort of sounds like some version of "I punched myself in the face for while, and once I stopped, it was awesome." It's a little different than that, more like, I was filled with doubt about my choices, and having challenged them to the extreme with this five-year adventure, I can feel more confident about my choices. One thing I got out of law school is that I love to learn. I love it. Even though I'm not going to be a lawyer, getting my J.D. was super fun for me. I would go back to school for any number of things if money were no object. Philosophy, Spanish, Botany, Music, you name it, I would love to learn about it. I truly treasure my law school education for the new way of viewing the world that it provided me - I had no idea how the FCC is allowed to exist, I had never considered my "rights" under the Constitution, I had never had to bend my mind around the kind of reasoning that the law uses. It was pretty neat for all those reasons. Another thing I got out of it was finally getting over my own insecurities about my intelligence. Being smart is VERY highly prized by my family and I was always worried about being only sort of smart and how that doomed me to a meaningless life. Grandpa went to Yale, Uncle got a free ride to college because he's so super smart, cousins have perfect SAT scores . . . but I was always hovering well under the exceptional threshold as it's measured by the world - wasn't going to get into a great school, etc. At last, at last, I do not give a crap about that. Education pedigree is a shameful and exclusive and hierarchical measure of human worth that no one should subscribe to. I went to a low/medium crappy college, and I would have had a way better time at a state school meeting actually interesting and diverse students. But anyway. As for my own level of intelligence, I am totally fine with not being a genius. I did great in law school (yes it was not a well regarded school but whatever I'll take it), and I certainly keep that in my pocket as evidence that I am reasonably smart, but it's not just that - it's more like I have enough education and enough of a sprinkle of wisdom now to feel like I can trust my own analysis and intuition, and enough skepticism to be ready to change my mind when something better, clearer, or more persuasive comes along, and I know I will keep trying to learn new things. That's plenty, and I feel great about that.
And here's one more important thing about law school that really broadened my perspective, and it's pretty basic, so if this kind of thing has been obvious to you since birth then pardon this silly revelation. So, a lady adult in my life has been repeating the following anecdote for years to me: this lady adult goes to a job interview, and the interviewer immediately notes her haircut, and says something to the effect of, "I really appreciate a simple, no fuss haircut on a woman, it shows that your sense of practicality is sound." This haircut apparently was highly influential in getting a job. I walked around for a long time with this, and many other similar ideas, in my head - certain decisions we make have very clear messages to people, and one of those is that having a practical haircut means you are practical person. I think I still judge people with elaborate hairdos as having suspicious priorities. So anyway, I think it took me until I was in law school to understand that sets of facts are susceptible to multiple conclusions. This is basically the premise of arguing the law - with any given set of facts, which conclusion is best for you, and can you persuade someone of it? With respect to the haircut thing - why didn't the interviewer conclude that the haircut meant this lady had no concern for attention to detail? Or placed no value on self-care and beautifying herself and was therefore indifferent to pleasing others in a workplace setting? Or gets up really late and is super disorganized and can't handle anything beyond a wash and go haircut? (Most of all, why didn't this lady adult conclude, in spite of the observation coming in the form of a compliment, that the interviewer was inappropriate and superficial?! Seriously, the haircut?!) Feeling liberated from narrow conclusions was huge for me. I didn't know how to see beyond a certain way of thinking until I was forced to squeeze my brain out a lot. Now I feel like I can see unlimited kinds of conclusions in all things, every day, and it makes life so much more interesting, and much less severe, if you see what I mean.
And of course, participating in the corporate world was fascinating, and I could finally decide, based on my own experience, not just my own leftist prejudices, that it wasn't the right place for me. And that does go a long way in terms of my own contentment. So, onward and upward, further in and further up.
Okay so there's that. What did law school do for me? The way I found myself putting it over the phone to one friend is that, well, "I basically have the exact same life I had before I became a lawyer, except now, I really like my life." This sort of sounds like some version of "I punched myself in the face for while, and once I stopped, it was awesome." It's a little different than that, more like, I was filled with doubt about my choices, and having challenged them to the extreme with this five-year adventure, I can feel more confident about my choices. One thing I got out of law school is that I love to learn. I love it. Even though I'm not going to be a lawyer, getting my J.D. was super fun for me. I would go back to school for any number of things if money were no object. Philosophy, Spanish, Botany, Music, you name it, I would love to learn about it. I truly treasure my law school education for the new way of viewing the world that it provided me - I had no idea how the FCC is allowed to exist, I had never considered my "rights" under the Constitution, I had never had to bend my mind around the kind of reasoning that the law uses. It was pretty neat for all those reasons. Another thing I got out of it was finally getting over my own insecurities about my intelligence. Being smart is VERY highly prized by my family and I was always worried about being only sort of smart and how that doomed me to a meaningless life. Grandpa went to Yale, Uncle got a free ride to college because he's so super smart, cousins have perfect SAT scores . . . but I was always hovering well under the exceptional threshold as it's measured by the world - wasn't going to get into a great school, etc. At last, at last, I do not give a crap about that. Education pedigree is a shameful and exclusive and hierarchical measure of human worth that no one should subscribe to. I went to a low/medium crappy college, and I would have had a way better time at a state school meeting actually interesting and diverse students. But anyway. As for my own level of intelligence, I am totally fine with not being a genius. I did great in law school (yes it was not a well regarded school but whatever I'll take it), and I certainly keep that in my pocket as evidence that I am reasonably smart, but it's not just that - it's more like I have enough education and enough of a sprinkle of wisdom now to feel like I can trust my own analysis and intuition, and enough skepticism to be ready to change my mind when something better, clearer, or more persuasive comes along, and I know I will keep trying to learn new things. That's plenty, and I feel great about that.
And here's one more important thing about law school that really broadened my perspective, and it's pretty basic, so if this kind of thing has been obvious to you since birth then pardon this silly revelation. So, a lady adult in my life has been repeating the following anecdote for years to me: this lady adult goes to a job interview, and the interviewer immediately notes her haircut, and says something to the effect of, "I really appreciate a simple, no fuss haircut on a woman, it shows that your sense of practicality is sound." This haircut apparently was highly influential in getting a job. I walked around for a long time with this, and many other similar ideas, in my head - certain decisions we make have very clear messages to people, and one of those is that having a practical haircut means you are practical person. I think I still judge people with elaborate hairdos as having suspicious priorities. So anyway, I think it took me until I was in law school to understand that sets of facts are susceptible to multiple conclusions. This is basically the premise of arguing the law - with any given set of facts, which conclusion is best for you, and can you persuade someone of it? With respect to the haircut thing - why didn't the interviewer conclude that the haircut meant this lady had no concern for attention to detail? Or placed no value on self-care and beautifying herself and was therefore indifferent to pleasing others in a workplace setting? Or gets up really late and is super disorganized and can't handle anything beyond a wash and go haircut? (Most of all, why didn't this lady adult conclude, in spite of the observation coming in the form of a compliment, that the interviewer was inappropriate and superficial?! Seriously, the haircut?!) Feeling liberated from narrow conclusions was huge for me. I didn't know how to see beyond a certain way of thinking until I was forced to squeeze my brain out a lot. Now I feel like I can see unlimited kinds of conclusions in all things, every day, and it makes life so much more interesting, and much less severe, if you see what I mean.
And of course, participating in the corporate world was fascinating, and I could finally decide, based on my own experience, not just my own leftist prejudices, that it wasn't the right place for me. And that does go a long way in terms of my own contentment. So, onward and upward, further in and further up.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)