when the student is ready

When I first started to get to know my yoga teacher I learned that she had recently adopted a practice that prevented her from offering advice.  She explained that she loved giving advice but was backing off and instead focusing on honoring the feelings those in need were having in order to support them in meeting those needs.

This made me feel like I had just missed out on learning the secret to life… or to my life anyway.  At that time I felt directionless and unsure and I longed for someone to tell me what to do.  I was pretty sure that, given an hour and a half and a fair amount of chocolate, my yoga teacher could examine my life and point me in the direction of certain prosperity and happiness and had I only come to her a year earlier it would have made her happy to do so.  So for the four years I have known her instead of advice I’ve received the gift of being in the presence of my teacher as she handed off one habit that made her feel good in the moment for one that, by virtue of the practice, sometimes creates very uncomfortable moments but ultimately (I believe) leaves her truly contented because she is constantly uncovering and honoring the truth.

In the time since I met my yoga teacher I have noticed in myself the desire to be given advice has fallen away.  I have learned to recognize the signs that point to the fact I am on my right path and understand that when things are going right it isn’t a fluke, but a result of the way I have been tending to all levels of my existence.  I had nearly forgotten my desire for an advisor when a few months ago my yoga teacher offered me advice.

At the time I was sort of crushed.  I was setting out on a difficult journey but had begun to set up systems that could put me on cruse control.  My teacher suggested that taking the scenic rout would not only be more beautiful but also offer benefits that I would be glad for later.  The last thing I wanted to do was follow the path she was sending me down, but I trusted that she had my best interests in heart & she had already been down the road I was traveling at the time so I made following her advice a priority.

As hard as it was to do as I was told, when I would feel like giving up I would remind myself of who had told me to do it and was able to stick with it (and its likely that had I taken the shortcuts I originally thought of I would have abandoned the trip all together).

As hard as the act of following the advice had been, I found accepting the fact that it had been offered even more difficult.  I though about my long forgotten wish and it soon occurred to me that as I released the desire for someone to tell me how to live my life I had developed the need to be told I was living my life was right… I’m currently working on just living my life, and it’s the most difficult thing since slicing bread.

It turns out that receiving advice from my teacher was exactly what I needed.  In the end I needed to hear what my teacher told me and my teacher is the only person to make me listen to what she had to say.  And though in the grander scheme I’m at a loss for how to live my authenticity and be fulfilled, I still have my teacher and shed bound to come up with something good to help me find my way.

watching Tron was a lot like spending time with my mother

There were times when I was like, 'are you seriously saying that right now,' and i didn't think i could take another second!
Then there were parts that were so endearing that all i could do was enjoy the simplicity of the scene.
It made me think about mortality, what I'm doing with my life and what the point of it is in the grand scheme of things any way.
It had me asking the question 'you have all access to all of this advanced technology but you are never even going to get close to using it to it's potential, are you?'
And just when i thought i had it figured out and was totally over it it surprised me and made me look at it in a whole new way.
But seriously Tron, making Daft Punk's cameo be as DJs? LAME!
and those are ways that Tron was like my mother.
The uncomfortably unclear nature of the relationship between Sam & Quorra, who are essentially brother and sister, that part was just gross.

Strangelove, PhD or: How I Learned to Stop Hindering and Love Lady Gaga

My first impression of Lady Gaga was roughly : "oh, so this is what you would get if you shoved Peaches and every single incarnation of Christina Agullera into a meat grinder." I tried to watch the Poker Face video in order to make a list of everything that was wrong with it, but I just couldn't take it. I flipped off the television and that was it. I hated Lady Gaga.

And, OK, maybe i thought Just Dance was a fun song that would have totally been my Wednesday night jam if I were still someone who went out on Wednesday nights. But as far as i could see that was all Lady Gaga had. I figured that, in time, she would quietly shuffle off to Ibiza to hang out with the Venga Boys, and i went on about my life.

Then one day something aired on VH1 that captivated me with the same seductive power as The Ring from The Lord of the Rings. Once i was able to look away and got my wits about me I had the strangest feeling. You know how after you overindulge in dessert you can just feel the diabetes coursing through your veins? It was sort of like that except after watching the Paparazzi video sort of felt like i was coming down with clamidia.

I fought against my urge to eat moldy bread and allowed my love for Lady Gaga to secretly fester so deeply that when the bad romance video was released I watched with excitement and presence and from the first frame i got it and i not only got it i got Gaga.

Now there are so many things I love about her, but the very fact that i am a Gaga fan is at the root of my adoration. The journey i went on in the process of becoming a Gaga fan makes me grateful for the fact that she exists. I had strong opinion about her for a long time and it completely changed. And that's allowed to happen in me.

It is absolutely OK for me to let go of the way i thought about things in the past. If i change my attitude towards something I don't have to think the person i was who held it differently in the the past with the different opinion in the past was a bad person, and it is completely plausible for me to change things about my self the I currently can not see a chance of changing. And none of it has to be at the cost of what else I'm doing or i did that may be or have been laying the foundation for other parts of my life in the future. I am a house that is going to go thru many renovations in this life time. And if I'm happy being different than i was it isn't because who i was was so terrible... it was just a different version of me. And if i enjoy who i become in the future it isn't at the expense of who i am today. And knowing that makes me feel liberated, and saying it makes me feel powerful. And.

When I experience Lady Gaga's work I'm not simply enjoying a performance, I physically feel a wave of emotion connected to all of the blips of inspiration she has to offer, my right to evolution included. She is the little red string tied round my finger to remind me of that.

test

I'll kick this off by revealing something about my self that i've never shared with anyone before; every time a blog catches my interest i can't fight the urge to go back and read the blogger's first entry.

I'd now like to address anyone who is reading this in the future. Hello. How are you? I know... I do it too!

I know of two reasons why someone in the future would be reading this post. They either find my take on everyday adventures charming and want to follow my story from the beginning, or, after randomly stumbling across my blog, they are hoping to catch a gimps of the type of person who would put such crap up on the internet. I'm usually thinking the latter when clicking thru a blog's achieves looking for entry number one.

I have this false sense of superpower in that i believe I can tell a lot about a person based on their first blog post. I have a faulty sense of logic in that I base the former assumption on the fact that I have started a lot of blogs, each to cast my self in a different light, each initial entry carefully crafted with the intention to tell readers a lot about the person i wanted them to believe I was. I will now reduce my entire existence down to a single cliché and tell you that I came to realize that the real person i was trying to convince about who i wanted to be seen as was, in fact, myself. Each new beginning was a clean slate i could fill up with a point of view, not of my own, but of the person i hoped to become. I saw my blog as a way to fake it till could make it, a place where i could fake smile when I was sad till i was once again happy. Wow, that was more like, four or five clichés. Well, I'm very complex.

In the past I didn't know who i was and I thought i could find my way by doing things i thought the type of person i was hoping to become would do. The only thing i was doing in any of those blogs that was totally honest was the actual act of blogging. I love to blog. I've learned lot about myself by putting my experiences into a written format that I'm comfortable about sharing with others, even when I was writing behind a veil. Now I can feel the sun on my face and i want to show off the real me in blog form. This is where that starts.