The site explains the circumstances of these retreats clearly enough, so I won’t belabour that; nothing in the bare-bones font and design of the site prepares the human nervous system for 12 daily hours of meditation and what basically amounts to a daily 19-hour fast, as no food other than fruit and tea can be taken after noon…for not being able to even expose your upper arms to the sun or nod and smile encouragingly at a fellow victim, I mean participant, when they are so visibly shaken and miserable that every cell in you is alive with compassion. What’s a soft, decadent little pup like myself doing in this rigorous situation, you ask? Haven’t I structured both my practice and my teaching to avoid the tedious drudgery of “life is suffering”? Well, yeah, sort of, except that this is a vast and rich continent of practice and knowledge and if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em for a 10 day psychic evisceration.

I’ve ranted against my half-witted definition of pop-Buddhism here and there; John’s language is more graceful and more accurate when he says that “some forms of discipline will amplify spirit, and other forms will diminish spirit”. I’ve had my spirit diminished by language like “suffering”, “craving”, “aversion”, “ignorance”, “misery” and even “equanimity”, borderline stoicism that can so easily jump the shark to apathy and inner death. Then naturally, since balance is apparently a foreign concept to me, I went wide in the other direction, joyfully embracing Tantra’s affirmation of life’s intrinsic divine unity as an excuse to marginalize/avoid/oversimplify other paths. UR DOIN IT RONG. Tantra means “to weave”, meaning in this instance that no methodology or path is excluded from its purview, from euphoric bhakti-fun, to grim Spartan rectitude. I figured I’d be a pretty sad excuse for a teacher if I couldn’t suck it up for 10 days, and I had various philosophical and pedagogical theories that needed experiential testing for validity. So your intrepid field reporter handed her iPhone to the wardens, put on M’s old T-shirts [the dowdiest items I could find] and went into the trenches.

Start again.

If you really want to know what the method and practice are all about you should probably just sit a course, since SN Goenka, the teacher and primary living exponent of this method is emphatic that its fruits will arise only from experience. Any description I could offer regarding the technique would be inaccurate and amateurish. I will say it is exquisite in its simplicity and admirably effective at addressing the nature of the mind. Nothing like it. Non-sectarian, resolutely intellectual, clean crisp lines that made me yearn for a splattery Sanskrit yarn, people with 500 heads, jewelled saris and blueskinned demi-immortals…alas, no such drama here…it’s all like a big food processor for your head.

And of course I’m not just here with my own special mess to clean up; I’m also here as a little baby teacher trying to see how the big dogs do it, and how to connect with students who might be more familiar with this type of technique…or how to bring it to those who really need to do it, and don’t wanna. So I’m running a couple of different subprogams throughout the process, usually resulting in me pacing around our little enclosure, chewing on the inside of my cheek and muttering to myself like a…really, really stable and well-balanced person, heh. So much of what was instructed was in the language described above, and as the vast chunks of the day spent in meditation chewed up the cognitive grist, you’re already pretty much as bummed as you can be, so it really seems like piling on. I missed what I perceive as the heart of practice. I felt very hollow when I wasn’t pissed off or bored. It seemed like we were in a time capsule, bodies hidden, eyes down, trapped in this energetic dead zone where animals and birds even steered clear while we did our work. I had promised that I would do my very best not to pollute this method with the more familiar, though, so unless I really needed to call my lifeline in moments of psychospiritual duress I avoided mantra or emotional narrative.

Due to the misunderstanding of the nature of Tantra mentioned above my stance was usually skeptical and combative, especially ironic as Goenka accurately describes the daily experience of the new meditators with chilling accuracy, particularly weird considering the instruction is given via video, recorded in 1991…how does he know about my special snowflake experience IN THE FUTURE? What a guy. I’d gird my mental loins every day at 4:20 am when I shuffled down the hall for the dawn session, ready to sneer at anything that seemed dated, irrelevant, body-negative, patriarchal, or inaccurate. I found plenty of material to inwardly bitch and mutter about, which naturally made my practice even more awkward and graceless. I spent a lot of energy trying to SEPARATE this grim experience from my familiar practice, forgetting over and over again that Tantra creates CONNECTION. So, what’s the hook? Should you, as an Anusara-curious student, live in the mountains for 10 days? Is there a relationship there, and if so, what the heck is it when the two techniques seem so radically dissimilar?

What rang cherries for me was on the morning of day 5, we heard a long and exuberant chant that Goenka has recorded, in Pali [e.g. not Sanskrit] that nevertheless mentioned terms and structures that those of you who have studied Anusara Yoga seriously will find familiar: the bottom 25 tattvas, from the elements of the material world, through the senses and their objects, through the mind and cognitive processes, all the way up to the mutually exclusive categories of Spirit and Matter [their exclusivity is why these philosophies are described as "dual"]. Tantra arrived subsequent to these tattvas or “principles of existence” and, *without modifying or removing any of them*, ADDED another 11 on top to create a non-dual system, that is, no more exclusivity: the substance of all experience, in their view, was the same single, vast, indivisible consciousness. Sounds pretty good, right? We

This is not endorsed by any authority or governing body, I've gone maverick

little pups often conflate this indivisibility with an abandonment of the exclusivity that preceded it, but in a very real way the world is of course quite dualistic: fraught with paradox, irreconcilable difference, wild diversity, and of course the animating spirit does appear to leave the physical body at death, a hard process to reconcile no matter how enthusiastic your non-dual practice might be.

I realized I was living in a little lab, a test-tube where the subject is your own head, and the raw materials of the experiment are described so elegantly through these tattvas of the mind and senses, particularly the part that uses the senses and APPROPRIATES them as being “mine”: my aching leg, my osteopath-hungry sacrum, my twitchy left eyeball. There was no need to argue* with Goenka’s videotaped image [as if!]; in spite of the surface differences in the practice I was simply focussing on this one little “chunk” of the principles of existence, and about time, too. We don’t spend very much time on them, for the simple reason that it’s really uncomfortable and difficult. It’s also dangerous, which is why you are necessarily cloistered for 10 days, so you don’t wander down the mountain road towards the gravel pit with your medulla oblongata hanging out [of course, each course can have its own attrition, because, well, it sucks a lot of the time]. Vipassana is a safe and well-supervised way to develop rudimentary psychonautical skills: you learn how to swim in this deep sea in a very clear and rigorous way. And then those discoveries and skills can naturally be recontextualized in light of your core values, whether they reflect life’s duality or non-duality; you can choose.

Oh, my body. Holy moses. Lest we come to think that we are the doers, the sole agent of change in this embodiment [anava mala], watch what happens to your body when you have to sit still for hours at a time. What a trip, man, I have a whole new spine in addition to my brain’s new firmware download. [Upload?] You could also think of this level of sensitivity and awareness as a new depth of understanding Anusara Yoga’s first principle, including “softening and feeling”: nothing in my experience of those two words prepared me for the lessons of Vipassana. You can’t use all your 90-minute mixed-level class tricks and hope to hold Sukhasana [crossed legs] for an hour straight. You have to get more efficient or you’ll blow up. I practiced for the first time this morning [you're not allowed to do yoga while you're there, I know right?] and was as wobbly as a colt, panting and baffled.

The transformation was effective and global; there was not a single co-meditator of mine whose body did not visibly shift in its energy and posture over the course. This of course came about due to the gruelling rigor with which they all did their work, so lest you think I’m implying a quick or easy fix here, nothing could be further from the truth. I’m just saying. The only other transformation I’ve seen like that was 2009’s Immersion with Chavez and where that took a year, this was 10 days. I would think that without maintenance the previous patterns would likely return, also, so we’ll have to see how it plays out.

So what’s the punchline? Nothing makes you appreciate a smile like not seeing one; nothing makes the radiance of the summer sky shine like having your eyes closed for hours at a time while you scour out your cranium. Goenka relates the Buddha’s experience of enlightenment as “pulsating”, “true, deep happiness and peace”…sound familiar? Om namah Shivaya. On the last day you can start talking to each other with your new voice and your new head, and what you want to say may surprise you in its affection and grace after almost two weeks of sturm und drang. So while this method has different texts, different language and languaging, and a fierce determination, it’s all one love…at least if that’s your bag, and if you’re reading this blog then it probably is.

*One beef that I still have that I think we could collectively attempt to describe more consciously is insisting that the mind is some sort of incontinent infant or wild animal. Sure, it can seem like that as you Roy-Rogers your way through lassoing the sucker, but the mind is gorgeous and potent, and I’m getting a bit honked off at the paradigm of treating it as though it has soiled itself. I feel so strongly after this experience that the mind is not a dog or bull in the soul’s china shop: the mind is a wizard. The body is a warrior. The Heart is Lord.

Not because of any physical or educational endeavour, although it is that. I recently realized that I get most of my energy from

WHAT TIME IS IT?

responding to the status quo with what I think is a balancing force, in most cases rebellion. That’s how I started teaching, actually. I would rumble around in my head with reasons why such-and-such instruction or demeanour was ineffective and think of ways that I could improve upon it. That’s why I started Big Rock Fridays: to puncture the dirigible of piety and passivity that seemed to cloak yoga, and I’ve actually been afraid that somebody would come along and think it was a terrible idea and that I was a jerk and that I was wrong in my passionate instinct.

And finally, they have. I recently got a double-barrelled attack of both anti-Anusara polemic and anti-Sjanie polemic. A more fierce spirit than I would probably respond to such playa-hataz with some serious game but I curled up and died inside because working on “balanced action” as I’ve been asked to do in my training has sapped the zeal and fire out of what started me on this path in the first place.

It’s this way. The world is not optimally aligned. Patriarchy and capitalism keep us from being ourselves. During today’s superlative lecture on this history of yoga with M. Chavez on Day 1 of Immersion II 2010 Planet Earth, he mentioned that all spiritual philosophy strives to seek liberation, and their different tenors will derive from what they perceive to be preventing liberation. Well, for myself personally, I came to Anusara because it was the only place I saw a healthy body image…not just paid lip service but literally embodied in the philosophy and alignment. And I stand by that. And I stand by it with a particular gusto given how UNFREE patriarchal concepts of female body image has made me and my friends. Until this changes worldwide [LOL] my teaching will always have a political element…it will always be “unbalanced” in bringing balance to an extant, unhealthy extreme.

I have ranted about this until friends have backed away slowly from the inferno of verbiage with their hands in the air. Watching the worlds’ climate drift forever towards mo money and mo problems makes me convulse with fury, and that fury gives me a lot of power. If you’ve ever been around me when I’m ranting you know how much power that is. It’s actually kind of scary, even for me. Kali Ma takes out her political ginsu knife and just starts slicing and dicing and that’s part of who I am. A really crappy situation takes a lot of power to address. That’s balanced action, Goddamnit: A LOT of power going against the prevailing dark current.

Thanks to Tobyn Ross and Yoga For The People

On a smaller scale I guess I’ll always be a jnana yogi, forever examining myself/systems/methods/techniques/words/metaphors and saying “Neti, neti [not this, not this]” because [and I'm really only just realizing this now] I get a lot of power from that inquiry. I get a lot of juice from the dark; I get a lot of good answers from my doubt. When I see my role as a teacher in an iconic sense I see myself living in the dark, in like a little hut like the witch in Hansel and Gretel, and when YOU are ever in the dark you can come see me because that’s where I live and frankly I’m more comfortable there. My darkness is my light, if that makes sense. So when I see too much faux-enthusiasm, phrases that make no sense, teachings that are psychically harmful, I can pretend to not care, and maybe you’ll never even hear me say anything about them [LOL again], but inside I am redefining what is needed in MY self-expression to make sure I balance that action of fear/emotional dishonesty/self-hatred/hardness/smallness with something courageous, authentic, loving and grand, even if its grandiosity is derived from excess and folly. I don’t do it on purpose. Sometimes I wish I didn’t do it. But I do and it’s my gift.

Yes, I’ve seen some of these eyebrow- and hair-raising actions in Anusara Yoga teachers. So naturally my nature is to say, “NOT THIS O HELLZ NO” and figure out how I can never make anybody else feel as bad as they made me feel, as lonely as they made me feel, as rejected at my essential level as that: like I’m broken, like they should send me in for repairs because I don’t like kirtan or I don’t “look for the good” or I don’t weigh 80 pounds and eat peanuts and weeds. What’s interesting is that a lot of this psychic abuse comes in the guise of the most ostensible brightness….that the most luminous and radiant words cloak a judgemental soul, picking and choosing where God can be found.

When my friend Steve Merkley saw whatever it was he saw in me and gave me my first teaching gig, with very little fanfare or preparation, not even a training, all I did was say what I thought would help address the lies that I’d been told were a part of this practice. Yes, I know they’re not lies for everybody, but I suffered so long at their hands I can’t pretend my soul isn’t still hurt. My pain is my power, and I REFUSE to believe I’m the only person like me out in the world, the only person who feels MORE lonely in the fake light. In that way I suppose I’m a feeble sort of activist; there are so many who do so much more than I, but this is how it starts: Opening to Grace is also opening to the reality that there’s some stuff out there that’s gotta change. The process has been hard because we first look to our teachers for our voice and our techniques and then you have to dig deep to find your own. Mine is kind of awkward and a bit of a flail at this point, I’m afraid, but I will leave no dogma unquestioned and no piety unpunctured, because that’s who I am. In the rebellion of one against the other, we find the true one.

1.  Number one with a bullet is the first pair of rubber boots I’ve purchased ever in my life…seven and a half years late if you’re going by Vancouver standards.  OMG everything in my world is better now that I have rubber boots.  And these are no boring galoshes or cold, thin-soled pretenders to the throne.  Mah Tretornz, let me show you them.  They’ve got fuzz inside so they stay perfectly warm and dry as I stomp through puddles like I’m back in Grade 4.  They’re also shiny and purple and look like big grape lozenges for your feet.

2.  The only internet flame-war worth having is, of course, PC vs. Mac.  Having had our new iMac for just over 12 hours I’ve gotta throw my hat in the Mac ring.  This thing makes mincemeat out of tasks that hung the Dell up for 3 days.  Class video DVDs?  Forget the former week-long rendering odyssey. Quad-core processing lets M add jokey titling and Star-Wars-esque wipes and still produce a DVD in just under an hour, with correct time-synch and aspect ratio, as opposed to days and days of messing around with various codecs and Premiere settings.  Keeee-rist.  The rumours are true…do believe the hype…this is a magical machine, and both M and I have competently mud-wrestled perverse PCs for long enough, thank you very much.  Also it’s sexy as hell.  And PVRing NFL games in HD?  Don’t mind if I do.

3.  One of my favourite stores in Yaletown is Beauty Mark, which simply provides excellence in all things girly, from little arm-warmers to jojoba-oil and Javanese clay facial masks, to European rosehip lip balm, to various panties, and my personal favourite, which I’ve been stalking bi-weely since I just can’t bring myself to spend $50 on a tube of goo:  the Bliss blood-orange-and-white-pepper body butter.  Today I showed up to moon at my fave product and not only do they now make a hand lotion in the same scent, which was more reasonably priced and therefore snapped up immediately, but the staff REMEMBERED my obsession, turned me on to the hand lotion, and also hooked me up with the tester of the body butter, which ends up being like $17.50 worth of this stuff for free, and since I’m not

I just want to climb into this picture and go to sleep

paranoid about H1N1 I am more than content to slather myself in used product.  Amen.

4.  I had a fling with Nick and Nora’s PJs a couple of Christmasses ago, and since those who know me know that I basically base my whole life on trying to be in my pyjamas whenever and wherever possible, I take PJ shopping pretty seriously.  Unfortunately both my Dream Designs proper grown-up PJ pants and my nasty men’s-size-large Denver Hayes PJ pants gave up the ghost in the same week, so I just went ahead and shelled out for the Bed Head set I had my eye on since they threw it up in the window in Flesh Lingerie Boutique, right next door to Raw Canvas and therefore rife with window-shopping since I’m down there all the time.  It takes a special kind of company to make pyjamas that feel like full formal wear.

Okay, I promise the next post will be about esoteric, non-material philosophical concerns so I can put my yoga hat back on.  Or food.  Either way.  In the meantime, cultivate gratitude for beautiful and effective ideas that make this embodiment cozy and good-smelling, because, yay.

Hmm...Matsyendrasana?

The perception of the female form is warped and turned into an inhuman image. Those attracted to the female form will then see normal, healthy women as being grotesque. The women will also consider themselves grotesque, and will look at themselves only with pain. They will tend to want to rectify the reality of their body, and change it into the idealized image that they see.

If perception of the female form is always skewed, then women (the bearers of the female form) and those attracted to the female form, will be always off-balance, always dis-satisfied. In western art and myth, the female form can symbolize the world. If perception of the female form is skewed and unbalanced, then is perception of the world likewise skewed and unbalanced?

This was '07 but still amazing

props to Dustin “Quasar” Sacks for the Flickr pic

…all the local vendors and foodies come out and have impromptu street patios with impossibly well-priced specials on everything you might like:  Portuguese chicken, wild salmon, buckets of beer, pomegranate mojitos, prawn souvlaki, samosas.  Performance art.  Organic bamboo bedding.  Curries, slices of pizza, vodka tonics, used clothing.  Last pair shoe sales.  Lesbian collectives.  Natural fibres, bead curtains, freestyle rappers, Vietnamese spring rolls, falafel.  Protests against the Olympics.  The first legitimately young Young Communist Party booth I’ve ever seen.  A Yugo with plastic flowers glue gunned all over it.  The Healing Garden with everything from cushions and Tantric Healing [!!!] to sinus massage and a toning circle.  Chicken wings, Greek salad, bratwurst, cappucino, imported fair-trade shea butter.  Argentinian pan-flute music.  Chardonnay, home-made greeting cards, hemp pants, and a breast-feeding rest-station.

I recently re-read Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin:  the protagonist, an almost 90-year-old woman, describes the difference between the Toronto of her youth as a “Protestant city”  and the new Toronto [I'm pretty sure this was when I was in university] as a “medieval city”…half anticipating lepers in chains, and I always imagine Ren Faire foolz in jester hats at that point.  But for real, the Car Free Day is that:  a jostling crush of medieval bodies, interested in what we are all interested in:  food, music, massages, perhaps booze [I'm not saying, I'm just saying], togetherness, HUMAN NESS.

It was delightful, not least because of my lunch and seeing my friend Julie’s amazing clothes.  Srsly you have to check these clothes out.  Any line that describes their hoodies as “Faramir” is worth its weight in Elvish rope.

A sort-of-ok part of getting sick: you watch stuff you would NEVER watch, normally

Especially as the world emerges from its layers of socks’n’sandals, long johns, Helle Hansen rain hoodies, and generally Vancouverian tarpiness into full bloom.  You just need that one day of getting a LITTLE too pink around the edges [I think that was last Wednesday] and you’re good to go until October.

I’ve been down for the count this week with a really weird cold/flu double-header that left no system in my body unturned.  I consider myself to have a relatively robust immune system for somebody who talks and touches sweaty people for a living but every once in a while it gets me.  I’m definitely in the ascendant, recovered more than enough to present to you Big Rock Friday VII.  Oh, and to watch this rad movie on Silver Screen Classics last night:  The Vikings with Ernest Borgnine and Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh and Kirk Douglas.  You haven’t lived until you’ve seen Ernest Borgnine in a bathrobe drinking beer out of a horn, pouring it all over his king-of-the-vikings medallion.

This was the only one I could find with glitter or sequins

This was a challenging one since it spans several decades and although there is a fairly straight evolutionary channel from the older Motown to, say, Usher, the recording technologies and sound palette has changed so much, it’s pretty astonishing.  In this case I used Boyz II Men, Janet Jackson and Lionel Richie as my “missing links”, to brick in the intervening

So much of this genre showcases voices together [esp. the Boyz II Men stuff] and what better way to connect our yoga family together than with our voices…let’s all party this afternoon and send the ladies off right.

Marvin Gaye, “Let’s Get It On”

Diana Ross, “I’m Coming Out”

Mary J. Blige, “Family Affair”

Justin Timberlake, “Señorita”

Usher, “Yeah!” [This is one of those songs that M and I pointlessly resisted on the grounds that it was everywhere for about a year, until we finally both admitted to each other that we loved it]

Lionel Richie, “All Night Long [All Night]” [title redundancy sic]

New Edition, “Something About You”

The Isley Brothers, “Footsteps In The Dark [Part 1 & 2]”

Boyz II Men, “Just My Imagination [Running Away With Me]”

Raphael Saadig and Joss Stone, “Just One Kiss”

Diana Ross, “Reach Out And Touch”

D’Angelo, “Untitled [How Does It Feel]”

Diana Ross w/Lionel Richie, “Endless Love” [what can I say, Happy Gilmore was on MovieTime the other night]

Boyz II Men, “Ribbon in the Sky”

I’m also enjoying the properly warm June weather and the fruits of my gardening labours, which have been sporadic at best this year.  I sowed some “Grand Rapids” lettuce, rainbow chard, and “King of Denmark” spinach in the hopes of having a little mesclun patch I can shave off every so often and conjure a salad from; we added a beefsteak tomato plant to our offerings of “Sweet 100″s, San Marzano and Romas; I planted some kale in the shadier box in the hopes that that too will give some greeniness to pastas and soups here and there, and some nasturtiums where the heather used to be before the snowy winter killed it.  We’ll see.  If I can get M to sow the white beans we’ll have our full yearly vegetable complement back again for ‘09.

Also, as the post title implies, June is Bike Month and my poor old girl has seen better days, maintenance-wise.  I had a cunning little apparatus from MEC that was supposed to help clean the chain, and the chainguard is too big so I had to sort of jerry rig it with twisties and bungee cords, besides which my snootier cycling friends sneered at such acoutrements and told me just to use a toothbrush.  So that’s what I did.  She’s 5 years old, is my lovely bike, and she’s almost customized:  she’s got an internal 3-speed hub which was not standard issue, and some monstrous tires that are really too fancy for her, ditto pedals.  She’s also got a handmade metal basket that M created from some spray-painted jobsite scrap that, before it started to get all banged up, was the envy of my fellow cruisers.  I took her out on the deck and wiped her down, toothbrushed her, and then used the garden watering hose to polish ‘er off.  A little White Lightning goes a long way.

If I was really my father’s daughter, however, I’d have an annual ritual where I took the whole durn thing apart, every nut,

There's life in the old girl yet

gasket and O-ring, and soak it in little aluminum pie plates of degreaser, whereupon once all the bits had been defilthed to my satisfaction I’d put the thing back together again, with one extra bearing or washer every year.  In this way I would contribute to the annual joke, which like great humour concepts everywhere increased with teh funny year after year:  that one day Dad’d be biking along and the whole shebang would collapse underneath him, having been losing parts annually for well over a decade.  It was a Peugeot, that bike, IIRC.  I think I’ll just wipe my bike down with a ShamWow.

A holiday? For me? You shouldn't have.

Omgomgomgomg…only one more sleep until the our annual Victoria Day Weekend trip to Nelson Island, huzzah! Calloo, callay! A quick Wikipedia search would help answer my questions about why we even have Victoria Day here in the unwashed colonies but I actually prefer sweet, sweet Googleless ignorance on the subject i.e. I’m glad that I have a holiday and I don’t know why.

These Fridays that preceded spring/summer long weekends really put the urgency on creating Big Rock Fridays, as it happens. The amount of…zeal? Enthusiasm? Chutzpah? SHAKTI that was in my fevered brain and body on these Fridays would not sit still for Ganesha bhajans and pranayam practice. It needed to flail and writhe, and so BRF was born. I hope that in the ensuing months these classes have been effective for “bringing the party to the party” as M likes to say. We’ll be revisiting BRFIII tonight, quite possibly my favourite of the playlists, and kicking Vicki’s holiday off in style.

Last weekend was, according to my more astrologically-minded friends, a very important full moon. The days surrounding said full moon were fraught with import and strange events, and it was said [by the aforementioned friends] that it was a time when all of our spiritual practice would be called on; tempered in the fire, if you like. I can dig it. It’s not that bad things happened; it was just all very intense. And the intensity, although lessening somewhat, is still leveled on me like crosshairs as I continue to develop my teaching, finish my certification required reading [The Shiva Sutras are easily the craziest thing I ever read, and I made it through Gravity's Rainbow], and stay on this path in spite of many distractions and enticements elsewhere.

I don’t want to use a scary word like “mature” to describe my new approach to these challenges, but this tenacious me is definitely no me I would have recognized, even a couple of years ago. The balance of perfect transparency and unrelenting commitment has a good resonance inside my body and head, and I slowly begin to see what is meant by “self confidence” in the non-cocky-jerk sense. The only people who seemed self-confident to me were the people who could never hear a word of criticism or comment. And then of course the deeply insecure, such as myself, who were not so much drama queens as drama farmers [new fresh crops grown daily!] There were these other people, though, who were so alien to me they might as well have had 2 heads, who simply quietly went about their business, engaged authentically with others, solved more problems than they caused…I did not get those people at all. Srsly. Never had the foggiest notion how they could go through their lives without gnashing of teeth, rending of garments/flashy gestures and displays of dominance. Maybe this is how they felt.

Now when I get presented with a freshly harvested crop of drama I feel more like chuckling than anything else. I suppose that’s also the luck of the draw; I have a pretty sweet life right now, D.V. But there also doesn’t seem to be too much point to pouring emotional gasoline on life’s fires, you know? I can see little sparks and pops of human beings writing their life’s story, with good guys and bad guys, dragons and princesses, and I think those lobes of my brain have become underused in the last couple of years. I might be cruising for a hubris-bruising here even posting this, but I just wanted to report back from the Other Side of drama in case anybody is feeling pulled down by their story. Enjoy the spring this weekend and we’ll see you in the couple of days on the t00bz.

P.S.  If you’re looking to put some rad events on this summers’ calendar, check out mah retreats.  They’re going to be the perfect combination of getting-away-from-it-all and getting-into-it-all, you know?  I’ll remind you as they draw closer.