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Capacity

2/14/2015

Earn the capacity
to feel

by feeling a little bit more

a little bit more
because your life will be so much richer

adapt

increase the "load"

dwell with the energy

build it
hold it
move it

so you are no longer threatened by it

Trigger:
click-bang!
click--bang.
click...bang
click...
click. click.

Today I Killed a Man

2/8/2015

currently reading Tripping Over The Truth: The Metabolic Theory of Cancer by Travis Christofferson

Today I killed a man

I speared through the context, the fabric
in which he thinks himself a man

Unraveled, the waters draining
he squirms for Oxygen

Deprived and suffocating

He begins to ferment
the fumes of spoilage spewing

lactic and intoxicating

turn him cancerous

out of culture, unable to yet breathe on land.

What I learned asking folks to do a "good thing"

1/29/2015

Earlier this week I asked people to comment publicly, extolling the virtue of the author or simply offering a well-wishing. The results were interesting. The process illuminating.

Givens:

Most people with whom I have contact are reporting social media activity in the morning hours.
My gratitude journal was rather thinly populated as of late.
I found myself needing a refreshed perspective regarding resources, and simply decided to ask others to help me inventory
I wanted to feel good and wondered what it would be like to crowdsource it.

Interesting points in process

I hesitated multiple times in posting the question to please generate a message with the intent to create some Goodness. It turns out one person assumed I was experiencing struggle or hardship. That was an interesting assumption.
The [internal] argument was basically the voice, "What will others think?" Similar concern: "People will think you're not at the top of your game."
The next day the post was populated by so much generosity I learned how much [emotionally and energetically] greater I can start each day; ingesting this positive feedback created an upwelling of highly energizing content that I drew from throughout the day.
I populated my gratitude journal with all these wonderful comments, bulking it nicely.

Conclusion

I recommend everyone ask others to say genuinely kind things about you or your character
Small risk + unchecked internal dialogue = unnecessarily high levels of anxiety/hesitation
Asking for help is awesome
Be extremely thoughtful and protective of morning influences on rest of day. If you don't have charging rituals to begin each day, I do not recommend a screen-based morning. The power of this exercise really demonstrated and reinforced for me the importance of setting the day with intent, not agenda.
I received some terrific responses from people from whom I haven't heard in years.

Crisis of Significance, Crisis of Importance

1/12/2015

When everything is equal,
when everything gets the same voice, we enter a
Crisis of Significance.

What is the Prime Directive today?

"I don't know, I'll do whatever I want to do."

The 18th century Enlightenment liberated the human from the Church-mind-worldview.
May the Rugged Individuals please rise.
Make your heads higher than the crowd so that we may take aim.

A cancer cell does not seek to liberate itself.
Rather its natural intelligence--
collaborating purposefully for the healthy functioning of the organism--
has grown malignant

destructive to the organism

When the purpose has been lost, when the healthy functioning of the organism has been forgotten
there is a Crisis of Importance

To be an individual is one matter;
To be an individual with a forgotten intent
is to be a free radical
mal-aligned
poorly aligned

The way of Goodness is the way of Will, the way of action
the balance of Service and Stillness has been disturbed in malignancy

The way of Goodness is the domain of ethics, morals
It is the domain of "WE"
What ought we do? What should I do?
In the WE-domain, there is more than just "I"

When there is suffering in the action/stillness ways
when there is pain around the importance of what I do
Inspect the WE domain, and ask "What's really important," "What's the purpose," "What is the intent?"
May these questions elevate our actions.

The Magi

12/23/2014

I am Herod

I desire to extinguish an
insignificant other

Elimination
an insipid solution to avoid a usurper

Serving the mission
the dream
bringing gifts over death

Each time I honor the Innocents
with this Divine Breath
Gold from the East

I offer her the choice of alchemy
to sacrifice the charade, and instead to be
unblunted and vulnerable
This, Knowledge of the Magi

Gifts I bring
I sit
I serve

I am King

Survey. 12/20 Forrest Yoga Workshop. Thank you.

12/20/2014

Thank you all for joining in practice today.
I learned a great deal in preparing for today, as well as through teaching the material.
I strive to create a high quality learning experience and to that end, I welcome your feedback.

Would you please take a brief survey? [click here]

Forrest Yoga Workshop: Three Faces of Spirit

12/8/2014

In this yoga workshop we will use a perspectives practice to investigate one of the pillars of Forrest Yoga--Spirit--cultivating our relationship with it, experiencing it, and living in a way that allows us to show up authentically.

Possessing the ability to take on various perspectives, first person-I, second-person-We, and third-person-It, offers us unique gifts and ways of participating in the world--[with] a sense of Fullness

Third person allows us objectivity--an ability to dis-identify with that which is "not me."
Just as a child becomes autonomous when it learns it is separate from mother, a third person spiritual practice helps us to Witness the Beauty and wonderment of this Great Mystery.

Second person perspective allows us to experience Relatedness with other. The spiritual practices that center in second person perspective may be devotional in nature or service-oriented. As Diane Musho Hamilton notes, "We" is where our sameness and our differences are mutually recognized.

First person perspective allows me, the subject, to experience Spirit intimately--within me, as me, through me--Embodiment.

The workshop will contain meditation exercises to provide a visceral "taste" of each of these perspectives. The remainder and majority of the workshop will use yoga asana [breath and movement] to encourage practicing Embodiment.

All levels of practitioners are welcome yet some yoga experience is strongly recommended.

Occurs:
Saturday December 20, 2014
Yoga Now Chicago; 742 N. LaSalle Ste. 201
Chicago, IL
call: 312 280 9642
time: 100-330pm
Cost: $35
Transit: short walk to both brown line and red line
Parking in lot behind building, entrance on Chicago Ave., validated: $10
[street parking expires after 2 hours]

About your facilitator:

Gwen Mihaljevich, a Chicago based practitioner, works primarily in the healing arts and yogic traditions and has for 10 years under the auspice of Ana Forrest. With an academic foundation in music performance and therapy, her interests include deep study in addiction and recovery, behavioral development, nutrition, sports psychology, epigenetics, zazen, and integral leadership.

Plan Strong, a seminar with Pavel

11/13/2014

currently reading: the Plan Strong manual...of course

Scottsdale, AZ: over one hundred bright minds gathered this weekend to learn what of the Soviet weightlifting system could be extrapolated into a suitable template for designing programs for use with barbells, kettlebells, and bodyweight for "the rest of us."

Saturday, not more than one hour into the Plan Strong seminar given by Pavel, I had already assessed the presentation as invaluable. It was affirming to learn that this would not be a repackaging of old material, but rather a further, clearer distillation of his previous material. I was skeptical: how could studying elite programs calculably translate for a novice lifter like myself? I posited that common denominators underlying growth in novice, intermediate, and elite practitioners must be organismic or biological in nature, rather than procedural or technical. The underlined theme of the weekend was ebb and flow. In purposeful training, one must accommodate both stimulus and the response to it.

Defined Terms

A distinction was made between measuring the subjective part of a training load [internal]--that which technology is great at doing [HRV apps, and the n=1 measurements like perceived effort]--and external: that which we can manipulate outside the organism seeking the adaptation, like weight.

The subjective report in training contains dirty words like “feeling” or “hard,” so we mostly abandoned that discussion except for an aside about technological assists. They might give us input as to when the best day to lift “heavy” is. What would happen internally if I only ever trained heavy on the “best” day to train hardest? Pavel’s open ended question reveals what I guess to be his penchant for keeping it simple and keeping it “old school,” rather than getting mired in minutia.

Meat & Potatoes or Brains & Brawn

What’s a steak without the fat? What’s strength without the smarts to recreate it for a student? It’s clear Pavel lives and breathes lifters’ numbers. Seeing him work out his thought and mathematical support on the board was how I imagine a sailor teaching celestial navigation. Yes, there are many stars but which ones will best guide you based on your location? Use these numbers to give your training life. The supplied manual is a ridiculous compilation replete with “these” numbers.

With a basic template revealed, I recalled a book I read a long time ago, Consistent Winning, that described naturally occurring patterns through Fibonacci numbers. The argument for athletic peaking, stock market trends, and intrinsically beautiful architecture all sharing these ratios appealed to me then. Moreover, the fractal nature of these ratios, scaling from DNA to galaxy spirals made the programming section of the seminar seem like another body of work adhering to a “natural code.”

Tidy Up

Big takeaways for me:

for what lifts we have a lot of data
minimum, optimal, and maximum rep schemes
where experienced and beginner lifters’ programs need to be different
most important variable with which to play [for most people and me]
most fundamental unit of time in programming
accommodating for competition

I’d love to say more, but I’m much too excited to go practice and experience this.
Cheers!

'Manus sapiens potens est'

10/4/2014

currently reading Fascial Manipulation for Internal Dysfunctions, Stecco

"A knowledgeable hand is powerful. The more a therapist's hand is supported by scientific knowledge, the more effective it will be. A therapist's hand will only be able to treat...after comprehending the importance of the fasciae....

For New Yoga Teachers and Trainers: Two Lessons, Save Five Years

9/3/2014

Wouldn't it be wonderful to be able to recognize good advice and heed it when beginning a new endeavor? The following two pieces of advice I would give my younger self or any new teacher. I'm not sure my younger self would have heard the advice, but if she had, a lot of progress could have been made quickly.

One of the best lessons I ever absorbed came from a kitchen--in fact, a well-known kitchen in Chicago. It was a basement: work tables jammed up along one wall with just enough room for a passer-by to walk behind you with a bus tub. It's a place where the wine storage served double duty as a changing room, and the fuse box room housed deep freezers, fermenting goods, and all our bicycles. Interestingly, everyone had enough room to get an astonishing amount of work done. Parsley was picked, shoulders roasted, chickens deboned, bread baked in slivers of space offered up by a constant rotation of bodies around each other. To credit my employee friends, it was a symphony of movement--one missed step and you risked bumping or burning yourself.

Many cooks-to-be added to the manpower project by multiplying the piles of picked parsley and mounds of garlic bulbs. Once, some poor chump threw the parsley stems away. A cook's response was stern surprise. He pointed to the ever-growing-full pot in the walk-in [fridge] saying, "Put all the scraps in the stock pot." He sighed at the waste in the garbage.

Lesson 1: Waste nothing and learn to operate in unlikely circumstances. Waste no space, waste no part of an animal, waste no food, waste no time. Not one inch of that kitchen went unused, and though it wasn't a glamorous workspace, the goal was to create a masterful experience for the diners upstairs.

Once we insist on creating something from seemingly nothing, a gift called creativity appears. Gray Cook uses a term called "self-limiting" to describe an exercise with constraints. What kind of practice or workout would you do if you only had a 4'x4' space? This is no notional exercise. Do it. Yes, it feels luxurious to spread out, preferably with sight lines of the lake, but this is not what most of your clientele base affords. Limit your materials, your tools, and your toys, and get back to basics.

Lesson 2: Buy the dang book. I wasted so much time trying to acquire books, knowledge, information, and teachings by penny-pinching. Internet-entitled: because so much is free, shouldn't I get it for free? Stop it!

I'm now nearing the age my parents were when they had me. My parents did a most amazing service by sending me to school that charged tuition. By my calculations, it wasn't until recently that I surpassed spending on my current annual professional education what my parents spent on my behalf 20-30 years ago! If you're waiting 2-3 weeks for the library to circulate a book for you, I've got you beat. Amazon brought it to my door yesterday and I've read through it in a few days, maybe a week, if I procrastinated.

I can hear it already, "But I don't want to spend $20 on a book. What if I don't like it?" You want to be taken seriously in your field. Learn from Masters and PhD level texts. Shell out $65 for a text book, multiply that out over 12 credit hours (12 books), for one college semester. Doable. If it's not doable, dishes are. There are plenty of kitchens near your home that need a dishwasher. They'll give you a nice 4'x4' space to get your work done. There you'll have a few hours to ponder the book that you just read before work.