I returned last Sunday from Bryan Kest’s three-week yoga teacher training down at Maya Tulum.  Maya Tulum is a really nice, fairly large retreat center down at the bottom of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, almost to Belize.  It’s a lovely spot with sugary soft sandy beaches, warm Caribbean water, and brown pelicans dive bombing into the ocean after fish.  And it’s quiet.  Maybe not so quiet as the first time I went there in 1999, when the only road was pockmarked gravel and you couldn’t much exceed 10 mph, but compared to the San Francisco Bay Area with its radios and BART trains and close neighbors, it’s pretty darn quiet.

 

It had been a very long time since I’d done a teacher training.  I was supposed to go two years ago, made it as far as the Cancun airport before Hurricane Dean said, “no, I don’t think so”.  Several of my students asked why I was doing it at all.  After all, I’ve been teaching for a long time – ten years this week – and I’m not looking to get work at a new studio.  Why bother?  Why spend all that money?  Why take all that time?  Well, to me, this one was a no-brainer.  Ever since my bills decided that it was time to give up full-time yoga teaching and go back to work, I’ve felt the slow but inexorable strain on the connections between me and my yoga.  Yes, I still taught every week, and yes I still practiced, but for most of the week I was living in a very different mindset.  Many of you have heard me say that my goal was to bring yoga’s heart to my business week and business clarity to my yoga teaching.  It takes a toll, and I was feeling disconnected.  On day two, Bryan was talking about people who teach but don’t practice and he said that over time, you begin to teach more and more from your mind – from memory – than from your body and that it shows.  That really struck me because even though I was still able to teach from my own true experience, it was only the physical practice that was real to me…the rest of yoga, especially yoga mind, was being drowned out by deadlines and powerpoints and conferences and speaking events.  I needed to reconnect, and I felt it very deeply.

So I did.  I spent three weeks with the following schedule:  wake up, silent 1 hour walk on the beach, eat amazing local food, chill and digest, long practice, meditation, eat, swim, satsang, meditation, eat, write, snooze, repeat.  I lived yoga for three weeks, pouring nourishment and water on roots that had been dry for far too long.  I re-energized my connection to it.  It felt amazing.  By the end, I was anxious to come back and teach – I mean, all the things I used to talk about came back – my philosophy of yoga, the heart of my yoga reawakened. 

When I got back, I had a bunch of emails from people asking how it was.  It seems that there is a concern that I’m coming back with a whole new repertoire of evil, complicated poses and that we’re all going to be starting tomorrow morning in one armed thumbstand or something.  Let me assuage your concerns with a quick summary of my training:

Number of handstands I did:  0

Number of headstands I did:  0

Number of wheels I did:  0

Number of pigeons I did:  0

Number of times I had my leg behind my head:  0

Number of crows I did:  2

Number of new poses I learned:  0

 

And yet we practiced for hours every day.  Here’s the thing.  We did simple poses.  What you would call boring poses.  We did extended planks, and bent over while lifting one leg in the air, and straddle folds, and balanced on one leg.  We did stuff that ain’t gonna get you on YouTube.  And it was perfect, especially for me, because this training wasn’t about what I teach.  It was about how and why I teach.  And that’s just what I needed to be reminded of. 

I’m looking forward to seeing you this weekend.

I picked up the September 2008 edition of Shambhala Sun in Whole Foods last week.  It has an article called “The World We Have”, which is excerpted from Thich Nhat Hanh’s latest book.  I won’t go through the entire article, but let me pull out one interesting passage that echoes some of what I’ve been thinking about lately.

 

“In twenty-five years the population of China will be 1.5 billion people, and if each of them wants to drive their own private car, China will need 99 million barrels of oil every day.  But world production today is only 84 million barrels per day, so the American dream is not possible for the Chinese, nor the Indians or the Vietnamese.  The American dream is no longer possible for the Americans.  We cannot continue to live like this.  It is not a sustainable economy.”

 

If you think about it even for a minute, the math is simple.  We live in an economy that is based on endless growth.  Stocks are priced with an implicit assumption of perpetual growth of between 2-3% for mature companies that grow that the rate of inflation and hundreds or thousands of percent for start-ups or hot sectors.  Imagine of your favorite stock posted the exact same revenues or earnings as last year.  It would be considered a disaster for most businesses.  Growth is implicit, expected.

 

The trouble is, growth at a system-wide level comes from one of three places.  Rising price levels, increases in population or improvements in productivity.  Rising price levels aren’t really growth, because although the revenue dollar figure goes up, your costs go up and the value of those dollars decline.  This is called inflation and is generally recognized as a bad thing.

 

Globally, population growth is an expected and baseline source of “true” growth, and productivity is the icing on the cake.  Now, I’m lumping some things together here.  Economists may tell me that the development of emerging economies like China and India are a huge source of global growth even if their total populations weren’t rising as quickly as they are.  My argument doesn’t require separating these things, though.  The bottom line is, each of them requires incremental natural resources in the form of energy, minerals, food, water, room, etc.  And like they always say about real estate, “they ain’t making any more of it” (except in Dubai).

 

A closed system with a finite supply of natural resources cannot support perpetual growth in production or population.

 

Our economy uses population growth the way an undisciplined consumer uses credit cards.  When the bill comes, I’ll have the money to pay it.  Then, when the bill comes, I don’t so I use them again.  Our entire economy is based on this premise.  For the most egregious example, see Social Security.   

 

If you’ve been waiting for me to now reveal the solution, you’re about to be disappointed.  The “free rider” problem here is ridiculously large.  How can you expect China or India to look at the rest of the developed world and their standards of living and say, “No, we’ll do the right thing for the planet and stay in verdant poverty”?  How can you expect Brazil to say, “No, we’ll leave the Amazon rain forests as they are and watch our people starve”? 

 

When I’m in a bad mood, I’m reminded of a virus, preying on the host, expanding, preying, expanding until the host dies and then of course the virus dies along with it.  When I’m in a very bad mood I think the only way out is population growth at zero or better yet negative – which of course would decimate the global economy, but tough crap.  Bring the world population down to 1 billion, or half a billion, or 3 billion…I don’t know what the right number is, but some number that allows for vast regions of the world to be untouched and where our footprint isn’t so ugly.  This is, of course, not gonna happen without some sort of massive disease, war or alien invasion and seems to me to be a pretty unappealing option.  Lower birthrates have never been proven to be sustainable, but you have to admit that fewer of us around would do a lot less damage than we’re doing now.

 

This is one of those problems that is too hard to think about, too big to do anything about and too scary to ignore.  I heard a guy from Google say that their biggest business risk right now is the availability of energy.  I think there are lots of things we can do with energy to be more efficient and remove this as a limitation.  Wait until gas goes to $10 a gallon, or $50 and watch us figure that one out in a hurry.  But what happens when it’s water, or food, or space.  What happens when we run out of magic tricks and we have to face the underlying reality that closed systems cannot support infinite growth?

 

I’m not a natural pessimist and neither is Thich Nhat Hanh, but somehow that guy’s got me in a bad mood.

I’ve asked this question in class a few times, but usually y’all can’t answer because you’re balancing on one leg with your left knee over your shoulder and looking behind you… 

 

Who understood light better, Einstein or Monet?

 

Now Einstein, he understood the whole wave-particle duality issue.  He figured out how finite energy quanta can be fixed in a point of space, worked out the speed of light in space.  I mean, the guy knew his light.  He had the equations, the formulae…he had the c-squared working.  Monet, on the other hand, never bothered with what light is…he just wanted to know how it works.  I think we’d all agree that he figured it out.  Monet learned how light reflects off of different surfaces, how it shimmers and draws out color, the tricks it plays.  Scientists are now figuring out quantitatively what guys like Monet intuited – how your eye and your brain process light.  How light feels, for lack of a better descriptor. 

 

So who understood it better?  The fact that this question can be so easily argued from both sides is illustrative of the concept behind manydoors yoga.  Every so often, I come across a student or a teacher who believes in the one true yoga.  There’s often a sense of fundamentalism about it – my yoga is the only path to enlightenment.  My guru is the one true guru.  Mine is right and yours is wrong.  If you aren’t coming to yoga with intention X or intention Y then you shouldn’t bother.  I even had one bozo tell a class I was in that you can’t say you’re doing yoga until you’ve mastered fifteen specific poses. 

 

It just makes no sense to me.  The great thing about yoga is that you can start anywhere.  You want to practice ‘cause Madonna or Sting do and you think they’re cool?  Fine.  You want to do it because you just read the Ramayana and you know the poses are named after some of the characters?  Ok.  You want a tighter butt?  You want to go because your attractive neighbor goes?  You want enlightenment?  You want better concentration?  Better breathing?  Rehabbing an injury?  Need time away from your kids?  FINE.  The thing about yoga is, the reason you show up is kind of irrelevant because of the way it works.

 

Where you start is almost never where you end.  Yoga is just so dynamic, confronting, and comprehensive that it’s almost impossible to not be exposed to more than you bargained for.  If you show up because you want to tone your body, you’re still going to get exposed to better breathing, to meditation or if not, at least to concentration.  You’re going to see changes outside of the ones that brought you in there and then you face the choice that all yoga students eventually face:  the red pill or the blue pill.  I’ve got students of mine who have come for years just for the workout.  Along the way, they’ve improved their breathing, they’ve improved their concentration, they’ve learned how to disassociate hard work in the body from strain and stress in the mind.  They’ve learned to pay more attention to what’s going on in their bodies.  They’ve learned to cultivate a bit of calmness in chaotic situations.  All that is just gravy, though.  They’re there to sweat and get stronger.  I don’t understand why that’s worthy of ridicule. 

 

I’ve got other students who use their practice to get closer to God, and they define God in many different ways.  For them, the physical work is a tool.  It’s about getting the body to help quiet the mind, and using the quiet mind to contemplate the divine.  That’s not worthy of ridicule either, whether you believe in their god or any god.  Don’t you think?

 

Others come for any number of other reasons.  Sometimes I know what they are and sometimes I don’t.  If I know, and I can provide some support to that goal, I will.  If I don’t, I just try to offer a place for them to explore it.  Some will tell me that this approach isn’t teaching yoga.  That I need to confront students in their comfort zones, push them to new levels, drive them down the well-trodden path to enlightenment. 

 

In yoga there are a number of stories about how the student begins down the path, goes through trials and tribulations, and ends up back where he started but with a new appreciation for his place.  Coming home again.  Basically, the story is that what you’re looking for outside you already have inside, but you need to go through the journey in order to discover it.  That makes me think about the “one true path” as well.  The message is that I’m looking for something I already have.  If I lose my car keys, I’m not going to walk in a straight line through the house and out the door and down the block until I find them.  I’m going to walk around, try different places, different approaches, circle back maybe and make sure I didn’t overlook them.

 

So one man’s advice.  Don’t get too hung up on someone else’s path.  Support them.  If you have some good advice from personal experience, maybe you offer it.  But this divisiveness, this elitism, it just doesn’t seem to me that it serves anyone.

There’s an old quote:  “If you teach a cannibal to eat with a knife and fork, is it progress?”

 

Why is it that we as a nation have come to believe that our most important export is voting?  Don’t get me wrong, I believe that giving a voice to the people is a good thing, but we’ve become a bit myopic about this.  It’s almost as if we’ll accept a long list of hazardous and oppressive conditions in a nation so long as we can end the list with, “but at least they’re voting now”.  Voting.  I mean, honestly.  It’s like saying, “as long as your nation has $5 bills”, or “as long as you build a statue of liberty” you’re ok with us.

 

If I got to unilaterally choose the best features of a just society to offer to a nation, I’m not positive voting would make my top ten.  Independent judiciary, legislative and executive branches would be on there.  Maybe independent central bank.  Free press I think is an important one.  Access to health care.  Some sort of protective commerce laws.  Some safety net to protect the most vulnerable members of the society.  Compulsory education through some reasonable grade level.  I wasn’t a polysci major…I can’t do this off the top of my head.  But voting to me seems like such a symptom of a just society rather than a cause. 

 

Aside:  before you start flaming me about how the U.S. doesn’t have half of my list above and Bush does this and Congress does that, just chill.  I’m not holding out the U.S. as the model of societies and I know we’ve got plenty of collusion and rigging in our system.  All I’m doing is pointing out how weird it is to fixate so thoroughly on voting as the elixir to cure all societal ills.  You might find differing opinions from residents of Zimbabwe, the Congo, and on and on…not just Africa, in case you were going there.

 

Now, we may make the argument that in order to get all those things I listed, you need voting.  The judiciary can’t be independent without an electorate to back them up (in which case we need to change our system), or the legislative branch has to be elected independently in order for them to behave independently.  I follow that argument, although I think figuring out how to drive more accountability once they’re in office will go farther faster than improving the way they get there.   I mean, look at us here in the U.S….we’re going to spend a whole year picking a hood ornament for our car without looking at the engine.

 

So really, why is it that whenever we send a whole bunch of marines into a country our message is always about bringing them elections.  No wonder they look at us like we have a cat on our head.  They’re like, “hello, can I get a hospital?  Some drinking water?  I don’t know, maybe some electricity?  You want me to vote…I vote you get your butt over here and build me a house…”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I had this odd experience today as I drove home from burying Meera.  In retrospect, I guess it’s probably something most people who have a trauma like this hit their lives feel, but I wasn’t prepared for it and it set off a string of reactions.  I heard these two women talking about whether they should get a salad or a sandwich for lunch and I found myself thinking, “How can you possibly stand there and worry about what to have for lunch?  It’s completely irrelevant in the face of death and loss, and Meera’s gone and…” you can imagine the rest.  This same string of thoughts came up again and again…”how can you stand there with a leaf blower – who frickin’ cares where those leaves sit?” and “so your kid dropped the ice cream cone…does it really matter?” right on up to “enough already with the ‘Israel’s right to exist’ squabbling – it’s just imaginary lines on an imaginary map.”

 

Suffice it to say, it was a good time to reexamine the fundamental principles by which I’m living.  So I’m asking questions like these:

·         What do I love?

·         What do I do as a means to an end?

·         What is that end and is it reasonable?   Will it make me happy?

·         When I’m 80, will I consider this time well used?

·         Am I treading water…being too careful, too willing to accept delay?

 

So, is it a midlife crisis brought on by a close personal reminder of my own mortality?  I don’t know.  I don’t think so.  I haven’t been considering my own mortality all that much during this time.  I already have a convertible and a motorcycle and I’m not feeling the need to get in the market for a twenty-two year old girlfriend.  But maybe the cliché midlife crisis isn’t the only kind, and maybe it doesn’t always have to come from the crisis part.  I’ll try to explain this developing theory.

 

Meera was such an important part of my life.  She was there through some pretty crazy times, and as I’ve said, there were days when the only reason I got out of bed was because I needed to take her for a walk.  She was the only one who was there when I was on a couple of nasty brinks.  She was also part of some of the best days of my life (so far).  She was a constant.

 

As I’ve had to come to grips with her leaving my life, I’ve realized that one thing I really have going for me was this…I didn’t feel guilt.  I know two things:  that I did every single thing I possibly could to try and save her from this awful cancer and more importantly that throughout her life, I never, ever took her for granted.  I’m not sure I can say that for a lot of the important people in my life, and it’s an interesting lesson.  I literally do not feel even the remotest pang of guilt about how I spent my time with her and I’m very surprised by how liberating that is.  I’m finding that it allows me to move much faster than I expected from dwelling exclusively on the loss of someone I loved, to finding gratitude for her presence. 

 

So my midlife crisis is sort of around this topic.  It’s not career or money or cars or supermodels.  It’s people, and yoga, and this house, and all the things I care most about.  It’s about knocking down a few more of those emotion = weakness filters, those fears of embarrassment, those “they must know that they’re important to me” assumptions. 

 

 

Meera and I have both been blessed with some amazing people in our lives.  Jenn, of course who sat through every second of this even as her own heart was breaking.  Christina, who drove like a maniac to be there when it was at its worst even under the most unimaginable circumstances.   And then literally dozens of other people, some of whom only knew Meera for the briefest of times, who called and sent emails and cards of condolence.  My Sunday night class sent a huge basket of really good cookies which have turned out to be an excellent incentive to get back into class tomorrow.  I always make a point to thank you for coming to class and sharing your energy, but thank you for being a true sangha, a supportive, spiritually awake community.  Your cards and calls have been like a life line to the best part of my world these past days.  I’ve heard from dear friends across the country and across the world that I haven’t done a good enough job of staying in touch with for my own liking.

 

I wrote a little talk for a workshop I gave a few years ago in which I said that to me, the best mental states you can be in are “inspired” and “grateful”.  Inspired because the energy of that state will drive you to express the very best of yourself, and grateful because it’s the most engaged, open-hearted way you can be.  And then I tortured them for two hours with backbends and balance poses, but that’s beside the point.  As I revisited that concept tonight, I’m realizing that my (capital Y) Yoga practice for a while needs to be about these two things.  It’s the best way I can imagine to honor what Meera gave to me, and I’m seeing that my own stupid filters of embarrassment, fear, assumption, are what can keep me from feeling the same sense of time well-used when my own time comes.  I think it will start with 7:00 a.m. class.

This is likely to be even less coherent than usual.  I’m up in Wisconsin on our annual golf trip, sitting on the floor in a beautiful house on the shores of Lake Michigan.  Tomorrow I’m supposed to play golf at Whistling Straits, one of the best courses in the country. 

But my heart’s not in it.  And my head’s not in it.  Two thousand miles away, Meera is lying alone in a cage in Adobe Hospital.  I have this image of a stark, off-white room filled with the sounds of suffering dogs…whining and barking and crying.  The feeling of stress and worry palpable in the air.  The image of her alone and confused and scared, not knowing why she’s here or what she’s done to deserve this.  I’m so tired from several nights of fitful sleep but I just can’t close my eyes.

The doctors don’t know what’s wrong.  It seems that her own immune system is attacking her.  She’s anemic, and her platelet count is plummeting.  They can’t figure out why.  Her bloodwork came back as generally ok except for the anemia, her initial cancer screen was negative.  And yet, she lays there with the life slowly draining from her. 

I swear to you, I would trade places with her in a second.  If I could take this away from her and take it onto myself, I would.  Instantly.  Without a second thought. 

I’m waiting to hear from the vet tomorrow to see how bad it is.  I’m struggling so hard with this question of whether to get out of here right now and head home or to wait and see.  I wouldn’t be able to see her or take her home, but at the same time, if I’m here and I need to be there, I’ll never forgive myself.  And so I sit alone in the corner, unable to participate in conversation, unable to enjoy even a glimmer of what’s supposed to be a highlight weekend.

 Any of you who know me know about this dog.  For a period of time, she was my whole life.  Literally the only reason I had to get out of bed in the morning.  During that period in 2002 when I was newly single, newly unemployed, newly homeless and locally friendless, Meera was the only good thing I had in my life.  I remember thinking at one point that if I didn’t wake up the next morning, nobody in the whole world would know or care until someone in my family happened to call.  Nobody of course, except Meera.  And that was what got me out of bed and out onto the trail.  The journey of a thousand miles started with those simple steps walking her around Tilden Park. 

The idea that she’s suffering, scared, confused is just horrifying to me.  I can’t come to grips with it.  I can’t process it.  It’s incapacitating. 

The doctors have not told me that she’s dying.  They’ve just said that her platelet count has plummeted, that she’s anemic and that they don’t know why.  You can hear it in the words they choose though, in the silences.  They’re not sure of what’s draining the life from her, but they’re sure that something is.  And so now all i can do tonight is sit here in this agony and wait.  Tomorrow, maybe I’ll cut out early and head home.  To what?  To do what?  I wish I could help her, save her the way that she saved me.  If there’s a way, tell me and I’ll do it, regardless of any consequence.

If you’re thinking of pointing out my very un-yogic attachment, don’t.  Not today.  Not on this topic.

I don’t know what’s going to happen.  I keep grasping for hope in the fact that the IV fluids seem to perk her up, in the fact that they can’t find a cancer or a blood disease, or a cause for this malaise.  But the doctors are so discouraging. 

Sorry for drawing you into my therapy session, but I needed to write this.  It’s helped me to clarify in my mind that I have to get out of here.  I have to come home.  I have to provide whatever comfort I can, in whatever small way, and hope that I can help her heal in the way she has helped me.  It’s obvious.  And maybe it can work.  Maybe I can lend her some strength in the same way she’s lent it to me so many times.  Maybe I can be a comfort in that awful place, and a step toward recovery.  I hope for nothing more.

Last week I did one of my favorite things.  I led a small yoga retreat – just fourteen of us – down to the Haramara retreat center on Mexico’s Pacific coast, about forty minutes north of Puerto Vallarta.  There’s no electricity except in the main dining and practice areas, no cell service and no internet.  No Bluetooth.  No Facebook.  No text messages.  No IM.  No Twitter.  Ramp up the oxygen levels, and ramp down the electromagnetic fields.  Blissful.

 

It was just about perfect.  Morning meditation, then a three hour practice, then all afternoon to swim or surf or explore the town of Sayulita.  At 4:30 we got back together and practiced for another two hours.  The morning was free-flowing and exultant.  The afternoon was focused practice on particular areas.  The group was open and smiling and wonderful. 

 

The second day down there, we went to town to look around and I took my phone because you can get service there.  I talked to Jenn and she said, “I’m struggling with whether or not to tell you this while you’re down there, but I think I have to.  World Yoga closed. “

 

I’ve always thought of my yoga studios as a community, a sangha, where we also happen to practice yoga.  It’s truly a part of who you are, and it’s a very, very weird feeling to have that abruptly gone.  I don’t know how to adequately portray the feeling of it.  Let’s say you went to go visit your sister and when you got there, her house was empty and she had moved without telling you.  Or imagine you’re in college and one fine February morning you walk over to campus to find that the school is all boarded up and closed.  It would have been weird under any circumstance, but it was triply weird while I was down in Mexico practicing with a bunch of the students from that studio.  I decided to tell them.

 

Now I’m back.  I was to teach there the very next day after we returned, and it was a little odd.  I teach these two nice-sized classes back-to-back and now I had one super-crowded one.  It was weird.  I’ve heard about our old students wandering in to studios all over the area.  Many have sent me emails asking what my plans are, and if I know the plans of other teachers.  It really is like we’ve lost a part of ourselves.

 

World Yoga too shall pass, and I knew that from the beginning, but like all transition the conceptualization and the reality are entirely different experiences.  

 

So now what?  I mean, should I try to find space and open a yoga studio there?  Should I sign on with one of the studios in a surrounding community?  Should I take the offer of one of a number of students who’ve offered back patios, lawns or spare rooms as practice spaces?  Or should I just reclaim the time, add a Sunday afternoon practice for myself or take a hike with the dog, or just have a coffee.  I don’t know, and no one else does either.  What I do know is that in a few weeks, routine will start to set in, and that bare spot will start to feel normal to everyone.  The community will have lost something dear.  The people who’ve been driving or riding or walking down there and downward dogging in a room together for years will splinter.  A bond will have been broken.

 

When my grandparents died, my family went through a similar thing.  Their house had always been the gathering place.  Everyone went there for holidays, even from across the country, and they were the conduit for communications, for events, for that feeling of family.  Not to make it like the rest of us didn’t talk to each other, just that they were that central hub.  When they died, new but separate traditions were born.  I guess something was gained, but it’s easier to see what was lost.  Yoga studios play a very interesting role in our social graph.  Because our associations with them are generally very positive, and we are often our best selves within their walls, the loss of a studio space is a bit like a small town losing its church.  Running into people at Whole Foods or in the line at the bank isn’t the same as breathing through challenge and frustration side-by-side with them. 

 

I’m going to miss World Yoga.  I was there at the very beginning and I have been working there for the entirety of its existence.  I remember sitting down with Toi Lynn over a cup of tea and talking through the idea of the studio with her.  I remember early classes with one or two people struggling mightily through poses that 90% of the class glides through with ease now.  I’ve watched students come in, grow and become amazing teachers. 

 

I don’t know what’s next for all of us, but as my favorite t-shirt says, “These are the good old days”.  And they will be before you know it.  So now that I’ve indulged my sentimentality and internalized the sense of loss, I’m going to move forward.  Any of you World Yoga students who are doing something around this, or want to, or want someone else to…please let me know your thoughts.  I’d love to try to hold this amazing community together until the next opportunity presents itself to us…it can’t be long.

There’s this comedian named David Cross.  You may have heard of him.  He’s crass and filthy, and if you’re of a certain mindset, he’s hilarious.  He’s won some awards, so I guess enough people like him.  Anyway, one of his routines is about people who misuse the word “literally”.  To quote (sorry about the f-bombs):

“When you misuse the word ‘literally’, you are using it in the exact opposite way it was intended…when you f- that up you f- it up so bad.  It’s not like a little goof.  It’s not like you said penultimate and you meant ultimate, like you’re off by one. You completely f-ing misuse it and you should stop using the word, forever  Until you f-ing figure it out.”

So on that note I did the following thing.  I Googled “Serendipity”.  I wasn’t actually sure that Google would even know what to do with this subversive, non-Googic word.  I half expected it to break.  Is there any single force in the universe that has so quickly and completely annihilated our access to serendipity as Google?  It used to be ok back when the algorithm didn’t have the bugs worked out but now, you put in what you’re looking for and back comes the answer.  Booooring.  How about a “Google for Artists” version where no matter what you put in, it returns a random juxtaposition of colorful content?  Ok, I can see where that would probably get annoying if you’re searching for “car repair”.  How about just a sidebar with unrelated content?

I actually blame Yahoo for this.  Yahoo in all its tree structure glory.  I’ve often compared the Yahoo home page to a magazine where they’ve accidentally printed the table of contents on the cover.  But search is worse.  The search box sits there on the page, glowing like the alien artifact right before it fries your brain.  It’s efficient, and getting more and more precise.  And cold. 

Maybe it’s just a use case issue.  The web is designed for one use case.  That use case is “I need to find out x, and I want to tap into the collective intelligence of the whole world to get the best possible information on x”.  But what about what I’ll call the Sunday New York Times use case?  Back in the stone age (aka the pre-dot-com boom era) I lived in San Francisco and had this little routine that I loved.  I signed up for a race every Sunday morning (there was always something available locally).  It usually would start around 8 or 8:30 and be done before 10.  I would then pick up the Sunday New York Times, go back to my apartment, sit up in the deep window overlooking Union Street and work my way through the paper.  Now, I didn’t read everything -far from it-but I LOOKED at everything and ya know what?  Every week I found myself interested in some article about something I never in a million years would have thought of or thought I’d be interested in.  How the Amish raise a barn.  The history of Czechoslovakia.  The economics of the Nordic health care system.  Type IIB String Theory.

I found these things because some combination of publisher, editor and writer thought they were interesting and put it in the Times.  From my standpoint, it was completely random.  I never knew what I was going to catch on next.  To be sure, wikis and social media and random jumps are trying to keep the happenstance in the web, but they’re swimming against a flood tide of search.  Categorize everything.  Tag it.  Collect it.  Display it on demand. 

So how do we do it?  Blogs?  Maybe, if you want to subscribe to a collection of interesting blogs and let these folks be your editors.  It works, although most blogs (this one potentially excepted) are about something and therefore narrow down the possiblities.  New media aggregators like Slate?  New York Times online, maybe?  Somehow, these options all feel to me to be a bit Luddite.  Sort of like buying an HDTV but only watching non-HD channels on it. 

Mind you, I’m not harkening back to the old newpaper days, suffused with the flattering light of memory.  I’m not looking to recreate the newspaper in a digital world.  I’m looking to figure out how the web can far surpass anything the newpaper in its finite, packaged way could deliver.  I just want to keep some serendipity in the process.  Just a few nice, surprising pieces of content that aren’t cataloged by user ratings or links or keywords or collaborative filtering.  Just a nice story that I can come across without feeling the invisible hand of Google shoving me toward A and away from B.

Any ideas?  And don’t say “Subscribe to the Times”.

They say that the kind of dog you have, or the car you drive, or what kind of salad dressing you use are all indicators of who you are.  Let’s face it, it’s probably true.  The choices you make are representative of your values.  Your tastes, your words.  You are who you are, all the time. You express your soul in every moment, like it or not. 

 

So I had to laugh last weekend when the little garden in the backyard went in.  We carved a place out in the corner by the fence, pulled up the grass, built raised beds and planted sunflowers, tomatoes, corn, cucumbers and a bunch of other stuff.  It all started out orderly enough – a row of peas, a row of lettuce.  Before long though, it just started to feel too…I don’t know…constraining.  I took my shoes off to stand in the soil.  I felt the sun on my back, and something just bugged me about those neat and tidy rows.  I think it was the dead space in between them.  So I just started planting the seedlings where they felt right, and before long the whole thing started to feel much better.  And then it hit me. 

 

I’m a free range gardener.

 

I appreciate order as much as the next person.  I file my bills and I use Quicken.  I do my spring cleaning and I get the dog hair out of my car from time to time.  But there’s something joyful about a little chaos.  Something liberating about it.  I don’t want my sunflowers to look like a platoon of soldiers guarding the edge of my property.  I want them to look like a sunflower cocktail party – a little unruly. 

 

The same applies to yoga practice.  I like the basic foundations that come with sound sequencing.  It keeps everyone safe and works through muscle, tissue and organ in a progressive, supported way.  Within those very basic confines though, I really enjoy the improvisation.  Have you ever taken a Shiva Rea class?  She’s one groovy chick, and sometimes she just throws pure freedom of movement at you – just move.  People freak out.  Move how?  What arm position, where’s my big toe supposed to be, weight forward or back?   Just move, she says.  Let your body figure it out. 

 

When I stopped teaching every day and wasn’t able to really, truly teach yoga day in and day out, I was concerned that the disconnection was going to make it less fulfilling.  And in some ways, it did.  I often miss the opportunity I had to work with people three, four, five days a week.  Play around with a challenging arm balance on Tuesday, do some supporting work on Wednesday, come back to it on Thursday.  Focus on the mind, the breathing, the experience of it.  To be a true teacher.  These days I don’t get to do too much of that.  Maybe on a retreat, or if I have a free week to pick up classes. 

 

But what I’ve lost in the depth of teaching I’ve recovered in the joy of pure expression.  When I let go of the pure teaching aspects – recognized that there are an awful lot of great teachers in this area these days who can help you through the particulars of shoulder rotation and spinal alignment – it opened up an opportunity for having a lot more fun with it.  Class got to be more about just letting out what you already know of the practice, embracing it, watching it move, letting your energy interact with those around you.  It went from being a rehearsal to being a jam session.  And it feels fantastic.  It feels like what I was born to do.  Erich Schiffman has a great story in Moving into Stillness where he talks about when his practice shifted from being a routine of someone else’s to being his own.  When all of a sudden, he wasn’t running through a script of chaturanga, up-dog, down-dog, but instead just started listening to what his body told him he needed and moved into that position.  He knew enough yoga theory to keep the movements safe, but beyond that, he just kind of let it flow from the sensations he was getting.  Arm needed a stretch?  He stretches it.  I love that. 

 

I think one of the things we find so hard about shivasana is just the lack of structure to it.  Just lie there.  Just feel.  Just breathe.  It takes away the training wheels of alignment and how it’s “supposed” to look.  It’s just like putting that little sunflower right in the middle of the row.

 

On a side note, who wants to bet me that I couldn’t capitalize on the free range gardening concept?  I bet I could get $3 a carrot from the Whole Foods crowd.  My carrots are just happier than those processed, chain-gang, industrial carrots.  They’re grown the way they would grow in the wild…nonlinear, collaborative, interconnected.  They’re happier and less stressed than those poor, mistreated, corporate, mega-farmed (probably genetically modified) varieties, and their blissful upbringing transfers to you when you eat them.  You take into yourself their purity and their artistic sense of unfettered abandon.  Isn’t it obvious that vegetables grown in this vibe are healthier for your body?  Ok, send me $20 and I’ll send you a bunch.

 

Kidding, but come on, it would work.  Ok, so I’m a free range, organic gardener with an mba.  I can’t help it.

One of our biggest bugaboos is the concept of the Gleeful Cheater.   The Gleeful Cheater is the person who does evil and revels in their ability to get away with it.  As a society, we spend lots of energy and lots of money trying to catch and punish these people.  The trouble is, I think the Gleeful Cheater is mostly myth.

If you live in my neighborhood, chances are that one of your primary images in this realm is the evil corporate executive.  We’ve all seen this guy in the movies or on tv…he’s usually a white guy in his late 50’s, slightly overweight and balding, and spends most of his time rubbing his hands together and dreaming up ways to raid pension funds, throw old ladies out on the street or exploit kids in southeast asia for profit.  He gives absolutely no thought to starting wars, rigging markets or making his staff work 100 hour weeks while he golfs at Pebble Beach.

Or, depending on your perspective, your Gleeful Cheater might look more like the smug welfare mom.  She sits around her house in the ghetto collecting checks from the government and having kids.  She doesn’t even imagine working because she can just ride off the back of your tax dollars while hanging out in her kitchen smoking crack and having sex, sleeping in until 10 every day and laughing at the poor saps who have to get up in the dark and commute to an office to pay her bills.

The thing is, I don’t think either of these people exist.  Or at least, they’re a teeeeeny, tiny part of the population and not worth all the energy we expend over them.  I know a few corporate executives, and mostly they’re worried about making their customers happy, making their employees happy and running a successful business.  They’re also worried about their family, their health and the same kind of things as you and I are.  And I don’t think too many welfare moms are laughing either.  I think they’re worried about putting good food on the table, about whether their kids are going to walk through the door that night, about education and opportunity. 

I think that in general, if we could cut through all the b.s., we’d find that the truly evil are few and far between.  I know that’s not an exciting opinion and it doesn’t provide us with a scapegoat, but I think it’s probably true.

What do you think?  Am I too trusting?  Am I blind to the level of evil in the hearts of people?