The Beautiful Answer

Still Tired, Looking Up

You know those days that kind of shoot past, and you realize by the end that you haven’t looked up at the sky at all? It could be raining outside, you have no idea, or it could be sunny and 80 degrees. Today was one of those kinds of days. I have a feeling I’ll be seeing a lot more of those kinds of days in the near future as well. 

Book marketing is going very well. I’m getting some great reviews and quotes, which are all very kind. I’m booking tons of print and radio interviews, and have a few sites wiling to excerpt the book near the launch date of April 24th. 

All I could use now is a huge shot of energy. All right, all right. I know. Writing a book is a huge burst of energy. It’s way closer to the birth process than most people realize. By the end you’re torn up and ready to go fetal for about a month. But then comes the marketing part, which is more like a marathon than a sprint, and you have to talk about yourself (writers aren’t by nature like that, at least not most of them, myself included) for a long time, a few months at least, and more if you’re really driven, as I am. 

By the end you need a vacation like you’ve never needed one, and you don’t want to even hear your own name for like 6 months. I work out a lot anyway, usually 5 times a week, and I mediate each day. I try to work in a fair amount of yoga and Pilates into my workouts, because I get bored easily. So I guess the tiredness I feel now is my wake up call. Time to get your butt in training lady, for this marathon that feels like a sprint. 

Getting some sleep early tonight. Gotta expand that sleeping zone so I can stay rested and ready. I feel so much going forward, and want to be as ready as I can to face the fun stuff ahead. 

Meditate Your Ass Off

It hit me today: I’ve been a meditator for almost 16 years. That’s equivalent to a kid who’s a sophomore in high school, or an almost college student, or an almost voter. That’s a long freakin’ time, if you’re pretty much sitting there doing nothing. 

After that long on the cushion, I can say a few things. I never expected to become enlightened and I haven’t, not really. I mean, maybe a little bit. A little less encumbered by my shit, a little less a prisoner of my own thoughts. I have more spaciousness in my life now, more time to allow possibilities in, instead of deciding in advance what has to happen, or what’s probably going to happen. 

And in the intervening years, a lot has changed. Yoga, which I’ve been practicing for half of my life now, was fringy. Not so much anymore. Pilates studios, at least in my area, are pretty prevalent as well. The downside of all that spiritual spread is the pervasive notion that yoga is a competitive sport, that Pilates and any other activity has to be done as if you’re trying to make the Olympic team of, say, meditating, when that couldn’t be further from its goals. 

I was lucky when I got trained. My teacher told us that there was no goal to meditating. I had begun in an effort to curb my lifelong insomnia and it helped, a lot. But because I had been told right off that there was no there there, I didn’t look for it. Instead, I watched my mind for 16 years, past the thoughts of the past and the memories and the fears and anticipation for the future. I never tried to meditate my ass off, and so it remains with me. I see no more point in trying to be a “good” meditator than compete with the person on the next yoga mat. If you need me, I’m going to be sitting here, pretty much doing nothing at all. 

On Letting Go More

Once I took a yoga class. At the end of every one of them, as we lay in corpse pose, the teacher would say, “Try to think of yourself as being busy letting go more.” And try though I may, it never made any sense to me. How can you be busy letting go? Aren’t the two mutually exclusive?  And how can you let go more? Aren’t you letting go precisely the amount you’re letting go, no more and no less? 

Today that began to make more sense. For the past month or two, as I entered the New Year, I’ve been thinking about how to throw any energetic ballast overboard. I’ve released issues, limiting beliefs, ancient behaviors and prejudices, and found myself feeling a lot lighter and brighter. 

But you keep digging, as I’m prone to doing, and you keep finding stuff to work with. Not that it’s all bad, not that it’s all dire. Some of it is funny, old beliefs I held while young that were somehow trapped below the surface. I may not have felt that way in years, at least consciously, but they’re there just the same.

When do you get to the bottom? Is there a bottom? And why does it matter, exactly? 

Maybe there is no “there,” where we’re all issue-free and perfectly happy all the time. Maybe it doesn’t matter to have arrived at this place that may not exist. Maybe the work is the real reward, the journey over the destination. And letting go more begins to make the most sene of any activity we could possibly be spending our time on. 

Then the Quiet Came Down

Sometimes, reframing seems like a lot of work. My mind would rather sit on the couch and watch basketball, or curl up with a good book and a glass of lemonade. Part of me sees this as something that has to be done, effort that has to be expended, or even something I may be unsuccessful at. But that’s like saying you can be unsuccessful at yoga. The whole point is to try, and if you can’t get into a pose, to find an acceptable substitute until you can. There really is no way to fail. 

Other times, the reframing has become such a habit that nothing happens in the next moment. My mind simply notices, refuses to react, then moves on. That’s when the quiet comes down. Time seems to drag, and it’s exactly like those scenes when the hero’s motions are in slow motion so he has time to dodge bullets, dive sideways while firing two guns at once, and of course end up saving the day. 

Times right after crisis, challenge, or even annoyance are like this. The quiet comes down like a curtain and all of a sudden you could be anywhere — away from the honking horns and the irritating neighbors, closer to some sort of paradisical landscape that lives in your mind. 

Today I was quiet, really quiet, so I could get down deep. I found some stuff, I did some excavating, and when I was “done” (because I suppose none of us is ever done), I felt like a little kid who’d just finished her first day of school. Glad it was over, but excited to go back tomorrow to see who I could meet and what I might learn. 

A Breath, A Year & Ten Thousand Experiences

Isn’t it funny how time shifts? When one moment marks the difference between this feeling and that behavior, this year and the next? It’s always in these twilight times that I feel most comfortable. After all, I choose to make my living navigating between the worlds. The line between day and night, living and dying — that’s my wheelhouse. 

I resolved this past year to keep this blog, and I’e been proud to not have missed a day except for the odd blackout (I’ve since caught up). I’ve finished a book, won a pitchfest in New York, pitched some pretty darn powerful folks in Hollywood, and made a few great friends in the mix. Oh yeah, and I wrote two plays (a long one and a short one) deepened my relationship with my husband and made all kinds of intentions for 2012. I’m even considering opening a brand new kind of healing center here in L.A. as a long-term goal. 

It really has been a year of ten thousands experiences. 

The list of intentions is just as long, if not longer, for 2012. I’ll keep this blog until I’ve done a year’s worth of posts, sometime in June most likely, and I’ve already started on another book. But it’s not all about work stuff. I’ve begun to do Pilates classes with the Reformer, and I freakin’ love that shit, even though it hurts like a mofo. I care less about time than ever before in my life, and embrace the unknown with an un-casual kind of resilience, and I want to travel, meet new, interesting and likeminded people this year, and give myself some time and space to see where I want to go next. 

To reframe any resistance about the unknown, I sat for a few minutes, watching the thoughts shoot through my mind. After a few breaths, it calmed down to display as much curiosity as I was showing it. We sat watching each other, my mind and me, until we nodded at each other, chins moved up and down as if to say, “Hey You. Don’t think I don’t see you. I’m here and you’re here and why don’t we try to cook up something pretty damn cool this year?  For too long we were on different pages, but together we can probably move words and mountains and even minds belonging to others. Right?” 

The Waiting is the Hardest Part

I think it was Tom Petty who drawled about how difficult it was to sit around the wait for things to unfold, to allow the natural course of events to take shape. I, like many people, would prefer to shape my own life, and sometimes I’m not that good at waiting, even after 15 years of steady meditation practice.  

I got my final proofs of my book cover, which I’m pretty sure I’m gonna go with: 

Not bad. Not bad at all, and that’s part of it. I’m excited for my new book to come out. Though it’s largely a story of my own life, with a few other things thrown in for good measure, I actually feel like other people might enjoy it or even be able to benefit from the struggle with being different, trying to fit and finally embracing your difference as something inescapable and even positive. But I have to wait until April 24th for it to come out, so I have to get used to that. Sigh. No use wishing time away. 

I also have something pretty important happening tomorrow, something pretty big for the book itself, and for me as its writer. I’ll write more about how it goes tomorrow, but for now, the waiting really is the hardest part. 

You know how your mind just starts to do the weirdest things, creating all kinds of positive scenarios, reaching into the future to see what will happen, and then reaching back into the past to see if you can really trust what might happen? And never staying around much in the present moment? I suppose I should be used to this after watching my mind for 15 years. But maybe you never get used to what it does when you’re lot looking. 

To reframe my need to wait, yet my desire to do nothing of the sort, I did some yoga. OK, part of that was fitness-based, but I wanted to see if it also had a bit of a patience boosting effect. It did, a little. Then, a few hours later, I still had some energy, so I went to a Pilates class. These are hard, as anyone who’s one them will tell you. But I wanted to see if moving my focus to my body would get me out of my head. 

This actually worked. And I’m ever so slightly fitter in the process. My body is sore, but I’m sure I’ll sleep tonight, which will come in handy. And from there, all I can do is watch my mind, work with my thoughts and cross my fingers for a good result.

Wish me luck. 

Sleeeeeeeeeeep

Making time for detoxing has its benefits. You feel a little wobbly and on the verge of getting sick for a few days, but it’s one of the best excuses ever for sleeping. I love sleep. After basketball, it’s my favorite sport. It involves no contact, results in a sweet dizzy hangover if you’re doing it right, and hurts basically no one, unless you’re late for work. But since I work for myself, that’s rarely a problem. 

I had a pretty full agenda today — errands, yoga, writing and a little work. But about halfway through the day, I just … bailed. My brain and body conspired against me and basically said, “You know what, lady? You work too much. Your body needs to let some stuff go — some old memories (been having some really strange dreams) and maybe even some ideas about what the “right” way to spend Saturday might be.” 

I work a lot. True dat. I like working. My work doesn’t suck, at all. But sure, I hear ya. Sometimes you just gotta freakin’ fall asleep on the couch for an hour or so. I literally haven’t done that in years. 

Also been thinking about reframing some limiting thoughts and beliefs that have come up lately, about what I can and can’t expect when my book comes out next year. I keep finding myself thinking I shouldn’t expect too much, or should protect myself from disappointment if it doesn’t sell the way I want it to. 

Crap to that. I’ve been working with reframing that stuff all day, and now it goes something like this: Who knows what’s going to happen? I will work as hard as I can, and exploit the resources I have, and after that I have to trust that the universe and other people around the world will somehow find their way to it, and want to read it, and buy a copy. I hope they will find it funny, entertaining, and maybe a little moving. 

And I hope above all that I can keep weeding out this stuff that doesn’t serve me, and probably never has. Who needs that, anyway? 

Sweetness & Light

This may be the detox talking, but I’ve been feeling a lot lighter over the past few days. This is practical of course, as my body sheds whatever’s been weighing it down. Don’t even want to think about that.  But it’s also happening on a few other levels. Some of the habitually negative people in my life seem to think that I’m Kryptonite these days, which is fine by me. Not that I want to get rid of them. Hopefully the divine will help them find their own ways toward healing. But it’s nice, as I go through this process, to not have those distractions. 

I feel more focused, so some of the detox seems to have shoved some of the strange thoughts that flit through my mind to the side, or maybe even released them altogether. Admittedly, I feel a little dizzy and “funny,” not just because of the change of diet and routine, but I think because the season is changing and, even though I live in L.A., the temperature has been dropping. For us, it’s a big deal maybe. Everywhere else, probably not.  :) 

Lastly, I’ve been feeling as if I’m shedding more than physical toxins. Maybe you could call them limiting thoughts and beliefs, or ideas that say the world is smaller than it really is. I suppose we all do this, to a certain extent. We live in our little bubbles of influence, and rarely travel outside them. But as a person who tries to broaden her awareness a little more each day, it’s always surprising when it can be wrenched open a little more, and then even a little more than that. 

So while I may not always be sweet (I try, but I am human), I’m filled with a new kind of light. Don’t know yet if it’s the healing kind, but it feels that way. Reframing today doesn’t feel crucial, because my whole body seems to be doing that work for me. Now if I could just get it to do the dishes and laundry, we’d be all set. 

Don’t Stop Being Amazed

The word cleanse gets under my skin, especially as it applies to the diet. I get that nutritionally, most of us aren’t all we could be, and that bringing more awareness to what we put into our mouths would make us happier and healthier. But the idea that somehow our insides are dirty and that we need to clean them out is to pretty much diss the body and the amazing things it’s capable of, despite our best efforts to eff it up. 

Despite my distaste for the idea of cleansing (I hate even typing the word — it just gets on my nerves), I signed up for Yoga Journal’s 7-Day Detox program, available online. I like the idea of changing my diet to be local and seasonal (luckily, I live in California, so that means I get a lot of choices there), but also to transition into the harvest season of fall in an intentional way with yoga, meditation and other related techniques. 

Ayurveda is on my list of Things to Study as I keep getting older. I’m fascinated how medicine is so intricately entwined with spirituality in pretty much every other culture except ours, and how they treat people often without the high-tech equipment we have in the U.S. This detox program is based in Ayurveda, and so far, I’m finding it pretty great. When fall comes around, I want to go out a little less anyway, so this is a great way to reconnect with myself and what I want to get done over the next few months. 

Another thing that’s arisen on its own has to do with detoxing, but not within my body. I eat pretty well, for the most part, and exercise almost every day. But toxic friends and acquaintances seem to have moved another layer outward in my life. No reframing necessary. Without drama or self-inflicted suffering, they just … moved away. 

Pretty cool, the way this stuff works on more than one level. And me? I don’t ever want to stop being amazed by what goes on.