Love and Other Cleaning Products

Ah, faithful reader! So glad you’re here. Things have been a little crazy lately.

A toxic roommate situation back home has me crashing with my guy at his place in the city. I also quit my troublesome full time job without having something solid lined up, so I’m scampering around between part time gigs while I search for more meaningful, stable work.

Despite everything being up in the air, I’m not complaining. I intentionally pulled the rug out from under myself! It’s an expression of wakefulness to change the patterns that no longer serve us. It’s freedom at its best. I’m opening up space for situations that are more in accord with what I find to be true and valuable.

That said, being out of an apartment and a job has obviously been cause for some worry. What’s magical, though, is that less than a year ago, this kind of turmoil probably would have rendered me a weepy mess. Nowadays I feel pretty confident about my choices, even if they are throwing me into uncertain circumstances. What has changed?

For one, I know where to look for support. The people I’m closest to at this wondrous point are the ones who don’t necessarily think they know best. They aren’t looking to save me, and they don’t press me with advice. Instead, they offer their experience and leave it to me to make decisions for myself. And no matter what I decide to do, they offer me love. We share meals and hugs, and set aside distractions in order to give each other our full attention.

My truest friends show me, by encouragement and example, that I have the wisdom and courage to listen deeply and follow my own path. I’m grateful to these people, and I don’t invest much energy in those who can’t meet me this way. This is a big change in my relationship paradigm. Maybe it goes without saying that my posse has shrunken…a lot. But I’m totally okay with that.

Another reason I feel grounded is that I meditate every day, which tends to put a cork in my drama-hole.

You might think that sitting around on a cushion while your life is in apparent shambles is not the right course of action. Maybe the better thing to do would be to toil relentlessly until I come up with a solution to my problems.


On the other hand, my mind keeps pretty busy at problem-solving whether I sit or not. Meditating just keeps it from going into emotional overdrive and blowing a gasket, so to speak.

So much of our mental energy is wasted on being afraid. Am I doing the right thing? What if this doesn’t work out the way I want it to? The irony is that all that agonizing just keeps us from being able to give full attention to where we’re at. It’s easy to get caught up in anti-fantasies about all the wrong turns we haven’t even made yet.

I bring my focus out of my mind and into my body, inhabiting the reality of my senses. On their own, thoughts have no substance, so they’re almost impossible to work with. Physical sensations, however, are tangible. I ask, How does this anxiety feel? A tightening in the chest, tension in the back of my neck, jitters in my tummy. I keep coming back to my senses, remembering again and again to live in my body.

Some ways that I come back to reality: I practice yoga, eat a nourishing meal, clean the shoebox-sized space I’m sharing with my boyfriend, or go for a walk or a bike ride. By working with my actual, physical being – which is not only my body, but the space I inhabit – I allow there to be some room around my thoughts. I don’t ignore what’s going on in my mind, but I don’t let it distract me from where I am.

It takes a lot of trust to step out of the storyline and just be here, and I don’t always succeed at it. Sometimes I definitely get caught up in feeling angry at my jerk roommate. I get homesick for my own space, or anxious that I won’t be able to pay my bills.

But if I do catch myself in the path of a mental avalanche, I can step out of its way and watch the feelings as they pass. If we can relate to our thoughts without letting them take us away, we can endure - and even grow - in each moment, even (especially) when there's discomfort.

When we are supported by love, and our mind and body are on the same page, we can move more wisely into the next moment, and the next moment, and the next moment. The future is not a freight train full of promise or despair heading straight for us. We're already on board.

Nadi Shodhana: the Breath that Balances

How often do you pause to notice that you are breathing? Taking oxygen and giving carbon dioxide is the most basic exchange between our internal and external worlds - a perpetual, life-sustaining dialogue between us and our environment - and yet so few of us even remember that we are doing it.

I’ve described the breath as an object of meditation, because it’s a constant, natural flow that you can bring your attention to again and again. Remembering the breath is a good way to step back from the chaos of our mental movie reel, because breath is the epitome of naturalness; it is so silent and simple compared to the rambling, complicated tangle of the mind.

In yoga, breath is prana, life energy. We forget that death is as simple as the inability to breathe. If we are willing to look at our human bodies honestly, we become aware of the fact that the number of breaths we are privileged to is actually limited. It is easy to forget. We could just keep ignoring the breath, sucking and blowing air in and out without giving it another thought, but I think that would be leaving a great resource untapped. I think the breath is a valuable tool for waking up to life in each moment.

Alternate nostril breathing, or nadi shodhana (“channel-clearing breath”) is a great place to start. I recently learned that our nostrils take turns breathing. Though we breathe through both nostrils, one is usually more active than the other, and they naturally switch every few minutes or so.

Breathing through the left nostril activates the parasympathetic nervous system. The PNS stimulates the right hemisphere of the brain, increases spatial performance, lowers blood sugar levels, and decreases the heart rate. Its effect is relaxation.

On the other side, the right nostril draws energy into the sympathetic nervous system, which stimulates our fight-or-flight response. The SNS rouses the left hemisphere of the brain, increases verbal performance, increases blood sugar levels, and increases the heart rate.

In short, the PNS (stimulated by the left nostril) relaxes us, and the SNS (stimulated by the right nostril) enlivens us.

The pranayama technique of alternate nostril breathing balances these channels. On the one hand, it’s calming, because it requires us to drop our mental storylines and focus on breathing. On the other, it also brings harmony to our nervous systems, like ballasts on a rocking ship. Think of it this way: the ship rocks because the sea is rough. You can’t force the ocean to give you smooth sailing, but you can equip yourself with practices that give you better balance. Try this practice as a prelude to meditation, or in any moment when you feel out-of-whack...

Your right hand is used to control the flow of breath through the nostrils. Sit in a comfortable position with upright posture. Block the left nostril with your ring finger and inhale smoothly through the right.

At the top of your inhale, release the left nostril and block the right nostril with your thumb. Exhale through the left nostril.

Inhale through the left nostril. When you reach the top of the inhale, switch nostrils again, exhaling through the right.

Repeat the cycle at least 3-5 times. If your mind wanders and you lose track of what you're doing, just gently notice and come back. I like to practice this breathing technique for 5 minutes or so before I sit meditation.

Special thanks to my teacher, Ken Lidden at ABT Yoga, not only for showing me this technique and being an all-around awesome instructor, but also for taking these pictures with my phone!

Life is Short, Stop Acting Adultish

Being stared at by a baby is one of the most fortunate things that can happen to you.

Have you had this experience? A child on public transit gazes at you unblinkingly. It is fearless. It has never seen a You before, so there is a lot to take in. The clarity of a stare so straightforward is disarming.

Children get absorbed in the simple act of looking because they are actually seeing. Whereas an adult will take in your appearance and immediately run down a subconscious checklist of comparisons and judgments, the child is without grounds to make snap assumptions. It looks at you openly because it is innocent. It looks at you out of sheer curiosity.

Understatement of the century: It would be nice if everyone made it a practice to view each other like children.

I keep a photograph of myself at age 4 on my wall as a reminder. I see child-me, wired with inquiry and honesty, and consider whether or not I am doing that dear little person any justice.

I ask myself: Have I allowed my world to get smaller even as I’ve grown bigger?

The way children see is what Zen master Shunryu Suzuki calls beginner’s mind: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” Purity (or goodness, or emptiness, however you want to talk about it) is natural. We were all children once.

In other words, concepts like shame were taught to us. This neurotic way we have of viewing each other - going back and forth between criticizing others and feeling sorry for ourselves - is not inherent.

Which also means that this nagging impulse to acquire more, to achieve more, to prove something, to get some ground under our feet, is a cosmic joke. It's like at some point during adolescence, they gave us blinders to wear for the race to the grave. That's not to say there's no point to achievement. That's not to say we shouldn't bother trying to live well.

But there is a natural clarity under all the insanity, and I'm disturbed by how few people return to it as a space where they can ask themselves what this "living well" even means. Imagine the wisdom that would arise if we were to combine our adult intelligence with a child's clarity of perception!

Meditation helps us come back to that openness. We can live more fully if we take up the discipline of re-learning the open-eyed, open-hearted way we were as kids. If we take the time to really pay attention to everything that's happening around us, I think we'll find ourselves fascinated again.

There was a time I ate a peach after a good long sit, and it was so good it brought tears to my eyes! This is pure joy: appreciating what is right here.

Living fully does not mean checking items off a Bucket List so that we can smile on our deathbed at the fact that we base-jumped El Capitan, dyed our hair purple, made six figures, or drove a loud motorcycle.

Living fully means experiencing our life for what it is, and not what we think it ought to be. It asks us to put aside the ego we've spent so much time growing. It asks us to remember that we are going to die, so the sooner we can stop deluding ourselves, running from one distraction to the next, the better.

Find some pictures of yourself as a child. Gently consider whether or not you have donned some tunnel vision over the years. Can you remember what it was like to be a blank canvas?

That's a good start. More on this another time.

How to Live Forever

My great-grandfather’s funeral last week was overflowing; my cousins and I had to stand in the aisles. The room was a-buzz as both young and old got up to share stories. We laughed and cried without discretion. We cajoled one another, embraced, and hollered our support. It was the best funeral I’ve ever been to, because it wasn’t a sermon so much as an untempered dialogue. It made me remember that the root of both grief and joy is love. In that crowd it was tangible.

Great Grampy’s legacy is assured because he asserted his love with countless kind gestures. When my aunt announced that she wanted to be a mechanic as a child, he gave her a set of tools and asked her to help him fix his truck. When I was little, he would point to a picture of me and ask “Do you know who that girl is? I love her!” Every time any of us visited he would stand us in the same spot in the kitchen and snap a Polaroid. I imagine he had stacks of Polaroids somewhere that you could use like flipbooks to watch us grow.

The stories extend backwards and forwards in time. The oldest grew in light of his loving presence, and pass that love down the line to the youngest. I wonder – who taught Great Grampy to love? And who taught those people to love? And those people? How much cumulative loving intention throughout the generations of people resulted in a man so radiant with it?

The effort of understanding it is like seeing a ripple on the edge of a lake and trying to return to the point where a hand touched the water. Love - that sublime energy that enlivens us with joy and sorrow - carries humankind through the ages, like a disease without antidote. One sincere gesture lifetimes ago can still be felt among the living, and the gestures are countless. This is our lineage: our actions have vaster consequences than we can see.

I feel the gravity of my heart. We express ourselves spatially and temporally because we’re bound by matter, these bodies that wither and pass. But the currents that run through us are beyond time and space. Our intentions radiate into the lives of the people we encounter, triggering chain reactions beyond our comprehension. What kind of ripples are you sending down the line? Are you fully open to being a conduit for the love you receive?

Walt Whitman writes:

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier.

The night before the funeral I dreamed he was laid out at my grandparents’ house. The rest of my family was sad and frantically busy. I watched them leave the room as they rushed off to get ready for the funeral, and when I turned back to look at him, he was sitting up, smiling at me.

His blue eyes shone. I said, “I thought you were gone.” He shrugged and said, “But I’m right here!” We laughed, and I said, “You’re going to freak everyone out if you are awake like this at your funeral.” The idea cracked us up. I looked to the door to see everyone rushing back into the room, and when I turned back, Grampy was laying down with his eyes closed again. He had the slightest grin on his face, as though he were keeping a beautiful secret. That's when I woke up.

The Prophet: On Wearing Makeup

And Almitra said, "Speak to us of wearing makeup." And he leaned towards the women, and looked lovingly upon their upturned faces.

"Some of you paint your faces, and say you would not leave the house without the concealment of makeup. Others of you never augment your natural beauty, and say you need not hide or lie behind such a false facade.

"I say unto both, be not ashamed of your radiance, which is neither diminished nor augmented by the costume of makeup.

"If you would use makeup, apply it in celebration of your beauty, which is God's beauty. When you make a caricature of perfect health, you celebrate the euphoria of the human form.

"Your blush is but an imitation of the flushed cheeks of lively exertion. Your mascara but serves as a way-sign to the radiance of your eyes, those sacred portals where the heart greets the world.

"Be not self-conscious about your urge to adorn your features, but know also that the glory of your form does not subsist in adornment. Let the application of paints be a ceremony of gratitude for what you have, for the poor in spirit will not find themselves made beautiful by makeup.

"Look upon yourself as a mother looks upon her peacefully sleeping child, knowing the true meaning of beauty with gratitude and tenderness. Without this reverence for oneself as spirit born in flesh, one may as well decorate a corpse."


(My amendment to The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran)

The entry I meant to write

I was going to take time tonight to write about some things I learned this week, but instead I rode my bicycle to the lighthouse point, sat up on a rock wall, and looked at the moon.

Make Bread, Not War

Yesterday morning I got up before the crack of dawn, put on a pot of coffee, and spontaneously started baking bread. When my roommate got up and came into the kitchen to find me kneading dough in my pajamas, eyes still half shut, he asked if I was stressed about something. My first reaction was to get a little defensive. "No, I'm just baking bread. We were out of bread."

This week I gave my notice at the bookstore and started working full time with a start-up venture. I'm excited about it, even though my new job involves a lot of sitting behind a computer screen. This week I've been confronting a new fear: that my creativity will shrivel up and die under the pressure of a 40-hour-a-week office job.

This is an interesting fear to pay attention to. It gets me up in the morning so I have time to play before work.

I came up with a whole wheat molasses oat bread, which tastes pretty delicious considering it's the first yeasted bread I've ever made. I followed a recipe from the Tassajara Bread Book, which is a resource I would highly recommend if you'd like some kind, thorough guidance and creative recipes.

Here is a brief version of the recipe I used. It makes two loaves.

3 cups lukewarm water (doesn't feel hot or cold on your wrist)
1 1/2 Tbs dry yeast
1/4 cup sweetening (honey, molasses, or brown sugar)
1 cup dry milk (optional)
2 eggs, beaten (optional)
4 cups whole wheat flour (substitute 1 or more cups unbleached white flour if desired)

4 tsp salt
1/3 cup oil (or butter or margarine)
3 cups additional whole wheat flour
1 cup whole wheat flour for kneeding

Dissolve the yeast in the water.
Stir in sweetening and dry milk.
Stir in eggs.
Stir in 4 cups of whole wheat flour to form a thick batter.
Beat well with a spoon (100 strokes).
Let rise 45 mins.
Fold in the salt and oil.
Fold in an additional 3 cups of flour until the dough comes away from the sides of the bowl.
Knead on a floured board, using more flour as needed to keep the dough from sticking to the board, about 10 minutes, until the dough is smooth.
Let rise 50-60 minutes until doubled in size.
Punch down.
Let rise 40-50 minutes until doubled in size again (optional).
Shape into loaves and place into oiled pans.
Let rise 20-25 minutes.
Brush tops with egg white/water mixture. Sprinkle with oats if desired.
Bake in 350 degree oven for 1 hour, or until golden brown.
Remove from pans to cool.

Happy baking!