Once, in a gentle yoga class, I was lying on my back in shivasana, quietly decompressing. The instructor, a very skilled woman named Reba Gray (look her up), read the class a poem and spoke to us a little about the practice of yoga. Honestly, every sentence she said has since escaped me, except one:

“Let your yoga meet you where you are.”

It begins with yoga. It extends to work, family life, driving, running errands. It is the practice of acceptance in its unadulterated state.

As my mother always said

“When you don’t have expectations, you can never be disappointed.”

Expectations, “shoulding,” two ways of saying the same thing: “I’m here, but wish I was there.”

Below are my truisms from today’s workout:

1)      They can’t all be winners

2)      Not warmed up enough

3)      Give it time- you’ve got your whole life

4)      Just show up!

5)      “do your best, forget the rest” Tony Horton

6)      Stay slow

7)      Have Fun!

8)      Active recovery

9)      Let it be hard!

10)   No expectations= living in the present, not seeing it through the eyes of the past

11)   What’s easy for them is not necessarily easy for you, and vice versa

12)   No ego!

13)   Don’t get ugly! (meaning, keep your form)

14)   Stay calm

15)   The body has all you need for enlightenment

16)   You get hurt when you “should”

17)   Tabula rasa- go in with a blank mind- no expectations

18)   Only in the world of comparisons does pain arise- be here now

19)   “Rome was not built in a day and neither was your body”- Tony Horton

20)   Go slow internally- remember there is nowhere to go, nothing to become

21)   Slow is not bad, fast is not good, more is not better, less is not worse

22)   Patience

23)   You can come back to it later. 

Today I went to do my daily work out and you know what? It sucked. Not actually, but I perceived it to suck. I was tired, I didn’t feel good, my range of motion was all weird, and my joints felt awful.

Worst of all, though: I had anxiety through the whole thing. Nothing acute or anything, just a low level feeling of “eh.” It was a constant discomfort, a needling voice in the back of my head saying “You’re not doing it right. This isn’t going right. Where’s the burn? Where’s the sweat? Why isn’t this working?”

 Perhaps the best way of saying it is: “Why isn’t this going the way I want it to/expect it to?”

“Want” and “Expect” and sort of analogous words in this context. I had a feeling that whatever was going on wasn’t what “should” have been going on, and that was driving me crazy.

“Should,” to me, is a four letter word. I want it erased from the history books. More on that later.

Anyway, so my workout was hard because I was already tired from a late night up and a day of bad food over the weekend.

It wasn’t until about halfway through the workout that I addressed these feelings. It wasn’t so much giving excuses as it was examining “Why am I so tired? Why is this so hard? Why is my body not doing what I thought it would?” After a couple of realizations, I got off my own back about working hard.

I realized that my body wanted one thing, but my mind, like a slave driver, was yelling “Produce! Produce! Produce!” and essentially whipping my body into a state of both emotional and physical discomfort, which is not how I like my workouts to feel. Make no mistake, I like the discomfort of a good sweat, hard work, and the strain of muscle failure, but I’m not a big fan of my brain telling me “you’re not good enough” when, in reality, I’m doing the best I can with where I am.

But “best” is a subjective thing, I realized. Today’s “best” will not look like yesterday’s “best” or even yesterday’s “worst.” This can be for so many reasons; a bad night’s sleep, a hangover, a recent death, passing, or big change, or just some bad food.

Anyway, today’s workout very quickly became a spiritual practice (like it usually is) with some extra “weight” or “resistance” going on: the weight of expectation. In the program I’m doing, I do a different workout every day, six days a week, plus a rest day. This was week two, day one, all about pushups and pull-ups, both of which I struggle with, so I was excited to see how much I’d improved now that my muscles had healed and I was a week stronger.

However, due to many other circumstances, my mind was in one place, my body in another. My expectations were not met and that upset my mind, for a short time. However, with the practice of awareness and acceptance, I realized “OK, this is where I am right now, and I’ll do the best that I can right now.”

For the last few days, I have had a lot inside: a lot of energy, a lot of excitement, a lot of desire to write, to pursue creative careers, to move on, to do more and more and more. Sometimes this feels really good, like I’m heading in some direction and feeling galvanized to pursue the things I enjoy, like an arrow racing for a target.

Other times, though, it feels out of balance, like there’s too much trying to get through at once. I’ve been really practicing slowing down my internal stuff lately, and maybe this is the backlash of that, but you know, it’s just a little hard to deal with.

Even now, my head is buzzing with ideas flying around so wildly, it’s hard to pin down the one I want to write into a sentence.

This has resulted in several writing purges to get these thoughts out and explode them onto paper. I want to share them with you, but I’m worried they’re a little too mind dumpy and not quite coherent.

So. That’s where things are today.

If there’s a big moral in this for me, it is: ride it out. I’ve had manic episodes before. I’ve had depressed episodes before. Am I bipolar? I don’t think so.  But that doesn’t mean I don’t go to extremes every now and then, when mellow slips into depression or happiness turns into a lack of perspective and a loss of touch with reality.

So I try to stay aware and keep my feet on the ground as much as possible, to feel my weight in the floor and remember that sensation is more real life than the fantasies in my head.

And I guess that’s it.

It calms me down. 


I might take a break from writing for a little while.

I might not. 

We'll see. 

Number 3: Quality over quantity.  That was the tip of the day in today’s workout, and it applies to EVERYTHING in life. Exercise, food, even words. Would you rather never stop talking, or only say what you mean, only say what’s in your heart, only say what matters (as much as anything can matter?) 

Lesson 2:


Get your ego out of it. 


I don’t care if you think you should be able to do 100 pull ups. You can only do as many as you can. For instance, I, right now, can do zero. And I hang on that bar and I struggle and I sweat. I put my feet on the floor for support and try to just hold 10% of my bodyweight with my arms, or 20%, or (at the beginning of the workout when I feel good) 100%, but, lord help me, I cannot do a single pull up right now. Right now. 


But with steady, consistent work, with accepting where I am instead of trying to pretend I’m somewhere I’m not, the change can come. In time. Slowly. But as soon the ego gets involved, it thinks “why can’t you do a single pull up? You're not good enough! Don't you realize you need to prove how strong you are?” And there goes form. There goes strength. There go my gains, and in comes injury.


Why would anyone listen to that voice? Would you listen to a friend who said that to you (not ironically, of course)? Why would you listen to the crazy voice in your head? I'm not saying there aren't sane ones. But why listen to the crazies?   

People want to look good, look strong, look like the people doing 100 pushups or weighted pull ups or whatever, but be honest with yourself: can you actually do it? No? Then why are you trying to look like you can? And why are you trying to convince yourself you can? It’s not that you won’t ever be able to, but right now, you can’t. 

It's healthy to recognize and accept what you're dealing with right now. Call them limitations, call them whatever you want, but when you argue with reality, you lose. You are where you are. That's not to say there's anything wrong with working toward a goal, but you have to know where you are to know where you’re going. 

I’m not working out for anybody else. I’m not working out to prove anything. I’m working out because it’s healthy for me. I’m working out to work out. It’s a lot more fun that way.  

One more on the way...

As mentioned last time, some exciting fitness stuff came up and taught me many lessons. Here are a few:


1)      Slow down.  

If you want to build something sturdy, lasting, or worthwhile, do it slowly. That way, what’s doing the building is you. Not momentum. Not bad form. Just your work, your discipline, your will power to be comfortable with discomfort and maintain awareness. It’s ground-floor, 101, easily overlooked but totally essential knowledge. 

And it applies to other areas in life. Until recently, I was a "serial actor" or "compulsive actor." For 10 straight years, there was never a time I was not in a show. I began questioning whether that was what I wanted to do. After about 9 months, my momentum slowed and I decided to get out of theatre for a while. It would have been easy to keep going, but not satisfying.

Why was it so easy to keep going? Because I had 10 years of momentum on my side. It was what I knew, what people told me I was good at. Why not just keep going? I was having a good enough time, but you know what? It didn't feel right for me. It's right for lots of people. It just wasn't for me. 

And that took a little while to get comfortable with, but once that momentum ended, I was free to start working from 0, which has been really healthy. 

So I urge you: find where you have momentum, and determine if you want it there. Kill that momentum. Work from 0, so you know what you're doing is what you really want to do and not just what you're doing because it's easy.

More lessons next time... 

(side note: This up above is not fitness. It is something entirely different)

Lately I’ve restarted a particular home fitness program which I will not name because if I do, I want to be sponsored by them and get lots and lots of money. But until then, let me just say: I restarted a home fitness program. Now, I’ve done other programs by the same company that tended to focus on cardio, but this one focuses on strength training, which I'm finding WAY more effective for my goals right now.

Strength training is a very different beast. In cardio, momentum is your friend. Imagine trying to go for a run but always having both feet on the ground, or running in slow motion. Hard work, yes, but not your traditional running exercise.

Strength training is different. You only get strong by lifting or pushing or having resistance against you. Momentum, basically, is the end of resistance. It makes things easier to accomplish. It’s like trying to push a car. If you push it downhill, it will roll, and there it goes. If you push it uphill, you’re going to have a much harder time because, well, you're pushing a car uphill, so momentum is not on your side.

Odd as it sounds, when you want to get stronger, you want to push that car uphill. You want all the resistance you can handle.

I recently attended a hiring seminar for another fitness company which advocates “slow training,” where traditional strength exercises are performed for 20 seconds each repetition. Compare this to the average 4 or 5 second rep of normal strength training, and you’ll see a massive change in resistance. No longer is exercise about how many can you do, but rather, how few.  

Without momentum to help you, your joints can’t take any of the payload (which they shouldn't anyway). You can’t drop yourself into the bottom of your range of motion, then push back out (which one should never do anyway.) Instead, you’re just doing good, old fashioned, honest work. No momentum. No gimmicks. Just work.

After applying some of these slow training principles to my workouts, everything changed. I was so sore for three days I almost got sick, my body was wrecked. It took me 11 hours of sleep one night to even come close to recovery, which lots of sleep in otherwise (9 hours, 7 hours).

But now I feel awesome. I feel like I could move mountains. I feel proud that I managed to work so hard and stay conscious while doing it. Not literally conscious, but figuratively conscious, aware of my body and what it was doing. Lots of great spiritual teachers talk about body awareness, staying centered in the body, and using it as a grounding place. I feel like these efforts of conscious training improved my spiritual life as much as my physical well being.   

A lot of lessons have come out of this fitness quest.

1)      Slow down.  If you want to build something sturdy, lasting, or worthwhile, do it slowly. That way, what’s doing the building is you. Not momentum. Not bad form. Just your work, your discipline, you will power to be comfortable with discomfort and maintain good form. I’m not sure yet how this applies to other areas of life, but with fitness, it’s ground-floor, 101, easily overlooked but totally essential knowledge.

I think it gets overlooked because of ego, which brings me to point number 2.

2)      Get your ego out of it. I don’t care if you think you should be able to do 100 pull ups. You can only do as many as you can. For instance, I, right now, can do zero. And I hang on that bar and I struggle and I sweat. I put my feet on the floor for support and try to just hold 10% of my bodyweight with my arms, or 20%, or (at the beginning of the workout when I feel good) 100%, but, lord help me, I cannot do a single pull up right now. Right now. But with steady, consistent work, with accepting where I am instead of trying to pretend I’m somewhere I’m not, the change can come. In time. Slowly. But as soon the ego gets involved, I think “why can’t I do a single pull up? Yes I can! I can prove it.” And there goes form. There goes strength. There go my gains, and in comes my injury. 

People want to look good, look strong, look like the people doing 100 pushups or weighted pull ups or whatever, but be honest with yourself: can you actually do it? No? Then why are you trying to look like you can? And why are you trying to convince yourself you can? It’s not that you won’t ever be able to, but right now, you can’t. There’s nothing wrong with working toward a goal, but you have to know where you are to know where you’re going.

I’m not working out for anybody else. I’m not working out to prove anything. I’m working out because it’s healthy for me. I’m working out to work out. It’s a lot more fun that way.  

Speaking of fun…

3)      Quality over quantity.  That was the tip of the day in today’s workout, and it applies to EVERYTHING in life. Exercise, food, even words. Would you rather never stop talking, or only say what you mean, only say what’s in your heart, only say what matters (as much as anything can matter)? 

I'm in one of those moods where things are moving really fast, at least on the inside. I've got a lot of excitement and a lot of desire to get all of the things inside, but I'm finding that's rendering me quite unintelligible. 
To that end, I make this point: there is a time to act, and a time to sit still. Moreover, everything has its seasons. Some of my projects right now are in a stage where they need more preparation before they are fit for public consumption, but that feeling of wanting to improve something (ever so slightly, no perfectionism needed) can be really uncomfortable.
It can be uncomfortable to say "I have this thing I want to give to you, but I want to give it to you in a slightly more effective form. I want it to help you as much as or more than it helps me." I realize I can't necessarily know what will help you, but I want to try to make what I'm doing a little more clear and a little less mind-dump-y.
I know there's a place for vulnerability, but I also want us to be able to discuss what's going on. I guess I just don't want to be too overwhelming. 
As I read this very post, I go back over and edit things, which I realize is maybe a super valuable thing to do in the creative process. At least giving these thoughts one edit so they can come out clearer.  
Anyway, those are some thoughts. What are yours?

P.S
Maybe I don't have any control in how my creative process evolves, and it just evolves on its own, in time, due to many forces outside of anyone's control (and some within, if you believe in that). But that is another topic for another day.

So this morning I woke up really early feeling a little out of control, probably because last night I got really tired and mainly got tired of trying so hard to eat right and make my body perfect so I binged on ice cream and pie and cookies and now I have some stomach acidity and it woke me up with a really high heart rate and I tried to go back to bed but couldn’t and the sun was coming up so I was like “fuck it” and decided to get a start on the day.

And my horoscope told me that it would be a good day to process things on paper so here I am.

That might have looked like a lot to read, but it only took a few seconds, didn’t it?

Anyway, I’ve got some emotional baggage going on this morning and I luckily already read an article about it. It was entitled “How to remove attachment to past relationships.”

Whoa.

Does that sound like something you need? I know it’s something I need.

By the way, as I write this, Ze Frank is narrating it in my head which is why there has been almost no punctuation up to this point.

Anyway, I think that learning to let go of past relationships is really important and earlier this week I saw something about how seeing an ex on Facebook actually makes the detaching and healing process WORSE and take longer.

2 things: 1) When I say “letting go” of past relationships, in my experience, that doesn’t mean letting go of the relationships itself. We’re all big people and we can handle anything that comes our way. I think it means letting go of one’s attachments to the relationships, our expectations of it and beliefs about what it “should” be in order for us to be happy. As if what we have isn’t already good enough. Sometimes I have a hard time remembering that what I have is good enough and even to be grateful for the things that cause me pain because pain is growth, but you know. Growing. Learning. It’s a slower process than I’d like sometimes. And isn’t that me “shoulding” on myself for needing to get better? Better?

Anyway.

2) When I say “ex” I don’t mean someone you used to date. I think I mean someone who has affected you in a big way and, like I said, someone you have particular expectations or unfulfilled desires about. In my experience, those desires have nothing to do with the person and everything to do with me. This person became a channel for my neuroses, or my neuroses came out more with them, or whatever. I formed a great big attachment and told a great big story and now none of it is coming true and I’m like “shit.” Ta da.

Sound familiar?

What’s your story?

Also, I’m not resolving this because I simultaneously have and haven’t resolved this for me, so how can I resolve it for you? Also, I think I’ve put my best guesses at how this particular situation works, so we can go from there. 

Tonight I found myself mildly overwhelmed by the prospects of the future, the big, wide, expansive, vast, nearly infinite future of the life of my physical body. I pondered questions of worth and value, significance and, ultimately, purpose.

“What is my purpose?” I wondered. From what I hear, this is a hard question to answer. From an absolute point of view, I’m not sure there is a reason to be alive, a purpose, a meaning. I’m not sure that this physical dance of atoms and molecules is worth anything. And that isn’t a sad thing, just a fact seen when the rose-colored glasses are removed.

However, in pursuit of some solace, I felt I needed an answer,  so I lowered my consciousness to realm of subjective points of view. What is my subject purpose? To inspire people? No. To become a great this or that? Any direction I turned, the stench of failure loomed, as I am better at replaying my previous failures than successes, and failure of a cause is inevitable at some point in the future anyway.

Amidst it all was the sense of directionlessness. When nothing matters, then what matters? And indeed, in the world of observable fact, nothing matters. Things are only as important as the stories we tell ourselves about them.

Though it might not seem it, this very abyssal perspective is what brought me back to basics. Since I am not planning on killing myself today (or at least my physical body. We’ll talk more about the metaphor of suicide later), then what is there? Well, there are the basics: food, water, shelter. Interestingly, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs adds “sex” to the very foundation of the pyramid. I wonder about that. I’m not anti-sex. I’m very pro-sex. But is it a necessity for the body to keep on existing? I should think not.

Anyway, I was relieved because I realized what had been going on: my wild 24 year old mind had been looking at life like a forest, and I had to cut the whole thing down. Hundreds of acres to fell, and just me and an axe to do it. So went the metaphor in my mind’s eye. And it looked so big and daunting, I knew I could never do it all, so why try? Where to start?

But then I thought: just one tree. Just one tree. That’s all it takes to get started. And who knows about afterward? But for now, just one tree.

Not even one tree. One step towards the tree. Then another. Then another. Maybe. Just one swing of the axe, to feel the reverberation of cause and effect ripple through the steel into the wooden handle and up into my arms. Then another. This one felt different. The tree gave way slightly more, the wood was softer underneath.

Then experimentation. Swinging at an angle, different rhythms, using my hips, my back, my arms, my head, my butt. Where does it feel best to swing from?

And then, before it is known, “the doer has vanished wholeheartedly into the deed.” This is the state so many ancient wisdom teachings speak of. The above is a quote from the Tao Te Ching, as translated by Stephen Mitchell.

To summarize: just one step. Just basics. Glory can wait. It certainly isn’t guaranteed. Riches, success, fame, acclaim, changing the world, saving the world; these can all wait. My efforts may go unnoticed. Who is to say I have a right to the consequences of my actions, anyway? Who’s to say I’ll ever see my garden flower? But I till it, nonetheless, the beautify the Earth.