YOU: A Story in Progress

In case you wondered, the story on you isn’t yet written – at least not to completion.

Whatever you believe to be true about yourself, choose a better story.

If you’ve given up, get up.

If you’ve lost hope, look for it again.

You can let your life be your teacher – and if you’re smart the lesson you learn will not be one of too little, too late, but one of “just in the nick of time”.

Check out Kathy Martin’s story.

Be well,

Tevis

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/02/sports/runner-kathy-martin-60-is-speeding-through-records.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all

Gifting: Music for a Living Planet

Gifting

Tips on great music is one of my favorite gifts to receive. And you know what they say about giving and receiving. That so, below are a couple of playlists I've made for yoga classes over the past couple of months. If you like them please let me know and I'll post more!

Gratitude

Gratitude India.Arie Voyage To India [UK]
Amazing Grace The Swan Silvertones Lifted: Songs Of The Spirit
Amazing Grace Caledonian Heritage Pipes and Drums Amazing Grace
Sun Again Kinnie Starr Sun Again
Lively Up Yourself Bob Marley & The Wailers One Love
Bonito Jarabe de Palo Bonito
Aguas De Marco Elís Regina & Antonio Carlos Jobim Nova Bossa: Red Hot On Verve
Let It Be The Beatles Let It Be
Sweet Thing Van Morrison Astral Weeks
You've Got A Friend Carole King Tapestry
Grandma's Hands Bill Withers Bill Withers Greatest Hits
You Are the Best Thing Ray LaMontagne Gossip In the Grain
Whenever Beth Orton Trailer Park
You Are The Only One (Jazz Version) INUSAX Global Player
Your Tender Loving Care Jon Hyde Hear Music: Sweetheart Love Songs
Gold to Me Ben Harper Fight for Your Mind
Gracias a La Vida Mercedes Sosa Trance Planet-Volume One
Grace Jeff Buckley Grace
Blackbird The Beatles The Beatles [White Album] (Disc 1)
Goodnight To The Mountains Paul Winter Consort A Celebration Of The World Of Crestone

M’aidez

Steppin' Out Joe Jackson Joe Jackson: Live 1980 - 1986
Air Play Outback Baka
The Wonder The Golden Palominos This Is How It Feels
These Days The Golden Palominos This Is How It Feels
Air India Dum Dum Project Desi Vibes
Eu Sou Meu Guia Lenine Na Pressão
Kid A Radiohead Kid A
Aguas De Marco Elís Regina & Antonio Carlos Jobim Nova Bossa: Red Hot On Verve
The Air That I Breathe The Hollies Have A Nice Decade (Disc 4)
Lilac Wine Nina Simone Verve Unmixed 3
Oh What A World Rufus Wainwright Want One
The Sky Is Crying Elmore James The Blues Collection (Disc 3)
Swing Low Sweet Chariot Christy The Blues
Wandering Saint L. Subramaniam Baraka


Morning Devotion

Gaayatri Ravi Shankar Chants Of India
Om Namah Shivaya Wade Imre Morissette Sagram Scales of Music
You Are We Am I: Blue Mix Tj Rehmi Shakti Rhythms With Shiva Rea
Cairo Bar Caravana Digital Bled
Ganesh Vandana Kakoli Indian Room
Walking Through Kaya Project Stoned Asia presents World Peace (mixed by Pathaan)
Wa Winjigo Ero Ayub Ogada En Mana Kuoyo
Nathdvara Shyamdas Beloved Chants
zaman8sani A Six Degrees Collection Emerging Artist Sampler – digital
Teardrop Massive Attack Mezzanine
Take Me Coco Zap Mama Adventures in Afropea, Vol. 1
Namaste Maneesh De Moor Sadhana
Tiny Birds Yo La Tengo Summer Sun
How To make A Baby Elephant Float Yo La Tengo Summer Sun
Shiva - The Third Eye Tony Scott Music for Yoga Meditation and Other Joys
Shiva Various Artists - Music Brokers New Age Series: Yoga Alternative
Hare Krishna Wade Imre Morissette Sagram Scales of Music
Shiva Gopika Poornima, J.P. Sai & Party, Kasinath Brothers & N.S. Prakash Rao 108 Vibrations of the Almighty

Mental Diet on a Down Day

This time of the year can be really beautiful with the reminder to reflect, connect, smell the flowers. But even as we embrace beauty, our minds have such power to cast a different hue.

Many deaths in my family have taken place this time of the year and even though consciously I feel completely whole in relation to these transitions, the power of the subconscious has a strong tug towards melancholy. Add on to this subconscious low of a boatload of travel last week, the energy required by being “on” much of it, missed connections due to airline misdirects, and then passing a holiday alone in a hotel room with horrible hot water flow and only intermittently flushing toilet, a dog attacking and scratching up my car, well, by yesterday morning despite the great weather my glass was feeling pretty empty. Knowing that no matter what I endeavored to do, my starting point would skew my perspective, I opted to spend time alone – not in withdrawal or to lament or lick wounds, but to regain the equilibrium of a neutral state by doing things that give me that.

I got up around 6AM and meditated, then grabbed a latte and headed to a nearby park for as much sweat, silence and fresh air as I could find. I let myself stay as long as I needed – no commitments. I topped that with a leisurely breakfast (huevos rancheros), and gave myself as much time as I wanted to read the paper. Returning home, I took as much time as needed, making sure not to rush any movement and be present to the light, the temperature, all the interactions no matter how transactional. When I got home I took a long bath, put on clothing I love, even took another walk with my dog around my neighborhood. Net net: by late afternoon I was still in a complete FUNK. DOWN. It happens.

I wasn’t sure what to try next to right my mood – I had tried movement, nature, self care, bonding with my little dog, and even nourishment to remind myself of my own wellbeing and nothing had really worked. So knowing I had a life change workshop to facilitate today, I gave up and took a dive into youtube looking for relevant, well-told stories on overcoming difficulty, getting THROUGH our challenges rather than just managing them. After all, when in doubt, always come from your truth.

You can imagine that in my negative state of mind, these images didn’t go over so well. Navigating through clip after clip, I discarded one after another for this reason or that – this one has sappy music, that one only features male examples, that other one feels preachy, I’ve seen that one a million times. Even with all that imperfection, something interesting happened: my mood shifted. By the time my eyes were tired from looking and my belly was grumbling for dinner, in 30 minutes of immersion in ideas of YES, I was completely reminded of the quality of our lives as being determined by HOW we respond to whatever stimulus we experience – internal or external. Focusing on inspiration for my class participants, on finding the right story about getting through difficulty resulted in a shift in my own state of mind. Imperfect as each of those clips might have been, by the end of my little research project I was in a completely empowered mood.

It reminded me: choose your mental diet. Don’t let perfection get in the way of a healthy dish.

Aye, Nay or OM: Yoga's Place in the Mainstream

Unless you're a fairly engaged yoga teacher, you may not have noticed something is changing in yoga: we're being mainstreamed. It's not only evident from the number of people you can see bopping around any community with a yoga mat on their back, sporting sanskrit symbols on cars, t-shirts and jewelry. While mother India goes Bollywood, the proliferation of her timeless spiritual practices has almost half of the United States wrestling with how yoga should formally participate in the collective.

Most yogis will admit we've wanted it, talked about how we wish everyone had a yoga practice of some sort. Who within the yoga community hasn't sighed at the idea of the houses of the U.S. Congress "OM"ing to open session, Sri President Obamananda scuttling his Marlboro's in favor of nadi shodana pranayama, Hillary Clinton or Sarah Palin checking in with supta baddha konasana/goddess pose before taking the stage, or held some other fantasy about yoga's ability to offer deeper connectedness and clarity to the folks who emerge as our loudspeakers and decisionmakers. As someone who adapts and shares the tools of yoga within corporate environments, I know beyond a doubt it would certainly be for the good.

Fantasies aside, and perhaps part and parcel to their ever becoming reality, the other side of mainstreaming is also happening. Yep. Just when yoga began to show numbers of participants that would make ANY business sit up and take notice, the states are taking notice and wondering what this means from many angles. As the American Bar Association Journal reports, twenty-one states are looking at yoga with an aim to regulate and somehow define this practice. Yoga proponents are on the scramble, responding with petitions, letters, hiring lobbyists, talking to senators, citing First Amendment rights and generally worrying over how a practice-turned-business that offers dubious profitability to all but a very small percentage of us can bear the increased cost to serve of meeting bureaucratic requirements that will no doubt result from the regulatory push.

What the states say they are worried about: mostly students buying trainings or memberships from organizations who vanish in the night without any path or recourse. What studios are worried about: registration fees in the thousands of dollars to qualify as a registered school, bureaucratic headaches of filings and paperwork, and being told what to do by the government.

Panic aside, this is an inevitable moment. Embedded in this moment are questions including: is yoga a religious practice, is it a therapeutic modality, is it simply a form of exercise, how is it valid, is it taxable, is it a vocation...and no doubt the list goes on. No matter how we define the "everything" tool that yoga fans know the practice to be, that yoga holds irresistable outcomes for so many of us and can be adapted to give benefit no matter the proclivities of the practitioner simply means this moment HAD to eventually arrive. With a capacity for ubiquitous relevance, our beloved Everything Tool has been destined to gather the popularity and prominence that the regulatory push signifies.

Sitting with this inevitability, I'm thinking of lots of pros and cons to this particularly sticky aspect of the mainstreaming of yoga. One cause for consideration: Yoga teachers have never been formally validated by the medical community - ask anyone in Donna Karan's Urban Zen Teacher Training and they'll attest to the frustrations of taking a training that was marketed as integrating yoga-based modalities into medical settings only to find out that any contact with real patients is actually not permitted. Another cause for consideration: Yoga teachers in many states are actually not legally permitted to touch students - that means hands-on adjustments or therapeutic touch of any kind is illegal unless the teacher is liscensed for some other profession such as Massage, Occupational Therapy, Physical Therapy, etc. Sure, yoga teachers can study for thousands of hours with therapeutics masters of multiple lineages, but because they are not recognized by state & local governments that they exist at all is the result of being "under the radar" - that is until now.

So if this is an inevitable moment, if the question "what IS yoga" is finally coming to the crown chakra attention of the mainstream world, we need to be the yogis in this moment. We need to ask ourselves what this means at the mula/root, at the solar plexus, what yearning rises from our anahata and how our voices give this truth expression. We need to step with wisdom beyond the veils of illusion and separation that we were ever separate from this world and know that we have always been spiritual beings on a human journey - in this world if not of it. We need to consider ourselves Arjuna in the chariot hearing Krishna's admonishment that we cannot retreat from the power struggles or machinations of this world into a spiritual coccoon. Indeed, because we are yogis in this world we must thoughtfully find how we powerfully serve in relationship with it and negotiate terms that best allow us to do that.

What can change: everything. It always is anyway.

Happiness or something else?

I've been watching the surge in happiness psychology offerings - the websites, the coaching programs, the university degrees. Seeing the proliferation of interest and academic intelligence about happiness raises questions around the measure of a life - is it happiness or is it meaning? Is it something else entirely? To the nihilists and even the tantrics, there may be nothing at all, no valuation differentiating between one lifetime and another. What would the likes of karma yogis such as Dr. King or Gandhi say? What do you think?

Counting down to the countdown...

Tick tick tick - I never feel so aware of time as when I realize there's something time specific I want to say on this blog and right now is one of those times. From Nosara beach in Costa Rica on retreat with my teacher Shiva Rea, hanging with a bunch of amazing people from around the world, I've been thinking lots about all the little breakthrough moments that have made my year a little brighter than it might have been otherwise. While I'm sure lots of you write gratitude lists - after all, even Oprah writes and advocates gratitude lists - in honor of the kind of year and decade I'm hoping to have, this post is dedicated to those breakthrough moments...may there be many, many more.

1. Teaching 300 NYPD officers to meditate
2. Peacefully ending an unhealthy relationship
3. Getting a puppy after YEARS of wanting one (yes, this is perhaps related to #2)
4. Spending a week on a lake with no visitors, no TV, no radio - just silence
5. Learning to drive a motorbike
6. Winning clients on national and global levels
7. Leading workshops for Harvard Business Review
8. Growing my hair beneath my shouders for the first time since college
9. Learning to surf (related 100% to being in Costa Rica this week but not represented at all accurately by the amazing photo above)
and (after a year that if it were a song it would be sung to the blues including all the maladies we've all been reading about in the headlines this year)...
10. Recovering my belief in possibility and deep love for this very brief pageant we call life.

Thanks for giving me a place to share this, internet world, and thanks to whomever is reading this for following the journey.

Re-Birth Day

Last night I threw my annual birthday-holiday fete. A bit of a challenge all these years not because of any primal experiences in the birth canal, but because with great hemispheric accuracy it falls in the middle of winter holidays (when I was little), final exams (in my teens and early twenties), and now competes with cold/flu and holiday party season. Among health, holiday challenges and the fact that I seem to send invites at the very very last minute, in the midst of regrets s'il vous plaît I take great comfort that I'm not alone in celebrating this day. In fact, the entire nation of Mexico and many other Catholic countries celebrate the day I was born.

No matter my intentions to live a remarkable life, they don't do this because of anything I did. By chance or grace, on December 12, 1531 the image of the Virgin Mary appeared in a little town in Mexico called Guadalupe. Lucky for me, I like religion in general and so whenever I get to hang around Mexicans here in NYC I love bragging that I am a "Lupita"- the nickname for anyone born on the day of the virgin - I love having a little extra zing in my birthday specialness.

You can probably tell that birthdays are important to me. Not for presents or hogging attention, but in a busy world they offer the potential for a ritual of recognition of all the life experiences that have combined in my life to make me the person I am, and to honor the many others who provide love and support for me to become the person I want to be.

Each year I look for ways to make these day-of-birth parties special by having a theme on the hunch that when we create a context for connection we're more likely to authentically connect and have real fun. Past years themes have ranged from human scavenger hunts in my apartment to "show and tell" where people share something they have created. One year we did a dj competition and the next we karaoked until sunrise. This year I asked folks to offer their favorite quote - from Raising Arizona to Winston Churchill, I figured whatever inspires my friends has to be inspiring.

What better gift than inspiration? I got exactly what I asked for. In hopes it is equally a gift of inspiration for you, here's a sampling:

Fail again...fail better
-Samuel Beckett

It could be better, but it's good enough
-Chinese Fortune Cookie

There was never a king like Solomon
Not since the world began
Yet Solomon talked to a butterfly
As a man would talk to a man
-Rudyard Kipling

CLOUDS
All afternoon, Sir
your ambassadors have been turning
into lakes and rivers.
At first they were just clouds, like any other.
Then they swelled and swirled; then they hung very still;
then they broke open. This is, I suppose,
just one of the common miracles,
a transformation, not a vision,
not an answer, not a proof, but I put it
there, close against my heart, where the need is, and it serves the purpose. I go on, soaked through, my hair
slicked back;
like corn, or wheat, shining and useful.
- Mary Oliver


Come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to killed me / and has failed.
~ Lucille Clifton

There is in every true woman’s heart a spark of heavenly fire, which lies dormant in the broad daylight of prosperity; but which kindles up and beams and blazes in the dark hour of adversity.
~ Washington Irving

And this one, too, from wondrous Rumi:

you suppose you are the trouble
but you are the cure
you suppose that you are the lock on the door
but you are the key that opens it
it’s too bad that you want to be someone else
you don’t see your own face, your own beauty
yet, no face is more beautiful than yours
~ Rumi


And of course my own favorite quote which ties this admittedly rambling post together. With my birthday patron saint Mary as a symbol of the mothers' loving compassion, in honoring the journey and beauty of my own life there's no greater cause to celebrate than the profound impact of my relationship with my own mother. As in any relationship, I certainly did not always understand her, and it took more than two decades for us begin to like much less really fall in love with eachother. With an ironic twist, its crossed my mind more than once that it took her fighting cancer for us to finally stop fighting eachother. But somehow through it we got to that place beyond rightdoing and wrongdoing and uncovered enough space in our relationship to hold eachother's beauty in the very brightest light. The connection we created is my reference in understanding what this lesson called "love" really is.

Years since her death, I will never forget the day when minutes after having just delighted in finding the following poem sitting on my floor reading in NYC, my phone rang as she excitedly called me from her home in Cincinnati to share it with me.

LATE FRAGMENT
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
- Raymond Carver

Wishing you re-birth every day,

With love,

Tevis