Nostalgia...

I've been feeling very nostalgic lately. With the prospect of leaving here for gordon the horizon it makes one contemplate odd things. Things I never knew I'd even care about again. Driving down old streets I used to live on, walking past my old school (which I hated), visiting people I haven't spoken with in years. Even eating at old favourite places.

Yes, I said leaving here for good. Doesn't mean I won't come back to visit, but who knows. When I go to India I hope to stay there for a good long while and then if I live somewhere, maybe there, or maybe another place on that side of the world. I had a reading and she said Bali, Bali could work too. Never been there but I like the idea of being near the ocean. But it's time, my life has been here for over 46 years now and it's time for a change.

I love India and can see myself traveling around there and teaching in different locations, then finally finding one place and being there for a while, then maybe another and another. I don't really know, or have a drawn out plan. I can't really plan things, I'm terrible at it and in the doing of that I feel like I'm living worrying about the future rather than enjoying my present. So I tend to not make plans. I know I'm odd to most of you, fucking hell, I'm odd to me most of the time.

I've chosen a life that doesn't fit here in St. Louis. And being here again makes me feel small. I do have a good life here, great friends, great students, and a great family. But feeling small is really painful. And I always feel outside my comfort zone, not that that's a bad thing, but its just tiring to always be uncomfortable. Not saying when I sleep I'm not comfortable or the places I go here aren't comfortable, but the only time I've felt like I'm me and living in my skin is in India.

I never knew that before. Never knew that I wasn't happy and that my life was small (not that its really small, its just not everything I want it to be, so its a figurative small). Odd to find out that I've not been being myself, and then boom, I'm in this strange land with strange customs and find myself more at home than I've ever been. I always said home is wherever I am, I take it with me, so that I could feel better wherever I was and it worked, then I ran smack dab into the place that was home and once you leave that place you can never be comfortable in the old place again.

I've been doing my best to not be depressed since I've been home. In fact that first month I wasn't and I even felt pretty damn good, was excited to see my friends, family and students again. Then it kicked in. Everything here is the same, nothing ever changes and I'm tired of having that experience. So its time to get out of here, but I have to stay and make money enough to afford to go back and be there for a while without income, while I study with Sharath and line up teaching jobs over there. I already have one two month gig lined up that I'm excited about, but I need more. Now, here I go again, living in the future instead of being able to enjoy my present.

I've got to do my best to be okay here while I'm here, things are good for sure, but if I don't maintain my feeling good, then it can all crash down around me.

So I go the Hindu temple a lot, I feel happy and comfortable there, I go to the park a lot, I feel happy and comfortable there (although these past two days with the rain I haven't been able to do that and that's probably a big factor in why I'm feeling this way today) and tonight I'm to the Hare Hrsna temple with a couple of my students. I used to go there a lot many years ago, it can be uplifting and fun, and they have a great meal afterwards.

So I'm doing my best, hope you are too. Sending love out to you all.

Let it in...

Experiences are what define us. I'm not one who is a proponent of speculation, often to me it becomes over thinking something.

If you're all in your head about something are you feeling it in your body? If you're not feeling it, or rather feeling the repercussions of the experience of it, how do you know what is actually happening? You can think about something, even invoke the ideas of the feeling of the situation, but until you've actually had the experience of said thing you cannot invoke the feeling of it again.

I wanted a practical experience of something and yet for years, even decades I was self medicating which dulled the sensory systems to such a level that I almost completely had to relearn how to feel how things felt viscerally again. Self medicating was alcohol mostly for me, and at some point that stopped working, thankfully around the same time I started yoga. The alcohol and the yoga fought in my body for some 9 years, one dulling the sensations, one reactivating them, before I quit drinking and began the path to relearn how things felt in my body when experiences happens.

So when the yoga finally started to work I found myself emotional a lot of the time. And if I'm honest each time I go through a new layer of veils between me and what I think of as me I get a new level of emotional.

Recently I've been having that happen again. It's also affected my willingness to practice and changed my relationship with it. Practice is what brought me to the realisation that I was covering everything up and that I needed to maybe start shedding some of the veils of reality that were covering the real me up. So now I've found a new appreciation for my practice, maybe even just this week again lol.

Of course this started in this last trip to Mysore to study, I felt the shifts happening and would skip a day here and there. But one thing that also became known to me is that practice to me was cemented in me as being so much more than just asana. I need the asanas, and even the sequence we in the tradition of K. Pattabhi Jois use them. I believe it set up to open up the energy channels systematically, from bottom to top, open up the spine the same way, and the musculature. So to me it's the best method. So I need this part of the practice and when I get too far removed from it, which I believe I was beginning to do a few weeks back up until last week even, things shift, the other parts of my practice don't work so well. They do still work on their own, but when all aspects are put together, then I'm the best me I can be.

Pranayama, I was taught the full Ashtanga sequence of pranayama some years back as I was learning the third series, before I took my break from Ashtanga and came back. So yes, I still do it a few times a week, there's nothing like it. But also the simple alternate nostril breathing in the way Sharath has taught us works so well too, that I often use just it for a few rounds and have great results. But one or the other has to be a part of my daily practice for it to feel complete.

Also I've chanted for years, but mostly began with kirtan and would chant along with a cd periodically at home. Once I finally made it to Mysore and took the chanting at the shala, then studied Sanskrit and philosophy with Jayashree and her brother and eventually learned how to systematically chant the Yoga Sutras and quite a few other mantras and songs with Ranjini, I realised that this needed to also be a part of my daily practice. So I devised a routine of regular mantras that I chant each morning, even a few that I do throughout the day with a mala, 108 times. But lately, with my deep interest in deity worship, I've begun to deepen that even further with an evening puja that again employs chanting in Sanskrit but feels more authentic, like the way they do it in India at a Kali temple. Almost tribal, and that feeling is something I'm glad to have.

But when I was just thinking about each of these things, pontificating if you will, they were just ideas and held little value. But bringing the experience to life for real has made me realise that I'm a tactile learner. I have to be the one to turn the page, the one to speak the word wrongly a dozen times before I hit it just right and feel the vibration I'm meant to feel where I'm meant to feel it, I have to eat the food, like the incense, burn the candle, ring the bell. I have to feel these things in the temple well of my pelvis and the burning in my solar plexus, and maybe even hundreds of times, to be able to determine what its like, how it feels to me, will it work for me, can I share this with another so they can also use it to help themselves?

Do you dig in and get into the nitty gritty of things, or do you sit at home thinking about it in fear of what it will really be like? There of course are many things in between those two ends of the spectrum. Where do you fit within it?

Are you letting it in, or are you holding it at bay?