RuPaul's Drag Race

This blog should've come before the last one but its just popping up now, and when the inspiration is there, I follow it, so here it goes.

As many of you who are regular components of my life know, over the winter I became obsessed with RuPaul's Drag Race. Fell in love with it really, not obsessed. I had never seen a whole season of it before, only catching an episode here and there occasionally.

But on New Year's Day I became sick and stayed at home all day long and what happened to be on Logo but a whole recap of the previous season to create anticipation for the new season beginning in a few short weeks. So I watched it and became endeared.

Then the new season started and I totally watched every episode, even bonded with and became great friends with some other homos in the area who also watched it with the same voracity.

The funny thing is that I began to be inspired by what I was seeing. I was seeing the underdog, Jinkx Monsoon, whom no one believed would make it far, come out with talent and amazing qualities that no one suspected and lo and behold, she won the contest! Amazing!!! (she'll be in town June 30th at Attitudes, I and a few friends are seeing her, so excited)

The inspiration came from that, but also from each contestant and the creativity they enlisted to strive to win the title. And even more from the fact that I used to be an artist, as a child you almost couldn't pull me away from my book and pen and coloring pencils. I created character after character and named them, created super powers or planets for them, whole histories for each one, all sorts of things like that. But also in 1988-9 I did drag.

There I said it for public consumption (many of you I'm close with already knew this), but yes I did drag.

I was a terribly shy young man, and I mean painfully so. It hurt me to think too long of talking in front of people or to people I knew, never people I didn't know, but alsways people I knew. I even created scenarios in my mind about it until I would get sick thinking of the conversation that could happen, but never actually did. So as I was 18, just out of the house and working in "the big city of St. Louis" I met folks who quickly surmised my sexual orientation and took me out to bars and dance clubs that had drag shows at them, and I was fascinated. Not because I wanted to be a woman, but because I could see the creative talent they were employing to become a character, much like the ones I had created for over a decade in my notebooks and sketch pads.

So, when Kathy Klein, a prominent drag queen in town. Really the fiercest one I'd ever seen, and still looks amazing now (even though she lives a small life with her partnerh in Iowa now)when she dresses up. When she came to me and said how pretty I was and had I ever thought of doing drag, then talked me into it and helping me do my makeup and buy the proper gear to stuff, pad and tuck everything into, I was ecstatically thinking of how this was my out. I could become someone else and therefore wouldn't have to deal with myself anymore, someone I was sick and tired of, but really in all truth, someone I didn't know. And so said yes and did it.

It lasted all of 9 months but I learned a lot about myself during that time and decided I was using it to hide and not being me, which I still had no clue who that was anyway, but I knew it wasn't healthy. So I quit and explored other avenues, including drinking heavily to be brave enough to speak to others, but that is another blog waiting to happen lol.

Anyhow, all of this to tell you why I've been changing lately.

Any of you who actually know me in person have noticed I've been more daring lately, with my new hairdo, with clothing, with my toenails (lol) and just trying to embrace more of who I am, maybe some of which that had gotten lost along the way. And enjoying being more expressive, finally! Just because we live a yogic life doesn't mean it can't be filled with color, right?!?

So, expect more, and more, as I embrace each new creative thought that comes up. I'm not sure how much more there will be, but there could be a lot and there could be just a bit more.

Either way folks, I'm embracing me, the inner me, the one only I know fully, but I let you see quite a bit of too. And as this me bubbles to the surface, physical changes may be prevalent, or not, but changes will be coming, be they physical only or mostly internal. So be ready!!!

Kino MacGregor

This past weekend I spent with some great friends and with aforementioned young lady. She's become someone I admire and who inspires me in ways I never thought would be able to happen.

I used to think no one younger than me could possibly teach me anything, I guess I'm old enough now to know better lol, and have embraced what this lovely, on the inside and out, woman has to share.

I also had a bit of hard time for the silliest reasons. Comparison, something which I'm not prone to do and therefore almost never do. But when I was there this weekend, and before when I read her mini bio book Sacred Fire, I became . . . jealous, maybe? No, not jealous, envious. Here's why...

We began the practice of Ashtanga Yoga at almost the same exact time, I was 30, she 21 I think. But she took the horse by the reigns and found a good Mysore class, learned a lot there and went even further and went to India to study with Guruji (K. Pattabhi Jois) and began a process of learning that I only dreamed of doing.

I embraced it to the degree I could at the time and drove to Boulder, CO, to study with Guruji on one of his tours and decided that I was going to go the following year to India and leave work and be there for as long as I could. I allowed things in my life to stop me though, and didn't forge ahead as I'd planned to. I'd planned to because never before in my life had something make me feel like this yoga, it was amazing to me and I was in love with it. Problem being I was also in love with someone who was a practical thinker and who had no intention of helping me figure out how to get there, and I allowed him this role in my journey, so NOT his fault.

So, again in 2002 when I retired from the corporate world and had a severance package (and was single again) decided, okay, now I'm going to do it! So I look online only to find out that Guruji and Sharath were on tour and would be the entire summer, so I said fuck it and bought a ticket to Maui to study with him there and decided to stay for a whole 5 weeks so I could enjoy Maui and study with Nancy Gilgoff as well. Neither of which I have any regrets about and I still have a great friendship with Nancy to enjoy too.

Anyhow, advance a few years and I was working part time at the St. Louis Bread Co and teaching little Mysore style classes in Collinsville, IL, which were doing pretty well and I loved teaching this style of yoga in this format. It is what I was born to do. I'm just plugging away at my own home practice and teaching and living, not thinking about it at all. Then the itch starts to hit me again in about 2006-7, so I went to the Ashtanga pre-conference at the Yoga Journal Conference in Estes Park, CO. Loved it, it was awesome, but I couldn't see a clear way to make India happen, then I met Desiree Rumbaugh, started learning Anusara and healing parts of my body that needed healing, then I started practicing Kundalini Yoga as well more often ( I had been practicing it as long as the Ashtanga but only once a week on my day off, this time I got into it heavily and kept going. The energy working aspect of it was healing me in many other ways). So got further sidetracked away from my original Ashtanga path and almost left it completely, only to come back to it at the behest of friends once a week in late 2011, then fully 3-5 times a week in February of 2012 and fully again 6 days a week in April/May of that same year.

Then I met Kino in May of 2012 as well but it wasn't until going back to Chicago to see her again this year that that little demon on my shoulder was whispering about looking at where I could've been and such and such. That's all nonsense, I am where I am and my path brought me here, and she is where she is and we are two different people.

So now, I want to go to India again, this winter, December through February, to study in Mysore with Sharath and learn and learn and learn. If I eventually earn my authorization and further to my certification in the process, so be it, but otherwise I'm just in it for the learning and the growth and the yoga of it.

I love the asanas in this practice, they are like nothing else, I want to dig deep into them and allow them to move energy through me, moving past and through any blocks, emotional, energetic or otherwise, that I may have. I want to learn Sanskrit from Jayashree and Narsimhan in the afternoons and I want to interact with the Indian people and adapt to their way of life for the time that I'm there.

I'm drawn to this as if I've lived there in other lives and therefore tend to believe I did. I mean sometimes I can feel and smell things that I know are totally Indian and I've never experienced here in America.

So, I'm putting it out Universe. I want this. The thought of it makes me ecstatic, lets do this!!!

Practice, practice, practice...

I've been practicing and teaching and not much else, including blogging lol. Didn't realize how long its been until this morning I happened to be thinking a bit.

I'm really trying not to get stuck in my head about things and the problem with that is that it doesn't lend itself to formulating something to write about, so haven't been on here since April.

But I'm seeing Kino MacGregor this weekend in Chicago and am super excited, so have put a lot of focus on my morning practices lately, even when they seem less than optimal. I still search and find the benefit I got from what I did or did not do.

I seem to be regularly practicing the primary series this past month or so and having so much sensation in my arms, from the upper chest down through the elbows, that I don't know what to do with it. Its not pain, its just like my nervous system is on fire, and then when my asanas are done, it seems to be fine, its just during my practice! So this morning I practiced second series to test it out and it did the same thing. The arms represent the heart chakra and as the energy channels that correspond with the arms open up it is the flowing of the energy through the heart chakra that can cause such sensation, but also such peace after the opening happens.

Along with that I'm opening up finally in my sacrum and my shoulders have been having major opening lately. The sacrum though is where I've been locked up on the left side since January and it started to subside when I went to the Ashtanga confluence, but came back strongly, but yesterday during my practice I felt movement in the area that was bound up and it feels so free after that and today, so I'm grateful I kept on practicing through whatever was going on with it and have mostly come out the other side.

It was through pain though that it found the opening, not acute, sharp pain, but tension and just feeling locked in a knot that created a shorter hamstring and pain down the leg, but when the movement happened it hurt for a second and now feels amazing, so we'll see how it goes with this weekend.

It seems that pain has been a theme lately, especially around articles I've been reading, and talking about how Ashtanga brings pain, but its really about it being in the areas that the energy is blocked or not flowing well and if you stick with it, work within your bounds, not pushing through it, but breathing and maintaining your practice through it, that on the other side is a great and amazing place to be.

I will say I agree and I will not quit practicing but will be mindful of how it needs to be adjusted to accomodate or to help heal different things as they come up. And I feel amazing lately, inside and out, so I'm not really worried about any of it, just being with it as it comes up, observing and learning from it and taking that into my teaching.

Namaste, and may you be present and observing in your own life from today onward and see what it brings you!!!