Category: Blog

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These are generous times: some online yoga offerings from my favorite teachers (etc)

Be Kind Stay CalmAs tempting as it may be to focus on what’s falling apart, I’m in awe of the generosity I’ve experienced and witnessed lately, and doing my best to pay it forward.

Even
After
All this time
The Sun never says
To the Earth,
“You owe me.”
Look
What happens
With a love like that.
It lights the
Whole
Sky.

Ashley Sharp invoked this twice during the yoga class she streamed yesterday from her Pudding Creek refuge. Whether written by Hafiz (Hafez?) or Daniel Ladinsky, these words released an enormous sense of… relief? gratitude? after weeks of feeling so incredibly fortunate while also wondering: “Am I doing enough to help?” Not to mention the more frequent thought, “I know I could do a LOT more, but wow I’m exhausted.”

I am beginning to recognize that my desire to keep doing more and more is an attempt to avoid feeling certain emotions: anxiety, grief, confusion, overwhelm. I would like to trust that we’re all doing as much as we can with whatever edible, technological, financial, and emotional (etc) reserves we’ve got available.

A remarkable gift emerging from these times is that we suddenly have unprecedented access to healing practices offered from afar, so we can continue to fill our own cups! I am so grateful to many of my favorite yoga teachers from my California days for making their teachings available online (see list below).

https://www.instagram.com/p/B-WlpPHpML3/

Last weekend I had the immense privilege of taking Devi Daly’s first remote yin yoga teacher training course — thank you thank you thank you Devi for a lovely and inspiring three days! — and yesterday I taught my own first remote yoga session ❤

If you feel you would benefit from a bit of yoga instruction in your living room, here are a few resources from teachers I love:

I haven’t actually tried these yet, but you might find the yoga offerings on these sites useful?

  • Yoga for the People offers free live-streamed classes, videos you can watch whenever, and even a podcast if you’d prefer a simple voice to guide you.
  • MyYogaWorks has a massive online class library, and you can sign up for free for the foreseeable future using the code “ONLINE“.
  • DoYogaWithMe is offering their premium subscription for free for 2 months.
  • Down Dog (and all associated fitness apps) are offering their courses free through May 1st for most of us, and through July 1st for K-12 teachers and healthcare professionals.
  • Yoga with Adriene has been teaching yoga on YouTube for longer than just about anyone… check out this awesome Yoga for Uncertain Times playlist! ❤
  • Fitbit offers streaming yoga classes through their app as part of their premium offering; if you haven’t already taken advantage of the trial offer for newbies, you can get 90 days free at the moment.

There are probably many, many more online yoga options available; I’d love to hear about your favorites in the comments and I’ll be updating this post as I hear of new resources 🙂

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Guitarist & bassist / backup singer seeking other half of our garagey punk indie band (and other blasts from the past)

I just rediscovered some long-lost recordings of a garage band I used to play with:

Clearly we needed more practice, ha, but we had a lot of fun!

After the above band had broken up, my guitar-wielding friend Mike and I put this ad up on craigslist. We got a lot of fascinating / weird emails in response, but we only ever actually met up with these folks… they had a very specific thing going on that freaked us out a bit, so we never met up again. Then I’m guessing I must have moved back to Bolinas, ruining any hope of regular practice sessions? Cracks me up to look back at this stuff, especially as I’m thinking about my various identities over the years!

***

Trying to rustle up a drummer and a singer, maybe a singer who also plays keys and makes spacey fun blaster sounds? Maybe one or the other of you writes original songs?

Mike: kicks ass on the guitar / is most likely to show up with the lyrics and chord progressions for the new song he wants to play / has fancy gear and isn’t afraid to play two guitar tracks, looping one of them / dreams of turning the dial his amp up past 3 / is really good at keeping us on track / likes it when the rest of us are so psyched we jump up and down when we play / might still be 17, or somewhat stuck in the 80s punk scene / has been through two Blue Bear band workshops…

…the latter of which resulted in his meeting…

Elizabeth: really likes being onstage / has more enthusiasm than talent / plays much better basslines when she’s not also serving as lead singer / has a hard time not singing / laughs a lot / follows instructions well / writes for a living but has yet to muster a good original song / is most likely to get tix to a show / will be out of town a bit later this year traveling for work after her book comes out.

We are both in our 30s, live and practice in San Francisco, and secretly dream about quitting our day jobs and playing music all day long, on and off stage… though we seem to be stuck in the land of playing covers.

Are you the rest of our band???

Please be in touch if you:

  • play drums and/or sing and/or play keys or synth and/or write songs and want to hear them come alive
  • are more interested in having fun and staying positive than beating yourself or anyone else up if we botch the song
  • want to practice 1-2x a week and contemplate the occasional gig
  • want to come to shows with us for inspiration (faves of late = Ty Segall, White Fence, Thee Oh Sees, the Walkmen, !!!)
  • like some or all of the songs in the following list, which we’ve spent some time with…

Pulled Up – Talking Heads
Gigantic and Where is My Mind – Pixies
Saints – The Breeders
Teenagers from Mars – Misfits
What Do I Get? – Buzzcocks
Thin White Line – Sticks & Stones
The Bends and No Surprises – Radiohead
Ceremony – Joy Division
Last Nite and Someday – The Strokes
Jail La La and Bedroom Eyes – Dum Dum Girls
I Am the Ressurrection – Stone Roses
Maps – Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Cheers!

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What’s your Printery?

I love everything this video reveals about this man, his vision, his spirit, his work in the world… Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr, please take my money!

You will not get a degree
You will not go into extraordinary debt
You will print all day, every day
You will clean type
Wipe up ink
Smell the scent of grinding heavy metal night and day
You will not move back in with your parents
Nor struggle to have a quote/unquote “career”

You can give him money too, via his latest IndieGoGo campaign. Hat tip to Austin Kleon for alerting me (and thousands of other e-newsletter subscribers) to the existence of this inspirational being!

If a contribution isn’t in your budget right now, Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr offers an alternative to “join[ing] the growing movement of people who are taking control of their own damn lives.”

OtherWays

May we all find our own version of The Printery, which is, as Amos describes,

another path, a community that will assist you in achieving your dreams.

Not someone else’s dreams; YOUR dreams.

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Where there’s smoke…

Smoky skies.png

At 3pm the Auckland sky has gone dark with an eerie, apocalyptic orange glow.

As weird an experience as this is for us, I can’t even imagine the mayhem and grief they must be going through on the ground in Australia, where the bushfires continue to rage…

The smoke had to travel a very long way to get here.

2249km.png

To put that distance into perspective, that’s only ~100km less than the crow-flies distance from San Francisco, CA to Fort Worth, TX.

2340km.png

…or one kilometer shy of the driving distance between Vancouver and San Diego.

2248km.png

My heart goes out to all the people, animals, and landscapes suffering across the Tasman Sea right now.

If we don’t suffer massive fires (as we have in California Siberia the Amazon), Climate Change and its impacts, not to mention human behavior in general (what is 45 doing in the Middle East?!), are coming for us all one way or another… may we use these trying times to awaken to new ways of living, on this Earth and with each other _/|\_

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Family affairs: This Be The Verse

My brother and I, who have both chosen not to have children of our own, recently received an email from my mother.

“Poem for you,” read the subject, and inside, only this link. No introduction, no context, even after I inquired.

I’m learning it’s best not to speculate. Regardless of her intent, I appreciate a fun poem; maybe you will too?

This Be The Verse

By Philip Larkin

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.

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Three years in New Zealand: some reflections

As of this week, we’ve been living in Auckland for three years.

The particular date we arrived — 5 November — is hard to miss because of two very interrelated factors:

  1. It’s Guy Fawkes Day, a truly bizarre holiday wherein people in New Zealand (and other Commonwealth countries) celebrate, in various explosive ways, the anniversary of a guy trying to blow up Parliament with a bunch of dynamite; and
  2. It’s completely legal for anyone to light fireworks from private property in Auckland, and oh do they ever, despite the inevitable fiery mayhem that ensues.

And so I’ve been joking since the day we arrived that the country sets off fireworks in celebration of our coming here.

Last year, on the two-year anniversary of our arrival, I wrote up some thoughts on pestestrianism, public health care, and paying income taxes… and forgot to share them. These days I have absolutely no idea what life is like back in the U.S. (and I doubt my experiences in the Bay Area Bubble were ever representative of what the entire country goes through!), so the intro feels even more relevant than ever.

***

The longer we live here, the harder it is to know whether the things I notice are really reflections of differences between the U.S. or New Zealand, or whether they are simply reflections of how the world has changed in the last two years. More likely, the things I notice are reflections of how I have changed since moving here? Continue reading “Three years in New Zealand: some reflections”

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The Lanyard – a poem by Billy Collins

Thank you, Jen, for sending me this video of Billy Collins reading his poem The Lanyard… on my mother’s birthday, and her mother’s birthday, no less!

Start at 0:45 for best effect:

My mother gave me life, and it was only because of her own late mother’s sacrifice that we both exist at all. In return, today I offer you both this blog post, knowing full well we’ll never be even.

Full poem below, as can be found all over the internet without attribution… the former US Poet Laureate has published many many books of poetry, do support him by checking them out! Continue reading “The Lanyard – a poem by Billy Collins”

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the water it moved / yeah it moved me

I’ve experienced a particular magic that is very difficult to describe, and it happened to me regularly while surfing this spot at sunset, on days when there was just enough haze in the atmosphere to blend the pastel colors of sea and sky seamlessly into one another to such an extent that distinctions themselves felt meaningless… in fact the difference between me, bobbing gently amongst all that wonder, and the vast expanse itself seemed to disappear entirely.

This song — and even the lyrics, which I finally “got” after playing the song over and over on trips to and from the Buddhist Centre — evokes a similar feeling for me. The internets claim that the artist herself now lives and surfs in this same small town, so I like to imagine it’s her I captured in the photograph above exactly two years ago today.

pacific is bigger / than I ever knew / until I got in her / and the water it moved / yeah it moved me / and if I was frightened / out there on the shore / well I had good reasons / but I don’t anymore / yeah it moved me / there’s nowhere to go where the earth doesn’t quake / it moved me

Lyrics (c) Kelly McFarling [source]

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Exactly the Q&A I need right now

Q (from Rupa Bhattacharya, Editorial Director, Culture at Vice):

…how do we make space for ourselves and hold being a trailblazer and everything else that comes with our work?

A (from hospitality activist and bartender, etc etc Ashtin Berry):

I’ve often said that self-care requires discipline, but it also requires acceptance. You can’t really care for yourself if you aren’t sitting in the awareness of what your body, mind, spirit needs. So holding space for myself right now looks like investigating my feelings in a deeper way and acknowledging things even if I don’t have words for it at the moment.

Full original below for additional inspiration, but first here’s my own (five years ago!) Ace Hotel mirror selfie, constant-companion fanny pack lurking in the background:

AceHotelSelfie.png

Huzzah for celebrating the awareness of what the body, mind, spirit needs, and to letting go of needing the right words for what you discover through that investigation!

https://www.instagram.com/p/B3TeG09FDe9/

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A yoga sequence to cultivate compassion from Chelsea Jackson Roberts

I found this lovely heart-opening yoga sequence several months ago while putting together a class on the Heart Chakra:

Heart sequence.png

Since then, I’ve incorporated it into just about every class I teach, and it’s become my go-to movement practice… so I figured it was about time I shared the love!

It’s quite accessible in that it is easy to practice anywhere, without a mat or specialized clothing. It’s also easily adjustable to fit any timeframe. I usually start with a version in which I hold each pose for two full breaths. Even if that’s all I have time for, my mindbodyheart feel so much better for it; even better if I have time to go through several rounds, timed with the breath.

I’m convinced that this sequence was exactly the loving kindness that I needed during a recent retreat that was very challenging, both physically and emotionally.

Thank you, Chelsea Jackson Roberts, for sharing your inclusive practices and experiences with us. They are truly gifts that keep on giving!