Month: April 2010

art, creativity, yoga

Step 101: The People’s Republic of Vinyasa

Christa Avampato

When I signed up for my yoga teacher training at Sonic, one of the requirements they told us about was a trance dance. I had no idea what this was. Johanna, one of my teachers, told us “you will love it.” I wasn’t sure about it – the description reminded me of a rave minus any of the substances normally associated with that kind of party. But hey, this training is all about getting out of our comfort zone and being open to new experiences so I decided to go along quietly.

Today I had the extreme pleasure of getting to practice and trance dance with Shiva Rea, the guru whom many of my teachers have practiced with for many years. Everyone within the sound of her voice feels her glow. Her only instruction for the trance dance was to “let it all go.” There’s no right way or wrong way to dance – we just had to let the music move through us spontaneously. No plans, no regrets, no patterns. “All our lives we struggle and struggle and struggle, when all we really need to do is let go,” Shiva said. And let go we did. All of us.

Being in the presence of over 100 people moving to their own rhythm, I got swept away in their current. In the process of being swept away, I was able to release and just be, in a way that I never have before. There we all were, twisting, turning, chanting, breathing. All on our own and all together, all at once. It felt like for a moment we weren’t on the lower east side of Manhattan. We had entered another realm where the energy we created could actually be held in the palms of our hands. That energy was a living, breathing entity that belonged to all of us. We were individuals, and yet we were all clearly citizens of the People’s Republic of Vinyasa. Born and raised.

experience, yoga

Step 100: Open the Heart

Christa Avampato

“Enlightenment means opening the chest, and thereby opening the heart. That’s a worthy goal.” ~ Keith, my yoga teacher

Keith is my anatomy teacher for my yoga teacher training program. Despite his modesty, he has an insane amount of knowledge about the body, about moving someone else’s body, and about the body’s positioning to the world around it. He’s also a little sarcastic and contrarian so that makes me like him even more.

In our class today, he emphasized the need to focus on opening. “Forget about what a manual tells you to do or what a teacher tells you to do or what some guru tells you do. Just minimize pain,” he told us. “If your knee hurts when you have a certain alignment, then change the alignment or end up with bad knees.” Straight-forward. No nonsense. Exactly my kind of teacher.

Keith really made us get under the hood of our practice and consider what it is we’re all really trying to do. Put aside all those textbook answers of improve our health, increase flexibility, etc. “Enlightenment means opening the chest, and thereby opening the heart. That’s a worthy goal,” he told us.

So now imagine if every asana we ever took, every meditation practice we ever did, every breath we ever took had that same goal. Open the heart. What if that becomes the only thing we ever tell ourselves we have to do? What doors begin to open and what doors do we choose to close? What opportunities do w seek out and take and what opportunities do we just let pass on by? With that kind of clear direction, open the heart, we now have a lens to look through for our every action and every day. Open the heart, and that’s enough.

choices, decision-making

Step 99: Planning for the Future

Christa Avampato

“Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.” ~ Martin Luther King Jr.

The future is a funny thing – we do our best to shape it, even when we know it has a mind and a plan of its own. I don’t think our planning efforts are a waste. I just think we have to be prepared to change direction, and even to change our convictions, when presented with new, compelling information. We were meant, as a species, to evolve.

I’ve found that a lot of prep work that I thought I was doing for a certain path has served me well as I took a completely different direction, often one I never imagined. My theatre work lead me to yoga and gave me the best business training of my life. My time living in Florida gave me an amazing mentor and taught me the art of fundraising. That fundraising work led me to join a nonprofit board once I had crossed back over to the for-profit world with a bank (go figure!) My unique childhood lead me to become a writer. Groundwork is laid when we’re not looking. After all, we need to put down the tracks before the train can arrive.

Often the plans we’re making don’t turn out to be for the result we assumed. And that doesn’t matter. Plant that tree. Go on that trip. Take that class. Meet that person who showed up in your life when you least expected it, and smile. There’s no telling where this all will lead, and truthfully where it’s leading is none of your concern. Just show up, heart open, awareness heightened, and just commit to bear witness to what unfolds.

The image above is not my own. It can be found here.

meditation, yoga

Step 98: 18 Minutes of Nothing

Christa Avampato

“Most of our obstacles would melt away if, instead of cowering before them, we should make up our minds to walk boldly through them.” ~ Orison Swett Marden, American author

Tracy is my favorite yoga teacher. She exudes this amazing feeling into every one of her students that lets us all know “I get you.” She’s undeniably, beautifully herself at every moment, and so she gives us the space to be who we are at our very core. She asked us how our training and teaching is going. One of my classmates mentioned that the meditation practice is a little rough. “Is it mind junk?” Tracy asked. “Yes,” said my friend. “Lots of mind junk.”

Tracy thought for a moment and then offered us all this advice. “Sit for 18 minutes a day.” Just sit there and tell yourself that there is no way you’re getting up until that 18 minutes is over. Your mind will reel for a bit. That’s okay. Let it reel. Let it tell you that this is a waste of time, that you have a million other things to do. And then just keep sitting there. The mind will think up excuse after excuse until it finally just calms down and accepts that it is going to have to wait.

Our greatest obstacles are not “out there.” They aren’t our jobs or our friends or family or relationships or neighbors or finances. Our greatest obstacles, the great big ones that get in the way and prevent us from radiating our beauty out into the world, are inside. We house those obstacles inside our own hearts. We can’t think our way out of them. The only way to remove them is to stare them down, and we stare them down by just getting quiet and sitting and being.

It will take some time. These obstacles have been a long time in the making. We have years of mind junk layered on top of them. We need to strip away that junk, let the obstacles lie bare in our hearts, pick them up, and move them out of the way. It’s a long haul. So just start. One layer at a time. One half of a layer at a time. Whatever you can do. Sit there for 18 minutes and just see what you find. It may turn out to be the 18 best minutes of your day.

The image above is not my own. It can be found here.

choices, decision-making

Step 97: Keep it Together or Take it Apart?

Christa Avampato

In a number of areas of my life, I’ve been thinking about whether to keep it together or take it apart:

Online – do I set up a new blog or twitter feed to explore some new topics or do I keep it all centralized here on this blog?

Entrepreneurship – do I just choose one idea for a new company I’d like to start or do I try to whip up a combination of a few of the ideas?

Vacations – do I link a few together for an extended break or take smaller trips that give me more frequent, albeit shorter, breaks throughout the year?

Work-life balance – do I seek to have a schedule that’s more fluid between work time and me time or do I want a line when work ends and me time begins?

There are valid arguments for keeping it together or taking it apart. What I’m wrestling with is which option in which areas of my life generate the most happiness. Which is more efficient? Do I want a life that’s jumbled and fragmented because I like to mix it up? Or would I be happier, and maybe even a little bit more sane, if I took on the mantras of simplicity and consolidation?

Lately I’ve found in my life that I have many more questions that answers. “I don’t know,” is a recurring reply that keeps bubbling up to the surface. In Sanskrit there is a wonderful phrase that is often used when a student asks her guru a question: “neti, neti” (“not this, not this”). The connotation of the phrase has come to be “maybe, maybe not” or “it depends…”

When I consider these questions about keeping parts of my life together or taking them apart, I often feel myself shaking my head slightly and silently repeating, “neti, neti.” I’m wondering now if we should just test it out without worries that we may have to fold and walk away if our new experiments don’t work out the way we want them to. Keep some of it together, take some of it apart, and see how it goes. The prana will point the way.

books, writing

Step 96: Don’t Save Yourself

Christa Avampato

I’ve been trying to space out my Examiner.com posts, limiting them to 2 per month. Guidelines at Examiner require writers to publish once per month to be considered active. A few months ago, I found a slew of great entrepreneurs who I wanted to feature so I spaced them out to last me through the middle of the year. I was saving up the great content to share in the coming months just in case I didn’t find any great leads in the near future.

In the past few weeks, I’ve gotten referrals and requests from entrepreneurs asking me to feature them in the column. Some came in from entrepreneurs I’ve featured before and friends of those entrepreneurs. (They travel in tight circles!) Some have read the column and pitched me a story about their business. I’m proud of the content I’ve put out there, and in return more good content is finding its way to me, even when I’m looking for it.

Anne Lamott, my favorite author, wrote a book called Bird by Bird. When I was a teenager, that book made me want to be a writer. (It’s out of print now which I think is completely ridiculous, but luckily it is available for the Kindle.) On the topic of giving, which all writers do every moment of every day, she says, “it is only when I go ahead and decide to shoot my literary, creative wad on a daily basis that I get any sense of full presence.” She’s hilarious and truthful and right.

We have to keep showing up and giving the best we’ve got everyday, whether or not we’re writers. It doesn’t behoove us, it doesn’t behoove anyone, to hoard our talents and stories and souls. Those who give will always find that there’s no end to what they will receive in return.

The image above is not my own. It can be found here.

health, writing

Step 95: Write for Mental Health

Christa Avampato

A lot of people ask me how and why I find the time to write every day. After almost 3 years of keeping this blog and nearly a year and half of making sure to write every day, writing is a habit for me. I brush my teeth, eat (at least) 3 meals a day, and I write. It’s a lens for everything I do. Some days, I feel like I really get it right. And some days, I really get it wrong. Every day I’m a happier person because I’m a writer. It helps me live a better life, so I keep doing it.

For the past few months, I’ve been getting a daily email from Psychology Today. The handful of articles they send to me are all centered around a specific theme. A few weeks ago, the theme was the positive effect that writing has on our mental health. One of the articles lists some scientific studies that have been explored the link between writing and good mental health, and provides some tips on how to get your write on.

Writing’s not a magic bullet. It doesn’t cure everything, fix everything, or heal every wound. It doesn’t protect us. It can’t save us. What it can do is help us process. It can help us get by, by helping us get through. And that’s good enough reason for me to keep going.

Easter, holiday, religion, Spring

Step 94: Easter

Christa Avampato

Easter Sunday – this was always my favorite holiday when I was a kid. We would all pack up and go to my Grammy’s house. We’d eat a delicious meal, followed by lots of candy. We’d hang out and the flowers would be blooming as everyone smiled in their very best Sunday clothes. Every Easter I spend some time remembering those times, missing them, and so grateful that we had that time together.

Because of all of my yoga training this weekend I didn’t go home for Easter this year. This morning I got an e-card from my mom that concluded with “Happy Easter. Happy Spring. Happy Everything.” All religious affiliations aside, that’s how I think of Easter. A time to wish everyone ‘happy everything’. (And I have to say I’ve been thoroughly impressed with the incredible e-cards I’ve been getting lately. They are elaborate and stunning. I’d like to keep them in an on-line library of some kind! Check out Blue Mountain cards and Jacquie Lawson.)

I also received a message from my friend, Moya, about her upcoming trip to DC. She wished me a Happy Easter along with this message, “I like the idea of sacrifice and of enduring and being rewarded in the end.” I’m with Moya and her beautiful sentiment. Everyday we make sacrifices for the sake of the long-haul. We hope all of our hard work and effort pay off in the long-run even when that hope seems foolish in the short-run. Easter reminds us that persevering in the face of difficulty, keeping the faith when we have no practical reason to do so, and continuing to show up with the very best we have to offer today despite the troubles we faced yesterday and will likely face tomorrow, has a magic, a power that just cannot be explained rationally. It’s just pure faith.

I love Easter and Spring because they show us that our future, our own re-birth, is in our hands AND helped along by a mystical, beautiful, universal energy. Whether you celebrate Easter as a religious holiday or not, I hope that this sense of possibility and the beauty of burgeoning life after a very long winter is yours today and every day going forward. Happy Easter. Happy Spring. Happy Everything.

The image above is not my own. I can be found here.

technology, tradition, yoga

Step 93: 6,000 years ago and decades down the line

Christa Avampato

I am currently studying for my yoga teacher certification, carrying on a tradition that is more than 6,000 years old. At the same time I started this certification process, I also took on a new job where I spend my days thinking about mobile technology and its useful application to everyday life now and in the years ahead. I have one foot in two very different worlds. The irony isn’t lost on me.

When I have tried to reconcile the paradox in my mind, I hit a dead-end. How do I stay true to an ancient practice and stay equally focused on the cutting edge of personal technology that is set to rival any science fiction model to-date? “Why do you have to?” Brian asked me. “Sounds perfectly balanced to me. Upper chakras. Lower chakras.” I think he really wanted to tell me, “Stop worrying about nothing and just accept that we spend our present living in both the future and the past. That’s life, sister.” But he didn’t – he’s too good a coach to say something like that.

I like this idea of innovative thinking coupled with ancient study. It helps me realize that we really are on a continuum, especially when we consider how the world around us is evolving and changing with our hearts and minds and bodies remain a blessed constant. Even 6,000 years ago in caves in India, where yoga began, people longed for peace and safety and love. They longed for belonging to an energy, a life-force, prana far more vast than they could be alone. They had a thirst for knowledge. They were curious. They were creative.

This constancy of spirit is a welcome thought to ponder when we consider how quickly everything around us is changing. We can feel overwhelmed by technology and communications and the great speed of life. We don’t have to be. In our hearts, we are all the same. We have been for thousands of years, and likely will be ages and ages hence.

The image above is not my own. It can be found here.

choices, decision-making

Step 92: Settling

Christa Avampato

Brian often uses the following phrase when I talk about “ideals” – the ideal job, relationship, apartment, friendships, life: “you get what you settle for.” I’ve been sitting with that phrase lately because something about it didn’t sit right with me. I have never thought of myself as someone who settles for anything. And then this weekend I realize that I’m exactly the kind of person who settles. We all are. We all get a job, choose a place to live, develop relationships, decide how to spend our free time. So there’s no more need for me to worry about settling because settling really just means choosing a path, making a decision. In this light, settling doesn’t sound bad at all.

We all settle, but the question is what are we willing to settle for? Said another way, what is it that’s going to make us happy and want to get up out of bed today. Either it’s something that makes us really happy or something that doesn’t. It either leaves us fulfilled or it doesn’t. Brian, as usual, is right. What we end up with is what we decide is good for us. We do indeed get what we settle for – it’s a matter of choice.