Month: August 2014

action, adventure, change

Inspired: Don’t wait until you’re ready

Christa Avampato

“Great people do things before they’re ready. They do things before they know they can do it.” ~Amy Poehler

Lately I’ve been feeling the tug of big life changes. I recognize their knock at the door and I’ve resisted answering for a bit because I felt like I wasn’t quite ready. This week the knock has grown louder and shouted, “I’m not going away so you might as well answer.” And I did, and the message was simple: “It doesn’t matter if you’re ready or not. You’re capable, and you’ll make the best of everything that comes your way. And where there isn’t opportunity, you’ll make it. Have a little faith in you.” Then all I felt was a huge sigh of relief. And I smiled: a big, wide, knowing, peaceful smile. There’s a great, big, beautiful, blank canvas out there just waiting for me and no one can paint it except me. Ready or not (and capable!), here I come!

dreams, time

Inspired: Live your life and forget your age

Christa Avampato

From Pinterest How many times have you caught yourself saying, “I would do X if I were younger, but…” I used to say that a lot, to myself and out loud. I convinced myself that because I’m no longer in my 20s, I had to take the sensible and practical path rather than the one that pulled at my heart. That kind of thinking only leads to more wasted time. Forget your age and think about this: you still have time left, time to reinvent who you are and to do what you love. The past is gone. Focus only on the time ahead and make the most of it.

books, creative process, writing

Inspired: Write from the ending

Christa Avampato

Last night I worked out the ending to the novel that I plan to draft in November as part of National Novel Writing Month. While we live and write nonfiction from the beginning, I’m finding that fiction is best started from the end. I tried to write it from the beginning and I kept getting lost. Now that I know the destination, the path to it is easier (and more fun!) to construct. And this makes me wonder: should I take this novel writing approach to living, too?

action, adventure, dreams

Inspired: How far will you dare to go?

Christa Avampato

Last week when I announced that Compass Yoga would dissolve after 4 years of helping students and teachers access and teach community yoga classes, a friend sent me this quote. I printed it out to hang at my desk. I expect to read it many times over in this new chapter of my life and career as a full-time writer. If you are also about to embark on a path that is both thrilling and frightening, I hope this quote bolsters you up as you design and pursue your own daring adventure.

“The credit belongs to the [woman] who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends herself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if she fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that her place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt

action, adventure, creativity, passion

Inspired: Oprah on the work of finding your calling

Christa Avampato

“We’re all called. If you’re here breathing, you have a contribution to make to our human community. The real work of your life is to figure out your function—your part in the whole—as soon as possible, and then get about the business of fulfilling it as only you can.” ~ Oprah

Somewhere along the way our society decided it was best to be practical rather than passionate, that we had to be much more concerned with the path of least resistance rather that the path that made us feel alive. It became obsessed with back-up plans rather than making and following the plan that made us excited to get out of bed in the morning.

To hell with those ideas.

If all we ever are is practical, then what kind of world will we have? We’ll become a community of people who blindly follows, who buries their collective heads in the sand and does what they’re told. No thank you. I’d prefer not to. I’ll take the hard knocks and the tough lessons and the massive disappointments that sometimes must be faced in order to go out on the edge and see what I can actually do and make and see. The only work we need to do is find that thing that fills us up—body, mind, and spirit. That’s our calling. We all have one. The fun of life, and its meaning, is to find that calling, to pick it up and carry it forward. That’s why we’re here. That’s what I care most about: that you, me, and everyone else finds what they’re called to do and then makes it happen. That’s what the world needs.

fear, growth, strengths

Inspired: Difficulty fuels growth

Christa Avampato

All clay needs a kiln to be made useful. Disappointment, fear, anger, sadness. That’s your kiln. Don’t think of them as forces that work against you but forces that polish you, that make you brighter, more resilient, and brilliant. Trial by fire shows us what we’re made of. It makes us empathic and compassionate and kind. Soldier on and let it do its work while you do yours.

art, creative process, creativity, discovery, imagination, sleep, writing

Inspired: The magic of sleep and its impact on creativity, clarity, and writing

Christa Avampato

Dan Levitin’s latest research on the power of sleep to bolster and ignite creativity is fascinating. For writers, this research is especially valuable because one of our chief tasks is to connect disparate dots of information to create a cohesive story.

Levitin reveals a number of actionable pieces of advice on how to make our sleep cycles most beneficial to our imagination. The brain prioritizes the thoughts we have right before going to sleep and spends a good deal of its sleep time working on them. I’ve been spending time before bed working on my most important personal projects and challenges. The results of this practice have been amazing for me. I’m waking up with insights and connections in my work that I haven’t been able to see in my waking hours. I’ve also been going to bed and waking up hours earlier than usual and that’s tripped a powerful switch, too.

While we often think of creativity as elusive and unexplainable, I’m fascinated to learn how we can engineer it at least to some extent. At the very least there is much we can do to make room for its arrival and help it to feel welcomed and valued. Sometimes all we need is awareness and openness. Sometimes all magic needs is a space to happen. Get some shut-eye and create.

nonprofit, yoga

Inspired: Compass Yoga Closes Its Doors After 4 Years

Christa Avampato
Namaste
Namaste

It is with an incredibly heavy heart, teary eyes, and several boxes of used tissues that I share the news that Compass Yoga, the nonprofit I started 4 years ago with the lofty dream to bring yoga to every person on the planet who wasn’t able to access yoga through traditional classes, has dissolved. Though I tried many avenues to make it financially successful, none of them worked and that stings.

Knowing what to do is important, but knowing what to stop doing is just as important, if not more so. Yoga teaches us that change is inevitable and that we must do our best to see change as an opportunity for growth and learning. Even though I know this is the right choice, it doesn’t make it any less painful to let go of the dream I had for Compass and admit that it just didn’t go the way I had hoped.

We helped hundreds of New Yorkers through our free classes every week, and without our classes our students wouldn’t have been able to learn yoga at all. Compass Yoga received a considerable amount of good press over the years that helped us reach an audience far outside of New York City. We also gave close to 50 new yoga teachers their teaching start by finding and cultivating opportunities for them to teach free classes in our community. It has been an absolute honor to work with all of these people to play a small part in helping them live happier and healthier lives. And goodness, did I learn so much about business, myself, community activism, the economic climate for nonprofits, and yes, yoga, along the way.

In time, I hope all of the good we did overshadows the enormous disappointment and sense of failure I feel right now. These are the tough choices that no one tells you about, the possible conclusion when we try to stretch far beyond what we know how to do or what we think we are capable of doing. When we go way out there into the unknown, we find our edge. And I, without a doubt, have found mine in this realm.

On the upside, I will continue to explore ways that I can personally continue to teach yoga and meditation to the people who need it most. Somewhere in this rain there’s a rainbow and I look forward to finding and following it. Thank you to everyone who has supported Compass Yoga and my dream of it over the years. The light that is in me honors the light that is in each one of you. Namaste.

art, choices, creativity, decision-making, home, writer, writing

Inspired: Cities—other than New York—that are good for writers

Christa Avampato

My friends are leaving New York City by the truckload. Some by choice and some because financially they had no choice. And I get it. This city can chew you up, spit you out, and then look at you like you’re the crazy one for wanting to be treated better. New York City is a crotchety old man.

Though like so many crotchety old men, it is an incredible teacher and good lord has it taught me. I grew up in the dirt of rural America (to this day there is a tractor crossing sign across from my childhood home) but I came of age in New York City. This great gorgeous place changed me and changed my life for the better. I showed me what matters. On these streets I figured out what matters to me and why. It gave me passion and heart and confidence. It gave me and put me through fire (literally and figuratively) but I emerged from the other side polished and transformed in ways I never imagined. New York City showed me what was possible by showing me my potential and daring me to take it.

Like so many of my friends, I am beginning to hear the exit music, or at least the exit music to this New York chapter of my life. And let’s be clear, I want to stay in New York. I fiercely love this city and its people and myself among them. There’s a part of me that will always be Christa in New York. Always. But, as life has shown me so many times before, what I want and what I need are often two very different things. And what I need now, in this moment, may be a change of scene. At least for a little while. At least for right now. Even Joan Didion, a towering figure in the literary world who famously penned her essay “Goodbye to All That” when she left New York for LA, eventually found her way back to Gotham. But she did need to take that journey. She needed to go away to come home again.

There’s a lot of New York in New York, and it may be time for more of us to spread our New York-ness to other places that need inspiration and courage to follow a less traveled, less conventional path. This world can’t stay on its current path of self-destruction and quiet desperation. We have to carve a better way forward.

New York doesn’t need another writer like me, but plenty of other places do. Friends, there’s a lot of blank canvas out there, a lot of stories that need telling, and they’re not coming to us. We have to go to them. We have to get out on the road, discover them, and then get it all down as faithfully and as honestly as we can.

If you’re a writer, or someone who likes to hang around with writers and other creatives, then New York City isn’t your only option to call home. Heck, it’s not even your best option. I recently found two lists (backed up by plenty of data) of cities in the U.S. that are great for writers and New York City isn’t anywhere on them:

This one lists: St. Louis, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Orlando, Minneapolis, Buffalo, Denver, Seattle, and San Francisco.

Another lists: Chicago, Charleston, Austin, Bellingham, Asheville, Washington, D.C., St. Paul, Seattle, Great Barrington, New Orleans, Miami, both Portlands, Ann Arbor, Savannah, Pittsburgh, Jersey City, Iowa City, Portsmouth, and Cambridge.

I have no idea (yet) if any of these cities are right for me. Maybe you don’t either. What they do reveal is that we have options. We always have options. Now, it’s about choices.

art, dreams, film, movie

Inspired: Robin Williams, you were one of the great ones

Christa Avampato

“You must strive to find your own voice. Because the longer you wait to begin, the less likely you are to find it at all. Thoreau said, “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Don’t be resigned to that. Break out!” ~ Robin Williams, Dead Poets Society

I saw Dead Poets Society in the theaters when it first opened. I went with both of my parents, a rare family outing in my house. Robin Williams won my heart that night. That story and his performance changed me from the inside out, forever. He struck a chord within me that made me a dreamer, and has kept me dreaming every day since. He inspired me to go home that night and write a poem entitled “Carpe Diem” as a way to encourage my 13-year-old self to keep striving and reaching for exactly the life I want even though my future at that point didn’t seem very bright to me. He showed me that I have a voice, a point-of-view, a verse to contribute that matters. And that realization is no small gift.

It was with a heavy heart and tear-filled eyes that I heard about his passing yesterday, another brilliant artist taken down by his own demons. I hope from the other side he can now see just how much light he brought to so many of us who needed his humor during our own dark times. Rest in peace.