Author: Christa Avampato

The short of it: Writer. Health, education, and art advocate. Theater and film producer. Visual artist. Product geek. Proud alumnae of the University of Pennsylvania (BA) and the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia (MBA). Inspired by ancient wisdom & modern tech. Proliferator of goodness. Opener of doors. Friend to animals. Fan of creative work in all its wondrous forms. I use my business skills to create passion projects that build a better world. I’ve been called the happiest New Yorker, and I try hard to live up to that title every day. The long of it: My career has stretched across Capitol Hill, Broadway theatre, education, nonprofit fundraising, health and wellness, and Fortune 500 companies in retail, media, entertainment, technology, and financial services. I’ve been a product developer and product manager, theater manager, strategic consultant, marketer, voice over artist, , teacher, and fundraiser. I use my business and storytelling to support and sustain passion projects that build a better world. In every experience, I’ve used my sense of and respect for elegant design to develop meaningful products, services, programs, and events. While building a business career, I also built a strong portfolio as a journalist, novelist, freelance writer, interviewer, presenter, and public speaker. My writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, PBS.org, Boston.com, Royal Media Partners publications, and The Motley Fool on a wide range of topics including business, technology, science, health, education, culture, and lifestyle. I have also been an invited speaker at SXSW, Teach for America, Avon headquarters, Games for Change, NYU, Columbia University, Hunter College, and the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America. The first book in my young adult book series, Emerson Page and Where the Light Enters, was acquired by a publisher and launched in November 2017. I’m currently working on the second book in the series. A recovering multi-tasker, I’m equally at home in front of my Mac, on my yoga mat, walking my rescue dog, Phineas, traveling with a purpose, or practicing the high-art of people watching. I also cut up small bits of paper and put them back together as a collage artist. My company: I’m bringing together all of my business and creative career paths as the Founder of Double or Nothing Media: • I craft products, programs, and projects that make a difference; • I build the business plans that make what I craft financially sustainable; • I tell the stories that matter about the people, places, and products that inspire me. Follow my adventures on Twitter at https://twitter.com/christanyc and Instagram at https://instagram.com/christarosenyc.
choices, clarity, yoga

Beginning: To Focus, We Need to Stop, Assess, and Choose

Christa Avampato

To move a project forward, focus is necessary. You can’t know what beat to march to unless you can hear the drum. Without at least a general idea of where to go, a lot of effort is spent wandering around aimlessly. I’m an efficiency junky and I hate wasting time, or worse yet having someone else waste my time, so focus is incredibly important to me.

Stop and Get Clear
Compass Yoga is beginning to occupy a great portion of my life, which is what I’ve been working toward for the past 18 months. It’s very much the work of my lifetime, or many lifetimes, and it’s my legacy. I feel blessed to have found this calling so early on in my life and to have so much clarity on its direction and purpose. My yoga practice and teaching is very much focused on its therapeutic aspects and the relief it can provide us for both mental and physical wellbeing.

To get to this clarity, I had to really put aside to outside influences, get quiet, and listen. There were lots of people who wanted to send me off in different directions once I finished my first leg of yoga teacher training. I am very grateful that they were so interested, but when I really stopped and considered their advice, I just couldn’t follow their instructions and be authentic. I had to go my own way and forge my own path. It’s the message I received in my daily meditation practice and it’s the one that felt most worthwhile.

Assessment Time – Take Off the Blinders and Expand the Mind
Once I knew I wanted to have a therapeutic focus in my teaching, I took a look at the landscape of where to take further training and where to begin looking for opportunities to teach. I quickly realized that few training programs focus on therapeutics (which will be another focus of Compass Yoga once I build up the organization a bit more) and there is an incredible amount of need for it. I hit the opportunity jackpot with this road, and it dovetailed perfectly with my own unique personal experience with yoga.

I found my way to yoga for therapeutic purposes and it made a tremendous difference in my life. Finding this same emphasis as my teaching purpose brought all of my experiences, as challenging as they were, full circle. It gave them great value and purpose. Once I realized all of this available opportunity and all that I have to give in this realm, I felt like someone took off the blinders that I have been wearing for so many years. Now I see opportunity everywhere.

Choice – the Final Frontier
I quickly realized that I could easily spin myself around in a circle if I didn’t narrow down my business development efforts to a population or a cause that I feel most passionately about. There’s no end to the amount of work that can be done in therapeutic yoga and it’s easy to get caught up in wanting to help everyone. I’ve always found that by trying to serve everyone, you serve no one well. I had to choose, and choose I did.

How I chose to focus on helping veterans and their families
I found my way to yoga as a means of recovery – from trauma, stress, anxiety, and insomnia. By my early twenties, I found that my mind and body were sufficiently battered. Yoga helped me to pick up the pieces and put myself back together again. Over time, it helped to heal old and new wounds alike and continues to do so. It became so much more than an exercise I did on a mat. It became a way of life. I live my practice; it’s always with me and within me and that’s a powerful possession to have.

A Teacher Finds Her Students
My goal with my teaching is to help others like me, others who feel battered, beaten down, or lost, and want very much to feel independent and in control of their own lives again. When I hear and read the stories of veterans, when I hear the stats of how much help they and their families need, on some very basic level I understand that need. I have never been into battle as they have. I’ve never even held a weapon of any kind. I do personally understand the aftermath of trauma and what it does to a family, particularly to children. I understand profound, irreversible loss, grief, and guilt. I understand the feeling of not being whole, present, and engaged. I’ve been there, too.

Yoga, which literally translates to “union”, helped me to bring it all back together for me and I know I can use it to help veterans and their families. The practice gave me direction, discipline, and an outlet to process and feel my feelings so that I could move on, so that I could transcend. No matter what the cause, that’s what all people in trauma are looking for – not a way to forget but a way to move on and honor all that we learned in the process. Yoga gets us there. It takes time and patience, but the door is open if we have the courage to walk through.

business, yoga

Beginning: Compass Yoga Finds a Home at the St. Denis Hotel

Christa Avampato
80 East 11th Street, Compass Yoga's new home

“The journey of a thousand miles begins beneath one’s feet.” ~ Lao-tzu, Chinese philosopher

Tucked away on a quiet section of East 11th Street, there’s literally a tower of healing. Formerly the St. Denis Hotel, 80 East 11th Street is home to private practice wellness practitioners, now including Compass Yoga. I’ll be teaching yoga private clients and very small group classes at this address.

I learned about the building through an ad on Craig’s List. That ad led me to one place  that wasn’t exactly right for me, though that place led me to connect with the building’s Facebook page where I posted a message and got a number of responses. Today I picked up the keys to a space I’ll be renting on an hourly basis, and took a look at a few additional space so that I can have a network of options for added flexibility in my client scheduling. I took the advice of my dear friend, Lon, and celebrated this big yesterday evening. Today, I’m rolling up my sleeves and getting down to work on my business development plans. Time to build a client base!

Breaking the chicken and egg cycle of commercial real estate
There’s a tough paradigm about being a private practice practitioner of any kind: it’s tough to start to build a client book without an office space and it’s tough (and expensive!) to commit to office space without having a client book. So what’s an enterprising lady to do? Set her priorities / nonnegotiables and plan to move forward. Here’s what mine looked like:

Priorities / nonnegotiables
Easy access by a number of subway lines
Quiet
Safe space – for client and for me
Doorman
Clean space conducive to healing
Rent by the hour at a reasonable rate
Opportunity to cancel if I needed to
No lease signing or commitment of hours required

Action plan:
Decide if there is an amount of money I’m willing to lose on the space – could I afford to rent it to do my practice teaching with friend?
Poke around Craig’s List to get an idea of going rates for this kind of space
Identify a few key possibilities to call and email to ask LOTS of questions
Check out the spaces in person if they pass the sniff test via phone and email
Establish a network of spaces to call on when I book a client

Knowing what you want is half the battle
This set of priorities and action plan gave me maximum flexibility, convenience, and an appropriate level of financial and operational risk that I could live with. I was lucky to find an entire building of wellness private practice spaces that I could cobble together to fulfill my priorities. Though I was also prepared to be lucky and very clear on what I needed. If you know what you’re looking for, it’s much easier to find it!

A step in the right direction
So now the fun begins – I start to build up my client base with the confidence that I have a few places that my students and I can call our home. My friend and client, Crystal, has graciously offered to cater sushi when I’m ready for my grand opening reception in the space. There’s an invite heading to an inbox near you!

I’m ready to dive in and see where all of this takes me in due time. It feels so good to begin. I am continually amazed by the direct correlation between the clarity of our asks of the Universe and its willingness to fulfill those asks just when we need them to fall in to place. Onward and upward in the name of greater healing!

travel, yoga

Beginning: Trading Austin for India in 2012

Christa Avampato

”]This week I had to make the tough decision to let go of the idea of submitting to speak for a second time at SXSW. I had an incredible experience in March speaking about the topic of yoga and creative focusand teaching yoga to SXSW conference participants. The people at SXSW are inspiring and generous. I packed so much learning into those 5 days; it made me feel alive. When I got home, I immediately began thinking about speaking topics for SXSW 2012.

And this in the past few weeks an odd and wonderful possibility came into focus for me. For many years, I have wanted to travel to India, the original seat of yoga. This desire has become increasingly stronger over the past couple of years as I’ve committed more fully to my yoga path – as a student and as a teacher. India is a tough place, and particularly difficult for independent travelers. I have tried to plan a trip before and once I got the tome of a guidebook in the mail, it became immediately apparent that this trip would have to be much more carefully planned and measured than my other globe-trotting adventures. India seemed to be new terrain in every way, though as the birthplace of yoga, a practice I am very deeply committed to, it holds an odd familiarity for me, too. .

My friend, Akash, had a birthday a few weeks ago. I wrote him a simple message on Facebook and got the kindest reply back. He wanted to know when I was finally going to get to India (where he and his wife live now) and said he was prepared to roll out the red carpet. There was something in his simple message and beyond-kind offer that set my imagination on fire. Here was the opportunity I was hoping to find; here was a way to India.

Now of course this trip will cost money and time, and the best time to travel in India is during our winter months. Given the timing of SXSW in March, I needed to make a tough choice – commit to applying to SXSW and letting the chips fall where they may or forgoing the trip to Austin in 2012 in favor of an incredible experience in India. There is something about this magical time in my life that makes India feel like the right fit. I feel like I am about to break open and free, about to start zooming along my path, and a trip to India to experience yoga in place of origin seems to be in order.

So bring on the swirls of color, the jasmine and saffron, the bustle, the crowds. Austin, I’ll miss you, though India is pulling so strongly at my heartstrings that I just can’t put it off any longer. I am ready to take it all in, to grow and learn in its presence and with its guidance. Now I just hope India is ready for me, too.

community service, health, healthcare, wellness, yoga

Beginning: Returning Veterans and Veteran Families, Your Communities Want to Serve You

Christa Avampato

I remember watching the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003 from my couch. It was two days after my birthday and I was sitting in my living room with my sister, Weez. Our eyes were fixed on the television, silent. It was that moment in which I began to turn my attention toward trying to understand the Middle East, trying to understand the sacrifices made by the noble 1% of U.S. citizens who give everything so that the other 99% of us can know freedom. 8 years later I have only begun to scratch the surface.

“The tide of war is receding,” said President Obama in his announcement last night about the draw down of U.S. troops in Afghanistan beginning next month. I heard those words with mixed emotions – happiness that our troops will begin to leave a war zone that has caused so much pain in their lives and the lives of their families, and sadness because I have some concept of the war they will face within themselves when they return home. And it’s this latter point that motivates me to keep pushing forward with Compass Yoga and my focus on using yoga for therapeutic purposes to help people dealing with the effects of PTSD.

This motivation led me to attend the New York State Health Foundation’s event “Paving the Path Back Home: Mobilizing Communities to Meet the Needs of Returning Veterans“. The purpose of the event is best summarized by a short video that was shown during Colonel David Sutherland‘s speech: “When our vets return from serving their country, let’s make sure their country is ready to serve them.” There are a lot of concerned community members who want to help; I am one of them. There are a lot of veterans and their families who want and need help when they return home. This conference wanted to provide information and inspiration to close the gap between the two.

New York State Health Foundation‘s President and CEO James Knickman gave the opening remarks and Colonel David Sutherland, Special Assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – Warrior and Family Support at The Department of Defense, gave a heart-stopping speech. It was part of his 50 States in 50 Weeks tour to raise awareness about the needs of returning veterans and their families. He didn’t use notes. He never paused. He never cracked, and every word carried a strength and profound emotion that made every listener sit up and take note. By the end of his speech I had an enormous lump in my throat and teary eyes. After his last word, I shot up out of my seat to join the standing ovation faster than I ever have in any audience. (You can learn more about Colonel Sutherland’s initiative Vets Prevail by visiting this Facebook page and website.)

A few facts revealed at the conference
The conference sought to dispel a number of rumors about the process of returning home from deployment:

– 1/3 of returning vets receive an inadequate amount of care. 1/3 of returning vets receive no care at all, to say nothing of the lack of care of families of veterans.

– “We don’t come home to big government. We come home to our communities. We come home to you. We trust you.” ~ Colonel David Sutherland. Most returning veterans and their families seek help, support, and services in their communities, not on military bases. This makes the development of community-based plans crucial to their health and wellness.

– There is a “Sea of Good” out there. There are 4,000+ vet organizations in the U.S. The challenge is not finding people who want to help, it’s connecting those people to the veterans, who aren’t always readily visible in their communities.

– The DOD and the VA are two separate government agencies and there is a good-sized gap that exists between them. Community-based organizations should focus on helping to fill that gap, not compete with the VA. As Dr. Alfonso Bates, Chief Officer of Readjustment Counseling Service at the VA so simply said, “There is plenty of work to go around. Cooperation is the key.”

– Welcome home events are incredibly valuable experiences for returning vets, and they are only the tip of the iceberg. If organizations and individual community members really want to help veterans and their families, then they need to commit to be in this for the long haul. The needs of vets will change over time, and we have to be with them through those changes.

– And this last point is the one that really got me. It was confirmation of another piece of work that I know is so critical for Compass Yoga to carry-out. The children of vets are a population that needs so much support, and they get precious little of what they need.

A personal note
I’ve talked on this blog about my own struggles with bouts of PTSD brought on by specific incidents in my life. These incidents gave me only a small idea of what these returning vets are going through. What you don’t know is that I also understand what it’s like to be a child raised in a traumatic environment, to watch family members whom I love so fiercely wrestle with trauma and feel helpless in the process. And it’s that experience that I know in great detail, and where I am completely confident that I can guide children of returning vets toward happy, healthy, productive lives.

I will put those children first, where children deserve to be
I will never accept that kids are too far gone to be helped, nor will I let them be defeated
I will not quit on them or let them quit on themselves
And if and when they fall down, I will make sure to help them lift themselves up

New York City, yoga

Beginning: NYC, Can I Get An OM? Me and 8,000 NY Yogis Welcome Summer with Open Arms in Times Square

Christa Avampato

NYC yogis welcome summer http://bornintocolor.tumblr.com
I welcomed the long days of the year by wrapping up what felt like a too-long day in the middle of Times Square. Douglass Stewart taught a yoga class right in the heart of it all. He helped us to focus on how to feel a part of all of that energy without letting it frazzle our nerves. Could we be present and embrace the energy without letting it burn us out? Could we focus on internal hum as we embraced the outer hum of the city all around us, and in the process could we still have fun with it all? By the end of the class, I found myself feeling so much gratitude for the energy that surrounded us. It is a conscious, deliberate choice to live in this crazy city, and I’m thankful for its energy and it dynamism. So are the 8,000 yogis who took in one of three classes held today in Times Square in honor of the solstice.

Solstice 2007
When I moved back to New York in 2007, I attended the yoga in Times Square event for the first time and wrote this post about the experience. It was a much smaller event then. I had been back for all of 10 days and I hadn’t found a job yet so I had plenty of time to get re-acquainted with New York. I spent the first part of my career in Times Square managing Broadway Shows, and spent some time living on 49th & 9th just above the beloved Coffee Pot. In many ways, this area of the city helped to sculpt my view of the world as an adult because for many years this handful of blocks was my world.

Throughout Douglass’s class, I thought back to the summer solstice of 2007. I distinctly remember being on my mat in Savasana and feeling some street dust (or what I hoped was only street dust!) fly up my nose. I was a newly-minted MBA, a novice blogger, and a little hazy at best about my future. I felt adrift but distinctly certain that I was meant to be in New York City. I couldn’t articulate why I felt that I had to be in New York; all I knew is that it felt like home and I was craving to feel at home.

Looking back, I really should have been scared out of my mind with no job, a few suitcases of clothes, and a shared apartment sublet in Astoria, Queens, graciously offered up by a friend of mine. I had enough money to survive for a month or so and then I would hit rock bottom. And here I was lying on the ground in the middle of Times Square focusing on trying to find peace in the madness. I am more optimistic than I give myself credit for!

Solstice 2011
Fast forward to 2011, and I am amazed at the transformation – in my yoga and in my life. New York has indeed become my home, I am financial stable, earn part of my income from writing and teaching yoga, and have put the art and science of business together by beginning my own company, Compass Yoga. Despite all of this change, I laid down in the middle of Times Square on my yoga mat, still excited about the future, still soaking in all the vibes the same way I did 4 years ago. Though I could mentally register all the changes that have taken place in my life in the past 4 years, I was struck by how much my body’s experience of this year’s solstice class mirrored my experience 4 years ago.

New York, can I get an OM?
Toward the end of the class, Douglass asked us to do a round robin OM in which you take a breath when you need one and just continue the rolling OM chant. It’s one of my favorite ways to close a practice. The magical part was when our OMs were complete. The OM kept rolling in the city around us. The low hum that the city has sounded remarkably similar to the OM created by all of us. Unity, yoga, at its very best.

family, future, history, peace, story, writing

Beginning: Writing Out and Learning from the Ugly Parts of My Experience

Christa Avampato

From http://kichigaikikyokagome.deviantart.com
“Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation.” ~ Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love

We run from the imperfect. We want everything to be flawless. We praise beauty; we seek it out; we convince ourselves that we can’t live without it. Ruin is something we have come to dread. To feel ruined it to feel busted up, disappointed, and taken advantage of. We desperately cling to the perfect – in ourselves, in others, in a moment of time. We try to rush through ruin as quickly as possible, and with closed eyes. By running from ruin we are missing so many opportunities for growth and personal evolution.

Dancing with our disappointment
I know this dance well. I have been running from ruin and toward perfection for many, many years. Brian calls this my intricate skill of “maximize this, minimize that.” In other words, I make the most of the good things and try very hard to ignore the bad things, hoping that those bad things will just magically go away. For the record, they don’t. They accumulate until their collective voice is so loud that they must be reckoned with in one way or another.

We can learn a lot from sadness if we’re willing to sit with it
I received a lot of positive feedback from my last two posts – the first about how my dad taught me that the only advice we can take is our own and the second about how a chance encounter with an ex taught me about feeling and transcending anger. So much so, that I’ve decided to take my writing in a very personal direction. I’m at a point in my story where some previously disjointed pieces are starting to fit together in a very powerful way. Steve Jobs said that, “We can’t expect to understand our lives living forward, but only by looking back.” That’s why reflection is so important, why writing it all down and sharing it is critical to our own understanding. All burdens can be borne if we can put them into a story.

Some of the pieces of my story are jagged and uncomfortable and some of them are smoothly crafted. Somehow, they’re all finding a way to come together and co-exist side-by-side, not stealing the limelight from one another, but sharing in it equally. It’s quite a surprise, even though I’ve been working on this very hope for such a long time. I never thought I’d realize it, and certainly not so early on in my life. And while this surprise is of tremendous benefit to me, I want it to benefit you, too, because I want you to have the same experience of holding up a mirror to the parts of you, of others, and of your experience to see that the good, the bad, and the ugly are all extraordinary teachers.

For a long time I vilified my dad, and many of those reasons were justifiable. What I shunned for too long were all of the lessons he taught me, albeit in a manner that I would never wish on anyone else. He was a cold, austere, sad man, and my family bore the brunt of that for a long time. What I didn’t know as a teenager, what there was no way for me to know, was that his behaviors and his personal history that caused those behaviors, would give me the tools I need to do the work I was meant to do with Compass Yoga.

This is about honoring our whole self, not about making lemonade
And this is not some pathetic attempt by a hopeful gal to make lemonade out of lemons, to make the most of what she’s got even if that isn’t much at all. It’s about honoring every part of our past; it’s about recognizing that in every moment, in every experience, there is a very deliberate, necessary teaching that sets us up to live our dharma, our path. We need the painful, sad parts of our past just as much as we need the joy and light. And I would argue that we need them in equal measure. The poetic Dolly Parton is famous for saying, “The way I see it, if you want rainbows then you gotta put up with the rain.” Truer words were never spoken.

So here in my promise to you: you will learn about my own personal story, layer by layer, piece by piece, even the ugly parts. Especially the ugly parts. It will be revealed in as thoughtful and sacred a manner as I can muster, and you will eventually see the complete picture. None of it will be gratuitous and all of it is intended so that you can benefit from these two learnings:

1.) where and what we come from has every bit to do with who we eventually become

and even more importantly,

2.) the depth of our roots does not determine the spread of our wings. We can fly as high as we choose to fly regardless of how far down we find ourselves at any point in time. It’s all based on our will to find our way. And I intend to find mine.

happiness, loss, love, relationships, yoga

Beginning: Healing By Chance – A Story of Feeling and Transcending Anger

Christa Avampato

“Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future.” ~ Paul Boese

I had an odd encounter on Friday that I wasn’t expecting, not at that moment, not ever. I was sitting on the steps of the main New York Post Office at 31st Street reading a magazine as I waited for my friend Jeff’s improv show to start that was playing around the corner. It was a nice night outside and I had just a few minutes to spend before heading over to the theatre.

A stranger I knew
A man stopped down on the sidewalk and stared at me. It was the guy I was dating when my apartment building fire happened almost two years ago. He was a gem in the immediate aftermath of the incident and showed is terribly ugly true colors not long after. His behavior and words were really hurtful; he kicked me when I was already down and out. We stopped seeing each other shortly after the fire, and I chose to completely cut off any contact with him. I was really, really angry with him and I had bigger issues to contend with. The last thing I needed in my life was someone like him, in any capacity.

He climbed the steps and asked if he could sit next to me, and then made a wise crack inquiring about whether or not my current apartment had caught fire, too. A very insensitive, cruel comment, especially given all of the trauma that unraveled in the months immediately following the fire. Sadly, I wasn’t surprised. Then he began his barrage of personal questions about my life, some I answered and some I left intentionally vague. I actually didn’t ask him a single question about his life because I didn’t really care what the answers were. I wasn’t happy to see him and I wasn’t unhappy to see him. I didn’t feel numb; I just didn’t feel anything. Not about him and not about us. All that anger was gone. I was shocked at how calm I felt. The conversation was only a few minutes long because I had to leave to go see Jeff’s show. We said good-bye – he went his way and I went mine – and I never looked back.

Automatic healing
Just prior to this chance encounter, I was talking to Brian about what I hoped to be able to give veterans and their families who I work with through Compass Yoga. Brian mentioned that I may want to focus on helping them heal to the point that they don’t even have to put themselves through the motions of yoga. The calm they gain through the practice with me would be with them always so that the stress response never even kicks in unless they truly need it to get themselves out of true danger. I wasn’t sure how this would work. though I told Brian I’d think about that idea.

After my brief encounter on the post office steps, I completely understood what Brian was talking about with the veterans and their families. If I had this encounter a year ago, it’s likely that I would have felt nervous, that I would have felt the need to meet his snarky comment about my fire with a snarky retort. Instead, I just told him a few details of my life in response to his questions. I was polite and detached, with no feeling about ever hearing from him or seeing him again. I was so angry with him for a long time, and I realized in this instant that I had found my way to the other side of anger as a much better person. A friend of mine once said, “You really know it’s over when you have nothing left to say.” True statement. I had moved on, completely.

The sweetness of healing found
As I walked toward the theatre to watch Jeff’s show, I thought about our immense capacity for healing every wound, no matter how deep, no matter how long it’s been with us. I found a way to feel anger and then transcend it in a powerful way. In the past year I’ve spent so much time caring for myself and building a life I truly love. It happened so gradually and with so much hard work that I’ve never taken the time to really reflect on just how much healing I’ve done, just how different I am. “You’ve come a long way, baby,” I thought to myself. “A long way. And it feels so good.”

family, forgiveness, relationships

Beginning: A Lesson From My Dad – The Only Advice You Can Really Take Is Your Own

Christa Avampato

In the last few months, I’ve been thinking about my father a lot. I had a very poor relationship with him and he passed away in a very unfortunate manner before I ever had the chance to build a better one with him. That was 19 years ago.

All this time later, I am still trying to make sense of it all – his own path and how it has influenced mine. The pieces are starting to come together as I make my way forward with Compass Yoga, but we have a long way to go and because he’s no longer here, I am left to figure it out on my own. Someday when it makes sense in my own mind I’ll tell you about it – why our short and sad story unfolded the way that it did and all the good that came from the hard lessons I learned along the way. Until then, I have just one lesson he taught me that plays over and over again in my mind: the only advice you can really take is your own.

People are opinionated by nature, some of us voice our opinions louder and more clearly than others. We all have the ability to judge, and we exercise that ability often. Whenever you tell someone about an idea you have or the plans you’re making, there is bound to be someone who tells you that it just isn’t possible to do what you want. And to that, my father would certainly answer those skeptics with, “I know better than you because I’m the one who’s living my life.” For a long time, I thought this was a very pompous point-of-view. Now as an adult it makes so much sense to me. Our greatest wisdom comes from within and so we are our own best coach.

Certainly we can and should listen to the advice of others, whether we want it or not, if for no other reason than the voices of the skeptics will actually help us to refine our own opinions. What my father would caution us against is allowing someone’s opinion about our choices to become our truths. The only truth you can live authentically is your own. It comes from your heart and your gut. It is prajna, that knowing beyond knowing. It can’t be articulated or justified through logic, only felt. It is calm, collected, and without end. In Sanskrit we pay tribute to it with the mantra Om Tat Sat – all that is the truth. We access it by getting quiet, and allowing it to have its wise and thoughtful say.

So on this Father’s Day, I’m not missing my father but rather working on feeling grateful for what he had to teach me for the short time I knew him. All these years later, we are still a work in progress, he and I, and slowly I am beginning to find the great value that lies hidden even within our toughest experiences. I’m working on making them mean something, and not just for me, but for the world, too.

art

Beginning: How to Start Collecting Art

Christa Avampato

I’ve been thinking about dabbling in the art collecting world. Now, I’m not running out to buy an original Matisse or Picasso today, but I am looking into new artists who I think have real promise and a unique perspective. I have some art in my home and each piece has a special significance to me:

– an oil painting I bought on the street in Soweto, South Africa

– 2 small water colors I purchased on Karlov Most in Prague

– a print of orca whales from my trip to Alaska

– an impressionist style print that my brother-in-law (who happens to be a remarkable painter!) got for me in Chelsea

– a chalk drawing, Beast of the Forest, done by a 6th grader and gifted to me by the Crayola Factory after I did some work with them

– A tucan painted on a feather that I picked up in Costa Rica

– A small collection of photos I took during the month I spent in France before business school

I was surprised to realize that almost all of the art I have I purchased while I was traveling. It’s the best kind souvenir – art captures the essence of the culture where it was created and so it can transport you back to that place just by being in its presence. Though vacations are often filled with a myriad of activities, I always find that it’s the art of the place that I remember most. Incidentally, my framed art pieces were among my only possessions that survived my apartment building fire 2 years ago. I’ve always believed that somehow those pieces of art were supremely protected in an effort to support my own healing that I would need in the aftermath of that event.

In the last few months, I’ve thought about starting to collect art more seriously and went looking for some resources on how to begin. If you’ve ever been curious about taking up this venture, too, here’s what I found:

Jen Bekman
Art collecting has primarily been a pastime of the well-to-do, and there’s a pervading feeling tat if you have to ask too many questions about a piece of art, then OBVIOUSLY you don’t understand it. This is absurd, and Jen Bekman decided to change that. Bekman is a radical in the art world, meaning she didn’t follow anyone else’s road – no matter how well-traveled and time-tested it was – and decided to build her own path instead. At the ripe old age of 32, she opened her own gallery to support new artists and collectors alike. When she established her space on Spring Street in 2003, Jen wanted it to be a different kind of environment: one where everyone is welcomed as they enter and one that encourages people to ask questions.

Leveraging the power on e-commerce, she also started an online program called 20X200 that brings art to the masses wherever they happen to live. The e-commerce site continually rotates an exclusive collection of photography, prints and paintings, with prices that start at at $20. Makes good sense for emerging artists and collectors alike!

deviantART
I met the fine folks from DeviantART while I was speaking at SXSW last in March. They had set up a gallery space filled with so much beautiful graphic art that I felt like I had fallen down the rabbit hole into a world of vibrant color.

From their website: “deviantART was created to entertain, inspire, and empower the artist in all of us. Founded in August 2000, deviantART is the largest online social network for artists and art enthusiasts with over 13 million registered members, attracting 35 million unique visitors per month.

As a community destination, deviantART is a platform that allows emerging and established artists to exhibit, promote, and share their works within a peer community dedicated to the arts. The site’s vibrant social network environment receives over 100,000 daily uploads of original art works ranging from traditional media, such as painting and sculpture, to digital art, pixel art, films and anime.”

PicassoMio
Is an online clearinghouse of sorts, curating a handpicked collection and offering assistance and guidance to new and seasoned collectors alike.

From their website: “Founded in 1999, PicassoMio is the world’s leading destination to discover curated modern and contemporary art and design. Thousands of art collectors have taken advantage of our hand-picked selections.

As the Internet’s most successful curated original art and design seller, we receive a monthly traffic of 1 Million hits and sales in over 50 countries.”

As I learn more on this new journey, I’ll share what I find. I hope you will, too!

family, risk

Beginning: Honor Your Ancestors, Pick Up Your Head, and Go Out On a Limb

Christa Avampato

Aftermath.com
“Don’t be afraid to go out on a limb. That’s where the fruit is.” ~ H. Jackson Browne via Tiny Buddha

Our vibrancy as a nation is an unsung casualty in this latest economic downturn. I’ve seen too many people hiding their well-founded opinions, particularly if they aren’t “aligned” with senior management, for fear that they’ll be candidates for the pink slip and cardboard box line. I completely understand the fear. Over the past 3 years I’ve watched a lot of truly phenomenal friends and colleagues walk out the door, and not by their own choosing. Good people who put their hearts into their jobs and made enormous sacrifices of their own personal time for the sake of what was best for the companies that employed them. And then they had to suffer through the company talking about their release as a cost savings. It was de-humanizing to say the least, and I want us to productively use our anger over the situation to rise above our fear.

Are we becoming a nation full of people who keep their heads down? What an enormous step backwards. Take a trip over to Ellis Island and it’s easy to see (and feel!) that our nation was founded by some serious risk takers – people who came here with few possessions beyond the clothes on their backs and unable to speak the language. They had no employment, no place to live, and many of them didn’t know a single soul here. How frightening that must have been, and yet they persisted. I’m here because of that persistence. We all are.

To honor their legacy, the legacy of people who risked it all for our sake, we have to take up that same spirit. Start small. Take one tiny step out of your comfort zone. Attempt some audacious project that seems just a bit too big for you. Look around you for the most beautiful dream you can find, gather up your courage, and go out on that limb to get it. It’s waiting for you, and you’ll be better off for throwing the dice to see what happens. We all will be.