Category: clarity

clarity, cooking, dreams, Second Step, sleep

Beautiful: Making Bread Overnight and Writing in Dreams

Christa Avampato
From Pinterest
From Pinterest

Bread making and sleep are magical processes. I put flour, salt, yeast, and water into a bowl in specific proportions, mix them up, cover the dough, and let it sit for 20 hours. When I wake up the next morning, it’s transformed into the perfect sticky consistency because I left it alone. When I need a booster shot of inspiration for my writing, I stuff my brain full of information that relates to what I’m trying to write and then I let my brain work it out while I sleep. Just as the light of day starts to filter into my apartment, the words I need start to filter right into my mind as I’m half-awake. I grab my pen and paper to get it all down.

The trick is to give your work what it needs and then walk away. Get the right ingredients into the right environment to work together. Arm yourself with data and information that your brain can sift and mesh together. The process is about you, and it’s also about you getting out-of-the-way. There’s a little mystery in creativity, a little magic inside each of us. There’s a time to work and a time to give up, and we need to do both to come up with something that’s inspired and inspiring.

action, clarity, thankful, time, wishes

Beautiful: Stop Wishing. Start Doing.

Christa Avampato

“Stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone ought to be.” ~ Elizabeth Gilbert, American author

When I wished on a star or the candles on my birthday cake, I used to wish for something I really wanted as if it might just fall down out of the sky and into my life. I used to make lists of things that I wanted to do, or have, or see, or be, hoping that verbalizing them would somehow actualize them. And then one day I realized that none of those wishes ever came true just because I wished for them. Some of them happened because I worked really hard and I almost always had help from other people who shared the same dream and were willing to work just as hard to see it happen. Some of them never happened at all, no matter how hard I worked, and for that I’m very grateful because I’ve ended up in such a good place.

So I stopped wishing for things out there and started wishing for things that would really make a difference: Now I wish for personal strength and courage, for an ever-deeper sense of compassion and understanding for the situations of others, for the opportunities to be useful and helpful to others, and for the ability to be at peace even in times of terrible turbulence. And a funny thing has started to happen: the more I want these things, the more capable I grow to cultivate them. And the more I cultivate them, the more good they do, in my own life and in the lives of others.

As it turns out, I don’t need to wish for any of these things at all. Wanting them for all the right reasons and tirelessly working for them are the surest ways to bring them into being.

change, clarity, courage, meditation, yoga

Leap: When the Going Gets Tough, The Tough Keep Breathing

Christa Avampato
From Pinterest member http://pinterest.com/pntdhorses/

“Sometimes when things are falling apart, they may actually be falling into place.” ~ Marilyn Monroe

I went to meditation class on Monday night and settled in to my seat as I’ve done many times before. Nothing seemed unusual about the beginning of my practice but I was in for a roller coaster of surprises. This is a short story about riding the wave, never giving in, and committing to the long haul.

In a couple of weeks I’m meeting with an accountant to get myself set up as a corporation as I transition into doing more freelance work. I need to come up with a name for my company and I’ve been running up against a wall because of some underlying angst. Since making the leap last week, I’ve been wrestling with how to reconcile my professional interests in product development, writing, and teaching yoga under one corporate roof. I hoped that my meditation class would bring about some inspiration.

As soon as I settled down and closed my eyes, I knew something was wrong. In less than a minute my eyes were tearing up and tears were rolling down my face. My whole body began to feel very heavy and weak, my legs were falling asleep, and I started to feel dizzy. I stretched my legs out in front of me and pins and needles started firing from my feet to my knees. I took a long forward bend in hopes of re-grounding myself. It helped a bit, but not much. I contemplated leaving the class but decided to try to breathe through it. And I’m so glad I did.

With each breath, I felt myself releasing something that was old and stale, something that needed to be sent out to pasture and never heard from again. I’m not even quite sure what it was. Maybe old perceptions of myself or the world, maybe fear and anxiety, maybe a hard shell that had outlived its protective purpose. Underneath, I could feel the green sprouts shooting up, struggling to break new ground, reaching for some air and sunlight. A new day was dawning.

Change is hard. It hurts. It’s scary ad int’s uncomfortable. But if we are willing to hang in there and do the work to cross the chasm, something amazing is waiting for us on the other side and that something is us. We are making our way to exactly who we are meant to be and once we arrive home to our own authenticity, we will look back and realize that all of that work was worthwhile. The journey is long and arduous. It’s full of surprises, good and bad. Don’t turn back. Breathe, and keep going.

choices, clarity, creativity, writer, yoga

Beginning: Create Something Beautiful and Good in 2012

Christa Avampato

“That which you create in beauty and goodness and truth lives on for all time to come. Don’t spend your life accumulating material objects that will only turn to dust and ashes.” ~ Denis Waitley

It’s with more than a bit of irony to find this quote among my reading during the holiday season. It seems that almost everyone except me went on a buying frenzy in the midst of Black Friday madness. Then they got their credit cards statements and logged an unprecedented number of returns. This is a good sign for American society – perhaps we’ve turned a corner when it come to how we think about stuff. It is all just stuff.

I think about stuff a lot because I am, by profession, a product developer. However, most of the products I’ve created aren’t tangible products. They are Broadway shows that inspired people, nonprofit programs that benefited worthwhile causes, and experiences that celebrated our creative spirit.

The tangible products I’ve created over the last few years for my current employer are things I am less than proud of, actual things that I have relegated to the back of my mind, and conveniently left out of my portfolio. Creating them has afforded me a salary that has helped me to pay back a good chunk of my student loans from business school and to save an emergency fund as well as another savings account so that I can chase my dream of starting my own nonprofit. I am grateful for this gift, particularly in a time in our economy when so many people have struggled financially.

If I think about the last three years of my professional career strictly from a product development perspective, they have been wildly pointless. I have churned out product after product that I don’t believe in, would never buy, and would never counsel anyone else to buy. These three years were really just about survival in a bleak financial market. The joy has gone out of my work.

Personally, these three years have been staggeringly exceptional. I have learned more in this time than I ever thought possible – about myself, the world, and my purpose. I have made oodles of friends along the way, reinforced my confidence and convictions, and found my voice as a teacher, writer, and leader. It has been nothing short of a blessing. It has been a transformation. I found and live the dream of my life, even if at the moment it is only after regular working hours.

This dichotomy – an enriching personal life and a stagnant professional life – has been brewing for some time now. I’d say it was at a slow boil for about a year, a rolling boil for another year more, and has been at a flat out screaming boil over 2011. The only thing that can possibly come next is a quick evaporation altogether. And that’s rather what my latest career decision feel like – an evaporation of what doesn’t matter in favor of activities that do matter, to me and to the world. Compass Yoga is my attempt to follow Denis Waitley’s advice to build something beautiful and good.

It’s going to be a beautiful 2012 – just wait and see!

change, choices, clarity, inspiration, invention, writing

Beginning: How to Recognize an Ending

Christa Avampato

My year of writing about new beginnings is winding down. A few more days and my new writing adventure for 2012 will take shape. I’ll reveal more details about this shortly. For the moment, I’m thinking about endings. The end of 2011. The end of spending too much time on things that aren’t adding to the world or fulfilling my own personal purpose. Beginnings are easy to spot; endings are a bit fuzzier.

I thought my apartment building fire was an ending. Instead, it was just the start of a more authentic life. It changed everything.

I thought my father passing away was an ending. Instead, it was just the start of a healing path that would weave through my life and then be used to weave through the lives of others.

I thought the end of this year would signal a steep drop off in my pursuit of beginnings. Instead, it is just the start of the very beginning that my entire life has been preparing for. It’s not okay yet but someday, a long time from now, it will be. And I will be a part of making it so.

child, childhood, children, clarity, encouragement, failure

Beginning: My 4-Year Old Niece Taught Me That There is Always a Reason to Try

Christa Avampato
Lorelei and I at her Fall Festival. She got her face painted like a butterfly.

I spent the Thanksgiving holidays in Florida, and got a lot of time with my 4-year old niece, Lorelei. She likes to play the game I call “Touch the Ceiling” where she asks me to reach way up on my tip-toes and then jump to see if I can touch the ceiling. I’m 5’2″ and the ceilings in my niece’s house are at least 10 feet if not more. My vertical is decent but it’s not that good.

I laughed the first time she asked me to do that and told her that I couldn’t touch the ceiling because I was too short. “Well, you could always try,” she said to me. This back and forth happened multiple times over the holidays. Lorelei would ask me to do something like figure out how to fly up into the sky, put both feet behind my head, and open up a seemingly un-openable bottle cap. Each time I would say I didn’t think I could do it, and each time she would tell me I could try. And she was right – we have nothing to lose by trying.

After this exchange happened a few times, Lorelei got me thinking about all of the times I say to myself, “Oh, I just don’t think this is going to work.” And then I remember her wise and wonderful counsel – give it a go and maybe I’ll surprise myself. And what’s the worse that will happen? I won’t make it, and that’s okay, too. At least I gave it a shot. Failure isn’t as bad a we make it out to be. 

I have a sneaking suspicion that this advice will serve me well in the new year. I hope it helps you, too.

(Thanks to Yoga Freedom’s prompt yesterday through Reverb11. The question “What lesson or piece of wisdom did you learn from a child this year? Did it surprise you?” inspired this post. And thanks to Jeffrey Davis for suggesting that I participate in Reverb11 through Yoga Freedom. So glad I took that advice!)

choices, clarity, dreams, faith

Beginning: Your Mission Possible

Christa Avampato

“What we need is more people who specialize in the impossible.” ~Theodore Roethke

A few days ago, the brilliant Tom Friedman wrote his weekly New York Times opinion piece on “The Start-up of You“. It’s a quick read, insightful, and hopeful. The last few lines are particularly poignant for me: You have to strengthen the muscles of resilience. “You may have seen the news that [the] online radio service Pandora went public the other week,” Hoffman said. “What’s lesser known is that in the early days [the founder] pitched his idea more than 300 times to V.C.’s with no luck.” In other words, you’ve got to have confidence in your own center.

This concept of confidence in our center is particularly powerful for me lately as I work on providing yoga and meditation to people who are recovering from trauma. One of the main challenges in transcending trauma is that trauma robs us of our center. In trauma, we have trouble getting quiet and going inside to tap our deepest wisdom. The trauma itself becomes our center; the focal point around which our other decisions are made.

Once we have a healthy center, of our own creation and internally guided, our confidence grows. And it’s not blind confidence or an overly powerful ego – it’s the quiet confidence that radiates from us. It’s charisma and authenticity.

That’s what Tim Westergren, the founder of Pandora, has. I heard him speak at Darden while I was a student there, and his vision and purpose are so clear. Despite the naysayers and those who thought the idea of Pandora would just never work, he could keep going and keep pitching his clear, simple message about the service. It was his center.

That’s how Compass Yoga was born and why its mission continues to drive me. When everything else falls away, I have my experience and my yoga. Those two things travel with me everywhere, and together they planted the seed that became Compass Yoga’s mission to provide wellness programs to those with a specific health concern. That is my center, what I know to be possible even if others see it as otherwise.

So now this begs the question, what is your center? What sustains you when everything and everyone else falls away, and how can you share that for the benefit of the world around you?

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.

books, clarity, health, inspiration, New York City, yoga

Beginning: Yoga Teacher and Writer Matthew Sanford on Awareness and Compassion at the New York Yoga Journal Conference

Christa Avampato

Matthew Sanford
“I have never seen anyone truly become more aware of his or her body without also becoming more compassionate.” ~ Matthew Sanford, yoga teacher and author Waking: A Memoir of Trauma and Transcendence

My Uncle Tom recently recommended Matthew Sanford to me after hearing him speak. Given my devotion to yoga and my desire to use it to serve the healing of those who are working through trauma, he thought Matthew’s story and message would immediately resonate with me. My uncle knows me well. Upon reading his website and getting only a small glimpse into his experience, I was entranced.I felt like I really needed to hear this story at this moment and connect with Matthew.

So it was a wonderful and synchronous surprise that Matthew is in town for the New York Yoga Journal Conference. He gave a talk yesterday that was open to the public – many thanks to my pal, Yogadork, for cluing me into the event. I had no idea he would be speaking in town and would have been so upset if I had missed the opportunity to hear him talk about his personal and professional work with trauma. Much to my delight, he was even more intriguing and engaging in person than he is in his book. I didn’t think this was possible because I loved the book so much. I could hardly believe it. It’s like hearing a musician who sounds even better in person than he does on his hit album.

I sat with my friend, Erica, of Yogoer fame, and she described Matthew’s style perfectly. “He sifted through so much information that I have in my own mind and didn’t know how to articulate.” His words are poignant, authentic, and perfectly selected without feeling rehearsed. All without notes, nor a single pause or “um”. I could have listened to him all afternoon. My only disappointment was that his hour-long talk passed too quickly.

He discussed his area of expertise – the depth and breadth of the mind-body connection and its ability, when fully manifested in each of us, to change the world. He explained how important it is for our own happiness and for the good of the world for each of us to move in so that we can move out. The answers to all our challenges are within us already, no outside resource necessary. We know what to do, if only we would take the time to listen to the wisdom in our own bodies, in our own hearts. We have the ability to alter our own reality, and the greater world around us, by redefining our experience in this very moment. We have the ability, right now, to change everything. “The principles of yoga don’t discriminate,” Matthew said. How true that is. If you can breathe, just breathe, you can access all of the wisdom that yoga has to give.

My favorite sentiment from Matthew’s book is the connection he draws between awareness and compassion. I am particularly drawn to this idea because of my one word purpose that I’ve been working with this year: awareness. When I heard Dr. Chopra speak earlier this year, he inspired me to go looking for this one word purpose as a direction for all of my work. Awareness, to wake up and help others do the same, rose to the top.

Matthew and his story helped me make the next leap on my journey. What do I do once I wake up, once I can be fully aware at every moment? What is the point of attaining awareness? My compassion will grow as a result. And with compassion, real healing begins. As Matthew so brilliantly stated, “Compassion gives us a way to sit with suffering and not try to fix it.” And if we can sit with suffering long enough, we will find that it begins to dissipate on its own without a threat of returning. By being present with suffering, we give it a container to empty into and then we can melt it down, taking only its lessons with us and releasing the pain and confusion it causes.

Letting go takes time; compassion achieved through awareness gives us the necessary patience to allow for the process of letting go to progress. It gives us the time we need, for our own healing and to help others heal, too.

For more information about Matthew and his work, visit his website.

celebration, choices, clarity, courage

Beginning: You Already Have What You’re Looking For

Christa Avampato

“What we see is mainly what we look for.” -Unknown via Tiny Buddha

I recently had a conversation with someone who said nothing ever goes her way. She’s been way down in the dumps for years. I have my occasional bad day, perhaps even a bad week. By all means, feel your feelings. Just make sure that the negative ones that don’t help make your situation any better have a hard expiration date.

How to “snap out of it” (without a smack in the face a la Moonstruck)
If my bad mood persists beyond a few days, I force myself to get out my computer and start clacking away on a list of great blessings I have to be grateful for. And if that doesn’t work then I turn to the news and start taking note of all the people in the world who have a much harder life than I do. It’s not long before I’m kicking myself for wasting any precious moment feeling sorry for myself. I lead a charmed life – I work for it, and still I know so many of my blessings found their way to my door by chance. As Joan Ganz Cooney famously said, “I am always prepared to be lucky.” It’s the best way to live.

We all get what we settle for
My friend, Trevin, and I continuously joke that we are the kind of people who hope for the best and expect the worst. To a large extent, I think that is still true. I like to feel prepared for whatever this crazy world throws my way. One of my business school professors once commented to me that the secret to his happy life was low expectations, which led him to constantly be surprised and delighted. I have a hard time arguing that idea from a logical point-of-view. However, the yogi and teacher in me asks that I aim higher. Disappointment while upsetting at first does lead to transformation and growth, two things I aspire to do all the time.

Exactly what you want is already at hand
A truth I’ve come to know is that the more ardently you keep your eyes and ears peeled for what (and who!) you want in your life, the more likely you are to recognize it when it crosses your path. It’s true of love, friendship, career, luck, and hope. It’s quite possible that you can will the life you want into being the life you have. It’s more likely that the life you want is already accessible to you in some way if you pick your head up, take look around, and grab the opportunities right under your nose.

Seek, and you will truly see all that is attainable.